http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog Wed, 30 Apr 2008 03:48:26 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Via High Scalability blog (a great addition to any RSS reader out there) there's a link to Jefrrey Dean's presentation on MapReduce usage in Google. Actually, his presentation touches upon a few aspects of Google infrastructure, such as GFS, and BigTable, so there's more on this video. What caught my ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/mapreduce-usage-at-google/1544 Yahoo! Developer Network blog had an entry by Stoyan Stefanov and presentation from PHP Quebec conference. A few points to take away, in case you don't feel like going through 76-slide presentation: A drop of 100ms in page rendering time leads to 10% in sales on Amazon. A drop of 500 ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/24-web-site-performance-tips/1535 Over the past few months my PSP started to show the signs of old age. Whether it's my addiction to World Tour Soccer series that completely worn out the analog stick, or frequent uses of the device in the train, on the beach, and on the planes that resulted in ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/giving-an-old-psp-a-new-life/1533 Pylot is a new stress testing tool for Web services testing. As creators describe it: You begin by defining your test cases in an XML file. Test cases are where you specify the requests (url, method, body/payload, etc) and verifications. Server responses can be verified by matching ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/stress-testing-web-services/1523 Eirik Hoem on his blog provides an overview of PHP's register_shutdown_function, and suggests using it for the cases when for whatever reason your Web page ran out of memory, fatal'ed, and you don't want to display a blank page to the users. register_shutdown_function is also useful for command-line scripts with PHP. ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/register_shutdown_function-possible-use-cases/1522 There was a lengthy article earlier this month in The New York Times on the importance of doing pushups, and how it's an all-around exercise, responsible for exercising quite a few muscles in a human body. The push-up is the ultimate barometer of fitness. It tests the whole body, engaging muscle ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/a-perfect-push-up/1521 What's the most expensive query you can think of? How about this one - USPS money orders are sold throughout the United States at numerous post office locations. Each money order has a unique ID number, and while there's no data on how many money orders are sold annually, you'd ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/the-most-expensive-query/1520 Pretty cool idea - instead of exploring officially approved photos on the travel agent's Web site, see what the hotel looks like in a short video. TVTrip is founded by Expedia alumni, and has videos of the hotels from around the world. They claim 3,825 videos so far, and include ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/tvtrip-videos-of-hotels-worldwide/1519 Guys at PHParchitect are running a PHP contest for smallest, fastest, most efficient command-line PHP script. A seemingly simple link parser task is probably very tricky, but the task itself is somewhat poorly specced out, as several things are not clear: Their example lists the href enclosed in <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/php-contest-from-phparchitectcom/1518 Lars Strojny says that a new magic constant __DIR__ is coming to PHP 5.3. __DIR__ will refer to the current directory of the script. It's useful for those include and include_once directives where it's preferable to use absolute paths to avoid navigating down the include path. http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/__dir__-in-php-53/1517 htaccesseditor.com is an online editor for .htaccess files specifically. It's a fairly easy way to set up custom pages for each of the HTTP errors, set up redirects for specific destinations, default pages for Web servers, and a few other things. What it doesn't have is preventing image hotlinking via ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/online-htaccess-editor/1516 Slashdot had a story on brain control headsets coming out soon from Emotiv. The company seems to have done a fair bit of research in linking various neural activity to explicit emotions. They're targeting gaming market, and hoping to introduce game that analyze your emotions as well as kinetic signals ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/emotiv-publishes-neuro-sdk/1515 The bionic arm project, sponsored by DARPA and executed by Deka Research and Development Corp. run by Dean Kamen (inventor of Segway, among other things), is nearing completion and might undergo clinical trials if DARPA sees the project fit, IEEE Spectrum says: "The arm has motor control fine enough for ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/bionic-arm-nears-completion/1514 Most of the e-commerce sites upon errors generate some cryptic self-exonerating error messages such as "Oops, something unexpected happened, come back soon" or "Error C333. Please describe in detail what you were doing, and what you were wearing, and send it over to our technical team for further investigation". Not ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/planning-for-failure/1513 There's a pretty interesting article in today's New York Times on Boltzmann's brains and probability of a human reincarnation arising purely from the entropy in the Universe. Among the infinitesimal amount of atoms, what is the probability of a combination forming, replicating your structure entirely? In an interview Dr. Linde described ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/nyt-on-boltzmanns-brains-and-infinite-universes/1511 Might be coincidental, but looking through the logs of a few sites I host, I noticed Cuill, a new search engine with supposedly faster indexing methods, going through quite a few pages:38.99.13.123 - - [25/Dec/2007:17:21:10 -0800] "GET /page.php HTTP/1.0" 200 17123 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Twiceler-0.9 http://www.cuill.com/twiceler/robot.html)"Looks like there are a few ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/cuill-getting-heavy-with-indexing/1510 Here's a great example of having wrong motivation factors in place: Issue subprime loans to a variety of people. Announce a government-supported plan to bailout existing debtors only if they have poor credit score. Watch the rest of those guys try to decrease their credit score by missing credit card payments. Have the malaises ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/unpaid-credit-cards-surge/1509 Hulu.com today expanded their userbase by sending out a bunch of invites to those who signed up for beta, which this time included me. Generally it's pretty hard to get excited about visiting media company sites due to small video size and a bunch of DRM they put in (such ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/hulucom-open-up-a-bit-more/1508 I just finished reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. I enjoyed Fooled by Randomness by the same author, and Black Swan has a few references to his previous work. In the previous title Taleb discusses a typical human mistake of taking the result ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/the-black-swan/1505 For a highly acclaimed book, according to the number of accolades on the back cover, The Starfish and The Spider is surely repetitive, but makes for a quick read. In a nutshell, the author applies the analogy of starfish and spider anatomy to the corporate world. While spider has many ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/the-starfish-and-the-spider/1504 Bloomberg has a long article on Renaissance Technologies LLC and its founder Jim Simons, in which the point out an interesting value inside the multi-billion dollar hedge fund with a few hundred employees: From Simons on down, the company encourages openness, whether it's about market signals that show where a ... http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/how-openness-is-a-motto-at-renaissance-technologies/1503 A pretty helpful breakdown of the parking costs. Pardon me, where's the restroom? Oh, forget it, where's more restrooms? The sign is behind the protective glass, which makes me think it was intentional, or installed by a quite disgruntled [ex-]employee. http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/some-things-you-can-see-in-maui/1502