Compile Memcached on Mac OS X
First of all lets make it clear, memcahced on mac? why bother?! Well i have to work on mac at work so i dont really have a choice. I assume if you are interested in that hint you are in same situation. Personally i think its just pain that i dont work on debian but any way.
If you need memcached running locally on mac download sources of libevent from lib event site. Then follow typical procedure of compilation and installation:
./configure --prefix=/usr/local make make install
Just a hint how to validate XML Schema xsd under linux
Its really basic stuff but worth to remember that you can easily validate XML Schema under linux command line with xmllint. It can be especially useful if you have to automate some xml files validation in crons etc.
xmllint --schema /path/to/schema.xsd /path/to/sample.xml
This will show you list of validation errors or a success message.
Review - JQuery in action
Its a really great Jquery book. I liked a lot the fact the authors simply let you see the power of jquery not getting too deeply into javascript. There is no cross/browser details or low level tricks.On the other side authors dont skip over important details.
Book has a very good structure and consistently presents Jquery API. I thik there is not much more you could expect from the book in that area.
I also loved the fact that they put javascript appendix to describe more complex ideas. It really gives you good review and puts all bits in place.
How to wget to mirror a website without html file extensions
Wget is a great and powerful tool but it does have some hidden features that are not really common in linux world.
For example it has set of default settings that can be altered via some misterious .wgetrc (good luck on mac!).
How to mirror a website onto local machine?
wget -m -k -K URL
This will crawl all pages in the site, save them on disk and rewrite urls to relative ones so you can browse them locally.
Its cool but it also adds .html extensions so index.php becomes index.php.html. But in my case i wanted to crawl the site to flatten it
and make static html pages. Site was like 4 years old, and i wanted to make it easier to deploy and safer than some freaky old crappy php app sending
emails and god knows what else.
Jmeter used to playback Apache access logs to generate live-like server load
Jmeter is a very useful tool for not only performance tests but also for automation of all sorts of web tests. Its not as powerful as selenium when it comes to ajax etc but it still allows to login, keep session and execute any sequence of http calls.
In addition to ab (apache benchmark) and curl it comes in handy when you want to stress test your applications to see the capacity and possible bottlenecks.
Its difficult to perform reliable tests when your development environment does not mirror live and when you have no traffic at all. 10000 home page calls will perform differently depending on what is the server doing.
To generate realistic load and be able to profile applications and their bottlenecks you can playback your live server logs on test machines.
Review - Ruby on Rails 2.1
That book is actually only in Polish so far, but there is no harm to mention a few words.
Author of the book is a friendly 'ruby-psycho' i work with :-) He is getting me interested in some things from time to time and he
also let me read his book on rails framework.
To be honest i have no experience with rails at all and i just started getting familiar with ruby itself. The book assumes you have quite a bit
of development understanding or at least you know ruby. I work with PHP for years and i have used other languages so analogies
Review - Linux System Programming
I guess its not easy to write an easy to read book about linux system programming but this one is not bad at all.
I have to admit that it is a bit 'dry', tons and tons of system calls explained with parameters and return values
and error codes going on and on and on :- ) But thats the point. You want to know how to write system apps on linux?
well you have to go through it and youd better enjoy!
But book also contains some really nice chapters describing file system handling, cache, memory and process schedulers.
Annoying unicode Byte Order Marks in UTF-8 files
There is this annoying thing that happened to me a few times before that some files get additional invisible characters at the beginning of the file. They might look something like this:
It happened to me a few times when i was working with some people from Germany and they used different tools and different encodings so i thought it was some editor related issue. But it was strange as it would only appear in the diff screen of eclipse svn plugin not in regular edit window.
Monitoring Linux servers with cacti ghraph
There is a lot going on on the average server and it helps a lot to be able to see how each component performs and under what stress it is. I prepared a few graphs that show most important parameters in a more readable form than default cacti graphs.
First there is memory status showing total phisical memory with swap on top:
Then there is CPU time division to kernel user io itd:
Review - Absolute c plus plus
I read this book recently as i wanted to refresh some c++ basics and im not sure if i liked it soo much.
Its a good book, examples are good, coding structures and language concepts are very good. I especially liked pointers chapter.
What i was not so found of was recursion chapter and stack managment. I also did not like design patterns chapter nor uml (there was almost none).
It describes well memory data structures like lists, trees etc.
I think its a great book to read if you are in college or you want to read some new stuff (never learned c++ before).
Review - eBay Strategies
Thats a nice book about selling online in general and especially on ebay. It has actually quite a lot of usefull tips and hints what strategies should you consider selling online.
I would recommend it to everyone selling on ebay or other auction site. I would also recommend it to people in ecommerce in general, who dont have deep marketing knowledge. You will get quite a lot of tips on how selling works, what and how do people buy and how to sell it.
Its nicely written and its a easy read.
Final score: 7.5/10
Review - Pro Drupal Development
I have read it last year when i was working for a while on Drupal 6 project and i can say its a nice book. I have read 2 more Drupal books and this one was by far better than the other ones.
Language was easy and readable, structure was good and the drupal api was explained well. Book will give you decent understanding of drupal internals and how to create your own modules.
Review - Website measurement hacks
I have read it just lately and i have to say its a decent book. It has a lot of insights into SEO especially from the measurements point of view. The thing i liked a lot about this book was that it describes how to measure performance, what indicators are important and how to validate your business decisions.
You dont have to be advanced in SEO at all to read it. I think it explains well terms like bounce rate, retention ratio, conversion funnel etc. Its easy to read and it has quite a lot of useful tips.
Review - Head First C#
I liked so much design patterns and jsp books of that publisher that i read quite a few of them already ;- )
I would say that one is a decent one. If you are beginner programmer or want quick and funny overview of C# its a good book for you.
You cant read heavy stuff all the time to let your brain breath a bit. And this book is just that type. You can read it in just a few days easily without
getting brain overloaded ;- ) You can read on the bus or wherever and you wont loose the plot : -)
What im trying to say its and easy and nice read.
Mysql - add user, grant permissions to a database, change password
Its annoying that you always have too look up syntax for things like create database or create user. Some samples.
Review - Head First Design Patterns
I cant deny, i really like head first books :- ) they make me laugh and in the same way they usually have good information too.
I dont like books that you fall asleep every time you open them .... those that authors want to look smarter than they actually are ; -) Well head first is the opposite. Make it simple and get to the point.
I got burned a few times on head first books as they were too simple but design patterns is a nice one. It shows quite a collection of patterns in a nice and colorful way.
Some of my College Projects
During university years i had an opportunity to work on some cool stuff. Some low level hardcore coding in c and some nice java stuff :- ) Any way its a great memory, thinking of all the sleepless nights and excitement when stuff actually starts to work :- ) if you enjoy any of the ideas let me know.
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