Orange is my favorite color

Archive for 2008 » Page 3


Found something out yesterday that I thought was interesting and a little surprising. I have my main application, let’s call it “www”. I am creating a new codebase called “api” that will be a RESTful API for third-party consumers (more on that later). I want to have the two applications share the same [...]

Transfer’s nifty cache causes real problems if you’re running a cluster as data changes without notifying other nodes. Over time, one server may report value A while another reports value B and the only way to correct this is to turn caching off. Boo! The solution is TransferSync, a recent project by [...]

I was reading about reinit troubles on the Coldspring users mailing list today. It made me think this might be an interesting meme to see how many ways people restart their applications.
My Routine
I run a Model-Glue, Coldspring and Transfer application. Here’s how I restart my application:
<!– see if we should restart the [...]

Have you had your application in production for awhile? Maybe you have a little traffic now and you’re starting to see some places where performance could be better? The easiest place to find gains that will benefit your entire application is usually in the database. Because the schema tends to be [...]

Let’s talk about being an e-commerce company. We have this fun thing called PCI DSS that has a few hundred security and procedural requirements for anyone taking credit cards. Then we have third party integrations like product fulfillment that require us, as the intermediary, to pass around the credit card number to complete [...]

The title is a long way of saying I have domain.com and I also have domainS.com, plural, in case people mistype the name. If someone hits my site as domainS.com, I want to automatically correct it to be domain.com to maintain my branding. This is pretty straightforward to fix with your <VirtualHost> and [...]

Postgres just released a 8.3.4 update a few days ago and when trying to update with a “yum update”, I got the following error:
–> Finished Dependency Resolution
Error: Missing Dependency: libossp-uuid.so.15 is needed by package postgresql-contrib
Interesting. Well libossp-uuid.so.15 is presumably used by the new-to-8.3 UUID datatype but I haven’t had this issue before. The [...]

I logged into our firewalls today to find the clock of our primary firewall was 45 minutes ahead and our backup firewall was 35 minutes behind. Embarrassing. It’s important to keep the clocks of all the machines in our cluster synchronized in case we ever need to investigate an intrusion or correlate activity [...]

I woke up at 3:50am this morning unable to sleep and by the time I got to work, I figured that was the worst thing that could happen today. Then I logged in to our CentOS kickstart machine to see how my “yum update” to CentOS 5.2 went last night and found all kinds [...]

When we rolled out our big Model-Glue/Coldspring/Transfer upgrade five months ago and ran into performance problems, we did some Craigslist shopping on a Sunday to buy some faster hardware that would hold us over until we could put a real fix in place. We have since acquired a couple of Compaq DL360G4s and I’ve [...]