Ljubljana, Slovenia

Posts

PHP Comparisons
If there is something every developer (not just PHP) should know, it’s when to use a strict equality operator. Interestingly enough, using empty() in PHP has exact behavior as checking loose equality with == false. This whole thing was inspired (and partially ripped off of) the JavaScript Equality Table. The design caught my eye, more than anything. I’m kinda wishing most if not all languages would have this kind of basic reference.
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Outperforming MySQL by hand
There is this SQL table, right? This is the part where you knowingly nod and prepare yourself for a long story about how a database is as good as the person designing it. Let’s call this table an access log. For the sake of argument, let’s also say it’s 30GB in size, has a 100 million rows, and only has an auto_increment PK ID field. Your task is, should you choose to accept it, to retrieve the last hour of entries in this log table.
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So far there is a distinct lack of snakes
In the dashboard which I hacked together at MMC RTV Slovenia, I display a set of related flickr searches based on the current state of the system. So far, there’s a distinct lack of snakes, volcanoes, lava, fire, explosions and other things that might freak an engineer out as much as a server outage. Thoughts: I like how the hosts are clearly marked when one of their metrics goes over a threshold.
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Flickr API
I’m currently applying for a Flickr API key, and this is what I put into the description for “HQ Dashboard”: “I’m building a monitoring dashboard which includes statistics data from internal sources, some tweets and, hopefully, an assortment of Flickr backgrounds based on current monitoring conditions (ie., search for fire/destruction/storm/tornado when servers are being overloaded, and grass/meadows/happy/coffee if the monitoring says everything is fine). In this way I plan to use the Flickr search to provide a visual representation of the severity level currently being experienced.
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