The Codebelay Blog

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  • Who Barce Follows On Twitter

    Herman Chan — a techie at McCann that often gives me good tech advice.

    Faris Yakob — He’s the Chief Technology Strategist at McCann Erickson and I love his blog, Talent imitates, genius steals.

    Craig Newmark — He’s the founder of Craig’s List. Craig is very involved with causes for the Craig’s List foundation.

    Chase Jarvis — He’s an excellent photographer, perhaps one of the best, that takes breathe taking photos.

    I will write more about the rest of my followers later. My plan is to add a few comments about those I follow each day.

  • Scalability Services

    Codebelay provides scalability services.

    A faster website makes more money.

    We can triple the amount of traffic that your site can handle.

    We use the following technologies:

    1. Memcache
    2. Gearman
    3. Perlbal
    4. Database Performance Tuning
    5. PHP Performance Tuning
    6. Table De-normalization for Speed
    7. Cloud Services for Traffic Spikes
    8. CDN via Akamai or Amazon’s Cloudfront

    Please feel free to email me, barce[ a t] codebelay.com.

    Sites I have scaled:
    Gaia Online
    Dogster

    140logo

  • Oddments: A Great Blog For Keeping Up With Drizzle and Gearman

    Alan Kasindorf just introduced me to a great blog by Eric Day, Oddments.

    If you are into learning about alternatives to MySQL like Drizzle, or how to scale writes to a database using Gearman, then I wholeheartedly recommend his blog.

    I really like the samples of code he puts up that acts as a very useful, and direct tutorial to new technologies.

  • The Easiest Way to Deliver Your Web Project on Time

    This week a web project that I’m working on started to fall behind. On the key things that made this happen was adding a set of feature requests last minute.

    I understand it’s important to deliver value, but when new sets of features are added to a project, it causes the project to slip.

    What should you do?

    Learn to say, “No.”

    It’s hard to do, but take the design of the iPhone for example. Instead of saying yes to more features, Steve Jobs took the approach of saying “No,” in order to create something light-weight, elegant and a work of genius.

    Less is more.

  • Overcoming File Encoding Issues

    Ever see characters any of these characters:

    1) ^M

    2) <feff>

    3) A black diamond with a white question mark in it.

    4) What<92>s going on?

    ???

    Does your version control system tell everything has changed when it doesn’t?

    Does your web app break because one of the above characters?

    If you answered yes to any of these questions, you are not alone!

    If you’ve dealt with this and figured out it please definitely shared your findings in the comments below.

    I believe it is *the* number one issue in working in a hybrid environment, e.g. with Windows, Linux, and OS X.

    In the next blog posts, I’ll talk about how I’ve struggled with these issues with other developers.

  • The Corporate Game: Coders Use A Deck Lots

    Being on the bleeding edge of technology just isn’t as profitable as making money. A good example right now is the beer industry. BUD is making tons off of our down economic times. But I bet you if you look at BUD, you might find a non-networked FoxPro application, or something from 10 years ago. You might find that there are copying processes that you would’ve replaced with rsync ages ago, or user rights managements issues still solved with point and click.

    I can’t say for sure, because I’m not there. If the clothing that most people wear in Fortune 500 companies is any indication, their tech is 10 years behind the times.

    How do you communicate to them?

    Kathy Sierra style and use a deck. Create a power slide presentation for free at Google Docs.

    If you’re at a big company, a coder that turns his passion and goals into something others share uses a deck. By my count, you should spend an hour of your day making a deck to get a point across.

  • This Post posted by ScribeFire

    ScribeFire is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to post to your blog. In fact, I didn’t have to go through the WordPress interface to publish this, and used ScribeFire’s interface instead. It’s a must have plug-in if you’re a blogger.

    Technorati Tags: , ,

  • 3 Clients for Storing Data into Amazon S3

    It’s not that difficult to store data into your Amazon S3 account and share that data with 50,000 or so people on the cheap.

    Armed with just your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key, you can use these two cool storage clients.

    S3 Webmaster

    For Windows, you can download the S3 Webmaster for free, and you just simply drag and drop your files and S3 will automatically set the permissions for public download.

    S3Hub

    For Macs, there is S3Hub, which works whether or not you have an S3 account. If you don’t have an S3 account you can view other public S3 buckets. If you do have an account you can easily upload and share the assets you stored.

    Transmit

    If your data storage needs run the gamut from sftp, webdav, iDisk, automated upload workflows, and S3, you’ll want to plunk down some cash like I did and get Transmit. At $17.95 it’s a bargain. I use it’s webdav and S3 features almost daily.

  • Setting Up a newLISP Webserver

    How fast can you get on the web? With newLISP it’s about as fast as typing:

    newlisp -http -d 8080 -w /usr/home/www/httpdocs &

    How fast can you create a backdoor with newLISP?

    newlisp -p 1234 &

    If you telnet into port 1234 in localhost, you’ll see something that looks like this:

    Trying 127.0.0.1…
    Connected to localhost.
    Escape character is ‘^]’.
    newLISP v.10.0.0 on OSX IPv4 UTF-8.

    >

    This opens up a lot of possibilities for distributed computing.

    For example, you can set up a newLISP server that’s ready to respond to a newLISP client with this command:

    newlisp -c -d 1234

    Your newLISP client can have code that sends a computing problem to be solved to the server:

    (net-eval “localhost” 1234 “(+ 3 4)” 1000)

    Or let’s say you had a farm of newLISP servers:

    #!/usr/bin/newlisp

    (set ‘result (net-eval ‘(
    (“192.168.1.100” 4711 {(+ 3 4)})
    (“192.168.1.101” 4711 {(+ 5 6)})
    (“192.168.1.102” 4711 {(+ 7 8)})
    (“192.168.1.103” 4711 {(+ 9 10)})
    (“192.168.1.104” 4711 {(+ 11 12)})
    ) 1000))

    (println “result: ” result)

    (exit)

    If the above example reminds you of Gearman, you get +12 points.

  • The Infamous Zed Shaw Declares ACL Is Dead

    If you work with ACL, this may be the most important video you watch ever. Zed shows how ACL is not Turing complete, which explains all the problems you’ve been having with control lists.


    Zed Shaw – The ACL is Dead from CUSEC on Vimeo.