Sid Sidberry Reads

came across this yesterday.

WP-Testimonials is a plugin for WordPress that lets you display your customer/client/product testimonials on your blog.

You may add, edit or remove testimonials through the “Manage” navigation tab in the admin area. The plugin includes the option to display a random testimonial in your sidebar using PHP code for older templates or using a widget for newer themes. The widget is built-in with the plugin, so you have no additional files to worry about.

Testimonials can also be displayed all on one page. A template file is included that will need to be uploaded to your theme directory. Once in place, simply create a new page and select that template from the drop-down.

check it out :
http://www.sunfrogservices.com/free-php-script-downloads/wp-testimonials/

just a quick heads up. if your experiencing the ‘unknown directive “if(‘ error when starting nginx, it’s because nginx requires a space between if and (

From: http://blog.tigerlogic.com/chunkit/the-evolution-of-search/

A look at the History, Vision, Innovators, and Future of Information Accessibility
1. Foundations

A. The Beginning – In the Pre-WWII era, information sharing was in its relative infancy compared to today. Without the help of more modern electronics, we had reached the upper limit in efficiency of how and where information was stored and shared. The organization and cataloging of information within libraries and archives had been well perfected, but the retrieval and dissemination of that information was being hindered by technology.

B. The Vision – In the burgeoning world of scientific advancement that characterized the United States during and after WWII, astute observers like Vannaver Bush began to realize the need for a better system of information sharing. In an article published in The Atlantic Monthly, Bush observed that:

Check It Out:
» The Evolution of Search ChunkIt!: TigerLogic ChunkIt!

Openx just keeps growing

From: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/15/openx-shows-impressive-growth-ramps-up-revenue-streams/

OpenX (which used to be called Openads), provider of an open-source ad serving solution for web publishers – we use it at TechCrunch -, is growing like weed under the leadership of former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller, who is the company’s chairman, and ex-Yahoo executive Tim Cadogan who is CEO. According to the company, they’re serving well over 300 billion ad impressions through its software as of this month, while its Hosted product line has achieved a more than 1 billion monthly ad impression run rate.

Check It Out:
OpenX Shows Impressive Growth, Ramps Up Revenue Streams

So after 3-4 days of research and study I’m compiling a list of links that helped me finally understand couchdb. Still bunches to learn, but hopefully it will save others from 4 days of googling.

Start

The very first thing you should read is the work in progress online couchdb book:
Relax with CouchDB [http://books.couchdb.org/relax/]

Now that your started

The following sections are grouped by what I left the article better understanding. They may cover other areas, but then again more knowledge leads to better understanding right?

JSON

Just in case you don’t understand json:

http://webt.wordpress.com/2007/10/01/json/

Couch MapReduce

fyi: hashes

Depending on what language your coming from you may know hashes as arrays or associative arrays. When they say reduce returns a single value, they are referring to the hash value it returns (scratched my head for a while)

If your coming from php an easy way to connect the dots is to think of how serialize creates a string that represents your object. Only in couchDb this is a json string

I had my eureka moment here:

http://www.ibuildings.com/blog/archives/1291-Some-thoughts-on-CouchDB.html

Just in case you didn’t eureka:

http://rrees.wordpress.com/2008/03/09/couchdb-querying-data/

Damien Katz explains more on couch’s mapreduce ( check the part 2 near the end as well ):

http://damienkatz.net/2008/02/incremental_map.html

MapReduce Method

In case you didn’t know mapreduce isn’t something couch invented, you can learn more about mapreduce below.

explains the mapreduce method in detail:

http://code.google.com/edu/parallel/mapreduce-tutorial.html#MapReduce

the mapreduce white paper:

http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html

mapreduce lecture (didn’t watch, but it was recommended by google, so why not):

http://www.youtube.com/v/-vD6PUdf3Js

using couchdb

blog db example / couchdb “joins”:

http://www.cmlenz.net/archives/2007/10/couchdb-joins

user permissions system example / offers rdbms comparison:

http://kore-nordmann.de/blog/couchdb_a_use_case.html

aimee’s 8+ couchdb on rails series (links to part 1, but your good from there):

http://aimee.mychores.co.uk/2008/09/07/post/320/

couchdb internals

Ricy ho’s overview:

http://horicky.blogspot.com/2008/10/couchdb-implementation.html

Related discussion where btrees are further discussed (as well as some decent bantering):

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/792hf/couchdb_implementation/

Ayende Rahien has an indepth series on couch db called: reading erlang

http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2008/09/24/reading-erlang-inspecting-couchdb.aspx

http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2008/09/24/more-couchdb-reading-btreelookup.aspx

http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2008/09/24/more-couchdb-reading-btreequery_modify.aspx

http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2008/10/04/reading-erlang-couchdb-from-rest-to-disk-in-a.aspx

http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2008/10/04/erlang-reading-couchdb-digging-down-to-disk.aspx

http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2008/10/06/reading-eralng-couchdb-streams.aspx

The most important part

Use it damn it! get planning, hacking, pop locking and start playing with couch

sources

Sources not referenced already:

http://damienkatz.net/2008/09/peek_into_couchdb.html

http://jan.prima.de/plok/

Came across an excerpt from:
The Innovator’s Dilemma, When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
By Clayton M. Christensen

It’s a good read detailing how new innovations disrupt tech markets and how they cause established companies to fail.

from http://www.businessweek.com/chapter/christensen.htm

How Can Great Firms Fail? Insights from the Hard Disk Drive Industry

When I began my search for an answer to the puzzle of why the best firms can fail, a friend offered some sage advice. “Those who study genetics avoid studying humans,” he noted. “Because new generations come along only every thirty years or so, it takes a long time to understand the cause and effect of any changes. Instead, they study fruit flies, because they are conceived, born, mature, and die all within a single day. If you want to understand why something happens in business, study the disk drive industry. Those companies are the closest things to fruit flies that the business world will ever see.”

Indeed, nowhere in the history of business has there been an industry like disk drives, where changes in technology, market structure, global scope, and vertical integration have been so pervasive, rapid, and unrelenting. While this pace and complexity might be a nightmare for managers, my friend was right about its being fertile ground for research. Few industries offer researchers the same opportunities for developing theories about how different types of change cause certain types of firms to succeed or fail or for testing those theories as the industry repeats its cycles of change.

The Innovator’s Dilemmafrom

While benchmarking performance for deathy death match I realized something: Benchmarking sucks!

That said, and me being the lazy person I am, I asked myself how can I make this easier? My answer: benchsid, two shell scripts that make benchmarking easier.

disclaimer

This is a 1,2,3 trick pony – use it as such

These scripts are offered as is and I am not responsible for anything you do, create, break, etc.

Both scripts are released under the do whatever the hell you want, but don’t blame me license. This of course isn’t a real license, but you get the point.

Make benchmarks easier, if only a bit

I’ve tried as much as possible to keep your commands to a minimum. If running as root you can run a complete benchmark, save both the results and you benchmark servers top + free output, and reboot with 3 commands. See lazy right?

monitor.sh – run this script on the machine your benchmarking
bench.sh – run this script on the machine your benchmarking from

you do not need to run these on separate machines, but I recommend it

How do I use…

monitor:

 ./monitor.sh

 ./monitor.sh help

bench:

 ./bench.sh

 ./bench.sh help

If your still having issues post a comment

monitor.sh

Monitor should be ran on the machine your benchmarking. It automates the process of recording free (free -m) and top, and if running as root will reboot the server when you tell it to stop monitoring a benchmark

Sounds good so far right?

monitor.sh process overview

start process

clear out any benchmarks that will be overwritten
save output from free to a file (free -m)
save output from top to a file
start a top process to monitor to a file while we benchmark
confirm that we are up and running

stop process

stop top
save output of free to file
save output of top to file
reboot server

monitor.sh: umm why?

monitor.sh saves the information about the server before, during and after your benchmark has been run. By running top during the benchmark process (10 second intervals), we can get a real time overview of both server load and the loads created by applications

bench.sh

bench.sh is the benchmarking portion. bench.sh can benchmark your server using one of three programs: ab, siege, or httpref. I considered adding an option to do all three, but honestly that more poor mans dos than benchmark.

bench.sh first will perform a warm-up cycle of 2000 requests to your server using your desired (or default) concurrency. After that it will perform 3 benchmark cycles of your desired number of requests and concurrency.

All cycle results (including warm up) are saved to the filesystem.

download

download benchsid: http://gregsidberry.com/httpdocs/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/benchsid.tar.gz

known issues

siege output – siege outputs a couple of variables to screen that aren’t included, or properly recorded, in the created file. I’ve tried output redirection, script, etc, but haven’t been able to find a fix that keeps everything in one script

input validation – there is no input validation, so please don’t put these files in a web public location.

funyuns – I’m out of funyuns, please send more

enjoy
Sid

As one of the co-founders of the Waffle Grid project, I beam with pride every time I get a stellar benchmark or every time I find a new use for the Waffle. But as a professional I still have to be critical of all solutions I would recommend or deploy. One of the big goals of Waffle Grid is to replace disk IO which should be slow with remote memory which should be much faster. But what happens when the disk is no longer slow? This leads me to ask myself, is Waffle Grid only good for servers with slower disk? Or is this a solution that can also help systems with fast disk? So which should you deploy SSD -vs- Waffle? Are they competitors? Or are they complementary technologies?

Big DBA Head! – Database Brain Power! » Waffle Grid: Remote Buffer Cache -VS- SSD Grudge Match

The IAB Ad Unit Guidelines are intended for marketers, agencies and media companies for use in the creating, planning, buying and selling of interactive marketing and advertising. The IAB’s Ad Sizes Working Group meets on a bi-annual basis to review proposed new ad units and issue updated voluntary guidelines as appropriate. The process whereby these new units are reviewed and considered can be downloaded here.

IAB – Ad Unit Guidelines

If you don’t know: I’m anti Mac. I love ipod, tempted by iphone, but my main issue is with the mac os and pretty much anyone I know that has switched. I’ll admit some of the newer laptops are oh so shiny, tiny, and have made me drool on occasion. Anyways more on my anti mac crusade: Apple is advising users to install anti virus software. Oh yeah freebsd users are still safe

We are all notoriously snobbish when it comes to not installing anti-virus software, but largely because we all know that malware is essentially non-existent when it comes to the Mac. Yes, yes, there’s the occasional scare, but seriously: when was the last time that you noticed an actual piece of malware on the Mac of someone you know that actually did any harm? Yeah, exactly.

Nevertheless, the Washington Post’s Brian Krebs noticed a November 21 technical note published on the Apple website that reads:

Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple anti-virus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.

Of course, Apple has long-touted the fact that Macs just, simply don’t get viruses. Remember this ad?

Apple says users should install anti-virus software | MacUser | Macworld