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March 31, 2006

memcached for win32

Scott Johnson sent me a link to a presentation (PDF) the guys from LiveJournal gave at a Linux conference last year. (As you might imagine, scale is one thing LiveJournal has to monitor closely)

Part of the architecture uses memcached, a server-based object cache built by Danga (guys who run LiveJournal). The object cache helps reduce the number of queries made to the DB, which helps the site to remain speedy as the number of visitors increase.  (Here's a good article about it)

I learned to my dismay that memcached does not run on Win32 platforms due to some issues with libevent and memcached. After quite a bit of searching, I was ready to call it a night and started thinking about some of the vendors I had looked at the other day.  I decided to troll the memcached email list and lo and behold, a kind soul (Kronuz) had figured out the issues *and* posted binaries for both libevent and memcached. I quickly downloaded them and wrote a simple test client in Java. Firing up memcached was straightforward as was running my test client.

Ah, the sweet smell of victory

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Posted by davehod at 06:27 PM | Comments (0)

March 16, 2006

Podtech Announces Series A Funding

Podtech.net announced their Series A today, funded by Venrock Associates and US Venture Partners.

A big CONGRATS to CEO John Furrier, who had the vision and the drive to make this happen.

(full disclosure - I am an advisor to Podtech)

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Posted by davehod at 12:45 AM | Comments (0)

March 09, 2006

Flockstar!

I ran into Chris Messina at eTech yesterday and inquired about my Flockstar t-shirt

He took down my info just in case he didn't have it and this morning I received an shipping notification email from Giant Robot Printing (the guys manufacturing the shirts).

w00t!

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Posted by davehod at 12:33 PM | Comments (1)

March 08, 2006

Conferences and Stress Fractures

Note to self - don't attend conferences when you have a stress fracture. Climbing up the stairs from lunch hurts way too much!

Posted by davehod at 02:52 PM | Comments (0)

March 03, 2006

Napa Marathon - Attending But Not Running

The Napa Marathon is this Sunday. I signed up to run with 4 other folks (all Relay veterans!) and put together an aggressive (but not insane) 16 week training schedule.

Things were going very well up to week 13 (when I hit a new PR at the SF Half). After the SF Half, I had an odd soreness emanating from the TFL on my right leg. Strangely, I couldn't stand on just my right leg without pain. My regular session at SMI helped a bit, but things didn't get better after a week.

My massage therapist suggested I head over to PAMF and see someone in Sports Medicine. Fortunately, I got in to see the highly recommended Dr. King. After 10 minutes of "can you move your leg this way? Does that hurt?" and a few questions, he told me he suspected a femoral stress fracture. A subsequent bone scan bore this out. Bottomline is that I am out of commision for 8 weeks to 6 months - it varies widely. A major factor is rest :-(

Instead of running this Sunday, I'll be on the sidelines, cheering on my wife and friends. Chris will be completing her first marathon and feeling a sense of true accomplishment that most people will never know.

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Posted by davehod at 10:00 AM | Comments (1)

Taking ecto For A Spin

Writing in the Moveable Type UI is painful enough that it is a big reason my posts are so infrequent.

I've read a lot of positive stuff about etco, so I'm doing a test post with it.

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Posted by davehod at 09:45 AM | Comments (1)