frogcake.net

We all know about The Book of Mozilla but Firefox 3, which was released today, has a cute easter egg when you type about robots into the address bar with all sorts of robot references.

The 2008 conference season is in full swing and I’m a little sad I couldn’t make it to the MySQL conference this year as I had a great time in 2007 - but not that sad because the reason is I’m going to JavaOne in May and don’t think I could have got approval for two conferences in as many months.

Still, I can live vicariously through all the people blogging the event. Artem Russakovskii’s notes on the Scaling MySQL - Up or Out? keynote have some interesting numbers:

Question One: Number of MySQL servers
Facebook 1,800 (900m/900s)

Question Three: Number of Web Servers
Facebook 10,000

Question Four: Number of Memcached servers
Facebook 805

That is one hella memcached! This post from last year by a facebook engineer lists their number of servers at 200 giving a total of 3TB of cache. If we assume they are using the same kind of kit then they now must have a memcached size of about 12TB!

Scaling is something I’ve been investigating at work recently and we will potentially be dealing with big numbers ourselves so it’s encouraging to know open source applications like MySQL and memcached can scale so massively.

This site has some beautiful images of old computers including an amazing picture of a Cray CDC 6600 that seems to have huge glowing green eyes. This was the world’s fastest computer from 1964 to 1969 and looks like something from the set of Blake’s 7.

They also have a picture of the Neiman Marcus Kitchen Computer(!) from 1969. According to wikipedia:

It sold for $10,000, weighs over 100 pounds, and is used for storing recipes (but reading or entering these recipes would have been very difficult for the average cook as the only “user interface” was the binary front panel lights and switches). It had a built in cutting board and had a few recipes built in.

There is no evidence that any Honeywell Kitchen Computers were ever sold.

No shit.

Update: The images are from Mark Richards’s book Core Memory - A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers.

Tomcat has quite a good page in its documentation about getting SSL working and it does a reasonable job describing how to generate a self-signed cert. However, when it comes to what must be a fairly common use case of importing an existing key/certificate pair into a keystore it avoids the subject with phrases like: “For more advanced cases, consult the OpenSSL documententation.”

The problem is really java’s keytool. It does a good job generating self-signed certs, importing existing certificates you want to trust or importing a certificate received from a CSR generated by keytool. But when it comes to importing both the certificate and key into a keystore things get a little messier. For example, say you already have a certificate you are using on your apache web server and you now want to use it in your Tomcat server. You might think you can do something like:

keytool -import -alias tomcat -keystore <your_keystore_filename> -file <your_certificate_filename>


but that just won’t work. It turns out the only way to import an existing key/certificate pair is to do it programatically. Get the details on my wiki.

Oh, another thing to watch out for is to make sure you always use the genuine Sun Java keytool. The thing that comes with gcj and is probably first in your $PATH will only make you cry.

While I was doing a yum update today I noticed it was trying mirror.facebook.com. It turns out they mirror a lot of open source projects there.

They also have a public svn repository where you can grab the source code of Thrift which looks interesting.

I just found another good reason to like Zen ADSL. I logged into my customer portal and discovered that I can change the reverse mapping of my static IP address through a simple form on their website.

I’ve been using Zen for years now and I can’t see myself changing in the near future. Certainly not to Virgin Media who, incidentally, phoned me a couple of days after I lodged my complaint with the CISAS and offered to refund the money they owed me straight away. Of course it could take up to twenty-one days to receive the cheque…

Yesterday, after months of hard work, we released Openads 2.3 Beta.

Afterwards, we celebrated at the Oxo Tower and Andrew has some pictures on his blog.

This guy has a great name for a sysadmin:

Daley’s view was backed by Tim Chown, systems administrator for the University of Southampton’s school of electronics and computer science and a member of the UK’s IPv6 taskforce.

You know how new cars always smell really nice? I don’t know why the fumes given off by all that new plastic and glue smell nice but they do. I imagine a new Ferrari with full leather interior would smell even better. The trouble is, no matter how clean you keep your car, that smell always quickly fades.

I’ve had my MacBook for a little while now and it still faintly has the same smell that wafted up when I opened the box and cracked open its lid for the first time.

Now, Kathryn thinks I’m weird because I also like the smell of books and magazines but I googled for “new mac smell” and it turns out I’m not the only one. Apparently it is:

a little bit of plastic bag with a hint of lindenberry followed by a rush of Styrofoam

I thought I may as well put some of the work I did for my MSc online rather than leave it languishing on my hard drive where it will never be seen again.

I’m not ready to publish my final project yet but here is a research essay I wrote about Mock Objects and test driven design.