This morning I had a strange problem where sound stopped working on my MacBook Pro running 10.6. The speaker icon in the menu bar was grayed out and the image brought up when pressing the volume up and down controls indicated that sound was muted. Bringing up the Sound control panel in System Preferences didn’t… Read More: OS X Sound Won’t Unmute »
I recently successfully migrated my first Django app from DreamHost shared hosting to a DreamHost VPS (virtual private server). I hope this info will be useful to others. The following two blog posts were absolutely key to me getting this working, especially the first one. Thanks Preston and Graham! Setting up Pinax on DreamHost Private Server… Read More: Django on DreamHost VPS »
DreamHost ended up at the top of a Lifehacker poll today for best personal web host. Well, not counting “Other”. Given how many web hosts there are and the likelihood that most of the people voting have experience with only one web host, it’s not surprising that Other came out on top. Still, DreamHost got almost… Read More: Lifehacker Poll Says DreamHost Best Personal Web Host »
During a fun debug session at work, Drew and I tracked down the cause of a misbehaving web app. The problem related to how Apache Tomcat decides to recompile JSPs and how some of our source code was branched and modified. Beware of modified JSPs in branches when you move to newer branches. The problem appeared… Read More: When JSPs Go Bad »
Monitoring MySQL with Cacti Cacti, like many other tools (Munin, Cricket, etc.), is a wrapper around RRDTool Baron feels that existing tools (zabbix, ZenOSS, OpenNMS, etc.) that try to do graphing and alerting do at least one of them poorly, though Reconnoiter looks promising. Cacti does graphing well RRDTool does interpolations, so you lose the… Read More: MySQL Conference 2010 Day 3 »
Replication Tips – slides Single master can typically handle a few dozen slaves If you have a lot of slaves and want to do filtering for all, maybe use blackhole engine to do filtering in one place. Especially if running blackhole slave on same server to limit network bandwidth. Replicate over WAN – slave_net_timeout, master_connect_retry,… Read More: MySQL Conference 2010 Day 2 »
What’s New in MySQL 5.5? Performance Unleashed! – slides Default storage engine is InnoDB (what had been called the InnoDB plugin, but now is the only version). Many locks and mutexes held back scalability in 5.1. Biggest win was fixing uses of LOCK_open. It was used for many things, some of which made no sense. Introduced… Read More: MySQL Conference 2010 Day 1 »
This year’s MySQL Conference was once again jam packed with very technical presentations. Best of all was the news about all the performance and feature enhancements in MySQL 5.5. The benchmark results for the performance improvements were very impressive. After attending this year’s conference, I’m more confident about MySQL’s future than I’ve been for a… Read More: MySQL Conference 2010 »
This week I attended a showing of beer-related films at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology at Cal. Research anthropologist Ira Jaknis, curator of the ongoing exhibit 99 Bottles of Beer: Global Brewing Traditions 2500 B.C. — Present was our host for the films. Sadly, only three other people were attendance. But, because the Prelinger Archives… Read More: Beer Films at the Hearst Museum »
Django includes a Bash shell completion script, which can save a lot of time. The tutorial recommends installing it, but doesn’t explain how. Fortunately, its the same as for any other Bash shell completion script. Here’s how I did it for Django. Add an environment variable for the location where you installed Django. For example,… Read More: Django Bash Shell Completion »