Technical Insights

MySQL Load Balancer

I’m not sure how I didn’t see this earlier, but it looks like MySQL 5.1 is coming with a load balancer for replicated servers. I’m absolutely pumped about this - we’ve got a …

' PHP Warning: Memcache::set(): Failed to extract ''connection'' variable'

I got this today. Solved by restarting the Memcached server. Move along.

Edit: this is actually a reoccurring bug we’re seeing with the memcache 2.2.3 stable build on 2 different boxes 2nd …

How curl_exec and urlencode killed my single sign on

If you do any work with single sign on, you’ll be familiar with the concept of exchanging tokens and validating against the authentication server using that token. One of the issues I’ve …

Awesome Awk Tutorial

This is exactly what I look for when I’m trying to find a tutorial. Thank you, Andrew M. Ross.

My favorite awk tutorial ever.

Decimal vs Float in MySQL

While I’ve known how floating points are stored, I didn’t know if decimal was stored any differently, or if it was more or less accurate. According to a post on the MySQL list:

Bruno …

Problems Installing Subversion From Source On CentOS

I was setting up a new server for someone, and encountered this error while I was trying to build svn

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lexpat

Now, while I can do some things on that a sys admin can, I am …

Report space remaining on disk on unix login

I get a kick out of stuff like this. Add this to your .bash_profile to be greeted with the remaining space on your disk.

df -h | awk ‘NR==2 {print “Space available " $4}’ …

BBEdit, I love you, but please can we have a few more things?

BBEdit is made by Bare Bones Software. For text editing, I’ve never used anything better. I swear by it. It’s got absolutely amazing search / replace, regex support, shell worksheets, …

How to Install the Lucene Search Engine using Solr

I’m going to go through the steps necessary to install and start using Solr. I’ve always been interested in trying out Lucene, but I never felt like dealing with writing my own wrapper …