by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 17, 2008 | Photography
Flickr and The Library of Congress announced a project together to put a whole load of the Libraries photos up and to ask the public to create meta data for these photos – tags, notes etc.
This is a phenomenal achievement for Flickr in my mind, looking through these photos there are some really absolutely amazing shots showing American life in the early 1900s, depression years, the war etc.
I spent some time over lunch browsing some of these, the machinery, clothes, culture, cars, architecture, it is all just amazing I wish there were such a good record of the UK available to the public.
Some of the images are just great to look at like the one below from 1911, that’s a hand held large format camera, amazing.
Others show the truly amazing work that photographers did in those days and frankly makes me wish I can even come close to this kind of shot on my digital cameras.
Click on these images and look at them, they are phenomenally well done the richness and dynamic range of color in those shots far out paces the results I tend to see on digital. I wish self developing color slides wasn’t such a pain else I’d start doing medium format color transparencies right away.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 11, 2008 | Front Page
I am under contract to be systems administrator at a Social Media company called Handmade Mobile, their prime product is Flirtomatic (You might want to wait till you’re home from work to visit the site), a site for adults who just want to chat and meet fun people, it’s not a dating site in the normal sense it’s more like MSN with with some profile searching, pictures, etc added.
I got involved with them about 2 or 2.5 years ago they were having some issues and needed a re-do of their servers, network, etc. I designed a simple easy to manage network and put in servers built the way I liked them using Open Source technologies which I still maintain and administer today.
They’ve been making some good waves in the last while, 2 items I think are worth mentioning:
Back in September they set a in-house record for monthly WAP impressions with more than 100 Million WAP impressions in the month. One report on this mentioned that In March the amount of searches across all the major search engines combined done from phones were around 20 million, so this puts the 100 Million WAP impressions in a extremely good light.
Today I got news of another impressive bit of stat about them – A company called WatchMouse who specializes in monitoring web site response and stability did a test against 104 Social Media sites for performance, time to load the whole page etc. they also penalized your points for any failed loads etc.
Out of the lot Facebook were the worst, Flirtomatic though came fourth which I have to say I am very impressed by as Flirtomatic has huge amounts of photos on their front page compared to number 1 faceparty for example. Faceparty’s front page weighs in at a very light 44KB (1KB for the HTML) while Flirtomatic is 630KB (17KB for the HTML) so I think being 4th fastest given its bulk is great.
Anyway, kudos to them ๐
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 9, 2008 | Usefull Things
This is probably old news to most people but I need to remember this so I figured I may as well blog it.
I made a mysqldump that just takes all databases into a single file, already I want to kick myself because I know if I ever need to import it there will be troubles because the target database will already have the mysql database etc.
Really I should have used MySQL Parallel Dump that makes files per tables etc and is much faster but it didn’t exist at the time.
So how to pull lines 8596 to 9613 from this big file? It’s trivial with sed:
here is a sample file:
$ cat > file.txt
line 1
line 2
line 3
line 4
line 5
^D
$ sed -n '2,4p;4q' file.txt
line 2
line 3
line 4
The sed command just tells it the start to end line and also to quit processing when it hits the end line, really kewl.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 9, 2008 | Usefull Things
I just noticed that the folks over at Newsgator has set pretty much their whole product suite free today, free is Newsgator for Windows, NetNewsWire for the Mac, the online version of NewsGator and so is NewGator Go! for your phone.
This is pretty huge news as all the products I just mentioned syncs with each other seamlessly and have great UI’s, NewNewsWire has been my reader of choice for ages.
For the paranoids out there though there’s this little tid bit in the new features list:
Sort by attention: NetNewsWire now tracks more information about what you do and can tell which feeds are most important to you.
So you probably want to find out exactly what that’s all about first.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 7, 2008 | Usefull Things
For some time the default clock rate on RedHat machines (and probably others) have been 1000HZ, this is great to keep your mouse moving smooth while something big is happening in the background, but not so great for hosting 10 virtual machines on one poor physical machine as it will have to try and satisfy 10000 ticks per second.
I’ve been using a guest kernel repository by one of the VMWare users that rebuilds the std CentOS/RedHat kernels with HZ=100 and it’s been great, chopped massive amounts off my CPU usage on the host.
Now with RedHat 5.1 this is not needed anymore see this post for a bit of a graph on the impact and the background. The short of it is, simply append divider=10 to your guest kernel boot parameters and enjoy a much happier host. I found that time keeping also becomes more predictable in the guest.
