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April 30, 2007
MySQL Conference - Two Interesting Items
Two interesting presentations from this years' MySQL Conference
- Capacity Planning for LAMP - John Allspaw the Engineering Manager at flickr talks about how they use Ganglia (pdf).
My favorite excerpt:
Accept the observer effect
* measurement is a necessity
* it's not optional
- Wikipedia: Site Internals, Configuration and Code Examples, and Management Issues - Domas Mituzas (MySQL and Wikimedia) talks about the internals of scaling a large site like Wikipedia (pdf). There is a good section on caching with memcached, although it applies to caching in general.
Posted by davehod at 01:22 PM | Comments (0)
April 23, 2007
Santa Cruz Half Marathon 2007
On Sunday, I ran the Santa Cruz Half Marathon (4/22/2007). Some of you know that this is one of my two favorite halfs, the other being the Big Sur Monterey Half.
It started raining Saturday night and we were all planning for a wet race. The rain quit about 4am; unfortunately, the wind started gusting to about 20 mph. When the starting gun went off at 7:20AM (we were supposed to start at 7!), the rain and wind has ceased. The 2500 runners were instead treated to a beautiful clear day. Some of the things I was lucky to encounter: a group of seals 200 yards offshore from the lighthouse; the scent of damp eucalyptus past Natural Bridges; the colorful zigzag of running jerseys on the cliffs of Wilder Ranch; the incredible views of Santa Cruz and Monterey while returning south on West Cliff Drive.
All in all, a great day with a great finish at Cowell's Beach. Can't wait for next year.
Overall, here's how the run rates in my book:
Organization - Twenty minute delay at the start, however, the course was clearly marked and staffed. Grade: B+ (would have been an 'A' without the delay)
Course - Doesn't get better than this. Grade: A+
Aid-stations - Well staffed, but no Gatorade, just water this year. Grade: B
Swag - Short-sleeve, cotton shirt that probably won't survive more than a few trips through the wash. Grade: B-
Cowell's Beach
Looking North on West Cliff Drive
Tags: marathon, running, santa cruz half
Posted by davehod at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2007
Web 2.0 Expo
After the first day of the Web 2.0 Expo at Moscone West, I read Steve Rubel's post "Irrational Exuberance 2.0". I don't know that he is correct, but it was in the back of my mind all day today.
... Web 2.0 Expo feels eerily like Internet World circa 1999
Food for thought (or at least something to think about while one is sitting on 101 trying to get to SF)
Highlights on Day 2
* Eric Schmidt with John Battelle - Battelle is a great interview, so much better than the Tim O'Reilly/Jeff Bezos infomercial from Day 1
* James Hamilton on Commodity Data Center Design. I learned a lot about something I thought I already knew a lot about (wrong!). Really impressive.
* Owen Byrne from Digg - Owen talked about the early days of Digg and how he built the prototype for Kevin Rose for $2k. Interesting to hear how a LAMP stack, memcached and 100 servers run a website that just passed the 1 million user mark.
* Dave McClure - on-stage, getting the crowd to do some viral marketing via "The Wave". Way to go Dave!
Lowlights on Day 2
* Wi-fi still sucks and still no power cords in the vast majority of rooms. I don't get it, for $1200, you think this stuff would have been worked out. I don't have these problems at Gnomedex. Maybe Chris Pirillo or Ponzi should be in charge?
* Too many people - the sheer number of people is overwhelming. It is difficult to engage the speaker for more than 1 question.
Tags: Digg, Web 2.0 Expo
Posted by davehod at 05:27 PM | Comments (0)
April 15, 2007
Motivation
If you're running Boston tomorrow (or the awesome Santa Cruz Half Marathon next Sunday), here's a great motivational phrase, courtesy of this month's Runner's World:
Race results stay on Google FOREVER
Think I'll go lace up my shoes now...
Posted by davehod at 09:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack