fossil fuelin the fonkay since 1996
Mediawiki uses MySQL’s full-text searching capabilities for its searching. I’ve always been irritated that I can’t search for a three-letter word, like “nfs”. It turns out that this is due to a default configuration in MySQL. In this article, I’ll try to pull together various tips I’ve seen around the Web for enabling searches for 3-letter words.
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Recently, we were interested in measuring how many users allow third-party cookies. While we were at it, we figured we might as well measure how many would accept first-party cookies and how many would run javascript. We got some interesting numbers that I think are worth sharing. WRAL.com has a 50% market penetration in the Raleigh metro area, so our numbers are fairly representative of a general Internet audience.
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Last year, I wrote about how much I despised the Dish Network ViP 622 DVR due to its instability. My thoughts on this haven’t changed a whole lot. In fact, we’re now using our 5th Dish DVR in 10 months.
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I just had to tell the world about this sweet new database system. redis is a non-volatile key-value database with speeds comparable to memcached. For the right types of applications, it’s just perfect.
If you’re like me, you already know that there are 86400 seconds in a day. Using UNIX timestamps, it’s fairly common to use this fact to move a clock forward or back by a day. Just be careful to do it safely.
Like many other organizations, we’ve struggled to manage the bandwidth costs of serving a popular Web site. Once you slice off extraneous images, trim up your CSS and external Javascript, and get control of your cache policies, you’re left with one thing: the size of your HTML documents. This article will give you a new tool to break down your HTML and look for potential savings.
When we replaced our NetApp filer cluster with a RHEL-based NFS cluster, we ran into a few surprises.
One of the scariest things in changing from a known solution like our NetApp filers to a less familiar linux solution was the question of whether the new system could push data as fast as the old. Here I provide an overview of our system’s specs and some performance numbers.
We recently transitioned from a proprietary NAS storage solution (NetApp) to an open, linux-based solution. Here I explain what brought us to that decision and an overview of the new solution.
Continue reading “Transitioning to an open-source NFS server”
I spent a lot of time looking for a good (and, I’ll admit it, free) comment solution for smorgasbork.com. The best I found was ChronoComments from ChronoEngine. I like the wide array of configuration options that it provides, and the layout/presentation is very clean and works well with my site’s template. One thing that isn’t so clear is the documentation, and if you don’t live and breathe Joomla, I’m sure you will find it even more confusing. I’ve tried to layout the install procedure that I followed so that you don’t have quite so many headaches.