John Adams’ views on emerging technologies, software engineering, and various hacks
Last Tuesday, I was part of the Velocity 2009 Keynote, where I gave a talk entitled, “Fixing Twitter”. I covered the last year or so of work in improving Twitter to deal with the massive traffic and user loads we’ve been under and how we use metrics to destroy the fail-whale. Details of the talk [...]
Frequently you want to predict when things are going to happen, and if it’s not the end of the world, it might be something occurring a bit sooner, such as your disk filling up. First capture some data, with cron. We’re going to capture the free space in our database, once a day, so we’ll [...]
I posted this in response to a post on GigaOM, but it was such a long comment, I felt that it was worthy as a post on it’s own. The workloads of social networking sites fall mostly into the ‘read lots, write once’ class (most of the web exists within this paradigm.) Regardless of the [...]
I’m announcing the release of mod_memcache_block, a distributed IP blocking system for Apache, with rate limiting based on HTTP request code. For many years I’ve had a need for a module like this — A distributed blocking system which could operate across large web serving clusters and register hits in a central store. With rate [...]
There’s a small interview with me in today’s O’Reilly radar, where I talk about some of the things that I’ll be presenting as part of my Velocity 2009 talk. You can listen to, and read the transcript here:
A bit of last-minute news, but I’ll be on a panel at SXSW Interactive: “Using GPS & Location to Enhance Social Networking”. First there were social networks, and then there were location-based social networks, and now GPS and navigation-enhanced mobile social networks. This panel will explore how these emerging platforms integrate with existing social networks [...]
Image by davidwatts1978 via Flickr Normally I don’t re-post Twitter articles here but this one on the New York magazine was wistful, fair, balanced, and gave a good representation of what it’s like to work here. The reporter was in the office on the very day the US Airways flight crashed into the Hudson, and [...]
Image via Wikipedia Since people started using virtual hosts by name with Apache HTTPD and other web servers, it has become very difficult to figure out which virtual hosts live on a single IP, if all you have is the IP address. Have a look at the Robtex Internet Swiss Army Knife. It solves this [...]
Often on our local network, someone will start using up all of our outbound Internet bandwidth, and this leads to the network administrator’s dilemma: How do we find the user in question so we can thump them on the head to make them stop? This is a basic exercise in information gathering. For the most [...]
On this page, Netgear releases Firmware version 1.0.30 for the WNR3500 router. In my previous Apple Macbook Pro to Local network host (Mac Mini) testing, my top connection speed was around 2.4 Mbps. After the upgrade, it’s between 4.65Mbps and 7.5Mbps. Nothing near the promised speeds of 802.11N (300Mbit/sec), but I suspect that this is [...]
