News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

ivan78

Re:Important database news from the last few months on Wednesday July 04, 2018 @01:48PM (#17458547)
If you are looking for something advanced, you should check books written by C. J. Date. For example, his "An Introduction to Database Systems" considered as one of the best book on database theory.
Re:About ZFS Performance on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @07:04AM (#17178008)
Another interesting project of next-gen file system is Red Hat Stratis: https://stratis-storage.github.io/

After dropping btrfs support some time ago they started developing their own next-gen file system based on LVM and XFS. It is now available for technology preview on Fedora 28.

Re:About ZFS Performance on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @06:53AM (#17177969)
Actually, it is quite opposite. ZFS is a copy-on-write filesystem - if you do write in the middle of your file the datablock gets moved to a new place on your disk. For typical database load your db files get more and more fragmented with time.
Re:How a domain registrar can kill your business on Friday May 18, 2018 @06:33AM (#17100286)
On my previous job we had to manage thousands of customer domains, including annual renewal. This was very tedious task, so I wrote a Perl script, scraping WHOIS and DNS data for all domains listed on our DNS servers. Based on this data every domain was assigned a status, such as "Ok", "misconfigured", "about to expire", "points to foreign DNS server" or "points to foreign Web server". This script was scheduled to run every other day and sent CSV report (full and diff from previous run) to a person responsible for domain renewal. Needless to say, our support specialists were very happy with this improvement.
Re:A JavaScript clone of Nu Pogodi, a Soviet hand-held game on Sunday September 14, 2014 @07:40AM (#8315010)
Thank you, I did not know that. It is sometimes very surprising to see such identical idioms, while English and Russian languages are so different.
Re:A JavaScript clone of Nu Pogodi, a Soviet hand-held game on Sunday September 14, 2014 @07:26AM (#8314998)
Interestingly, Wikipedia translates "Nu, pogodi" as "Well, you just wait". Actually, this phrase is a threat and should be translated something like "I will get you".
Re:Only 90s Web Developers Remember This on Wednesday February 26, 2014 @11:00PM (#7310328)
To solve the problem with non-US character-encoding. Web browsers of 90s were notoriously bad with client-side encoding. The only way to show content properly for all available clients was server-side recoding and different HTTP ports were used to serve content with different encoding - ISO, DOS, Windows and KOI. Each web-page had a set of links, usually in top-right corner, labeled as "ISO", "DOS", "Win" and "KOI" which transferred you to corresponding HTTP port.
Re:Only 90s Web Developers Remember This on Tuesday February 25, 2014 @11:30PM (#7302894)
In Russia we served HTTP traffic on non-standard ports, such as 8100, 8101, 8102 in addition to default 80. It was very common in 90s. Can anyone guess, why?
Re:Most popular Firefox extensions on Monday November 25, 2013 @11:13PM (#6799056)
I was surprised to find Web of Trust addon ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wot-safe-brow... ) in top 10. From my past experience https://mywot.com is nothing more than a scam. Their ratings are not reliable and should not be trusted by anyone. For example, our business website was rated with "Child safety: Very poor" and there is nothing we could do about it.
Re:Why Russians Are Not Smiling (2011) on Tuesday November 19, 2013 @08:21AM (#6760950)
Best comment. :-)
Re:Why Russians Are Not Smiling (2011) on Tuesday November 19, 2013 @12:20AM (#6759438)
You should not judge about all Russians by those tourists. Unfortunately, during last 20 years in Russia, being such scoundrel and scumbag, you have pretty high chance to earn good money. Even in Russia nobody likes these (very small number of) people and wants to travel to the resort where there are no "damned Russian tourists". :-)
Re:Why Russians Are Not Smiling (2011) on Tuesday November 19, 2013 @12:07AM (#6759397)
Actually, Russians smile quite a lot. They are not smiling to strangers - the article explains why. But this does not mean they are not smiling at all. Once you become acquainted to the person, the smile becoming the natural part of communication.
Re:Why Russians Are Not Smiling (2011) on Monday November 18, 2013 @11:50PM (#6759341)
I hope, having read the article, you can now understand their behavior.
Re:Why Russians Are Not Smiling (2011) on Monday November 18, 2013 @11:40PM (#6759312)
Moscow is not a country. But I agree with you - people living in Moscow have very few reasons to smile to strangers.
I immediately remembered about this story too. This is pretty hilarious:

"Containing a Harry Potter book, the letter was sent to a Russian student by her French friend, who manually transcribed the address that he had received by e-mail. The Frenchman's e-mail program was not set up correctly, so the Cyrillic characters encoded as KOI8-R were instead displayed as diacritic symbols from the Western character set (ISO-8859-1). Russian postal employees deciphered the address and delivered the package successfully."

It's a fake. http://ria.ru/science/20120917/752346830.html Google translate: http://tinyurl.com/9kqjr3t

TLDR: There are so called "technical diamonds", they are not good enough for jewelry, bat can be used for making tools, such as drills, etc.

Re:Help, Linux ate my RAM on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @02:42PM (#3699749)
You are probably talking about apt-xapian-index. It rebuilds its indexes once a week, consuming all system resources. I had an old notebook, which became unusable every weekend. I did not want to buy a new machine, so I simply deinstalled apt-xapian-index package. :-)
Re:Help, Linux ate my RAM on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @02:13PM (#3699621)
to henrikschroder: I expected that this reaction was caused by mentioning a book. It is my deepest belief that questions like memory management can not be answered with brief comment. You must read at least a basic book if you want to understand it in depth.
Re:Help, Linux ate my RAM on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @02:00PM (#3699579)
If you want to be more enterprisey, you can pipe it to SNMP counter and then draw a graph with your Network Monitoring System. It is much more convenient if you have more that few servers.
Re:Help, Linux ate my RAM on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @01:51PM (#3699538)
Thank you. I'm on my way to become exceptional DBA. Oracle is only 2 years younger than me, but unfortunately it has been developing much faster than I am. It literally takes years just to become familiar with all these layers of Oracle technologies. So, it's really hard to blame DBAs for not knowing how underlying OS works. :-)
Re:Help, Linux ate my RAM on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @01:33PM (#3699436)
Why downvoting? It may be not the best explanation, but IMO the closest to the way a "developer" should understand it. On Linux a virtual memory is committed with mmap call. Check this for details: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2782628/any-way-to-reserv... This is basically how shared libraries and other shared objects are attached to your process.
Re:Help, Linux ate my RAM on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @12:51PM (#3699215)
Well, if you don't understand it, you must read some basic book about modern computer architecture. Short answer: It is possible to reserve memory address space without assigning actual physical memory. As your program runs it can dynamically assign physical memory pages to its address space when it needs it. Again - you must read a book if you want to understand it.
Re:Help, Linux ate my RAM on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @12:31PM (#3699135)
As a longtime Linux user/admin and beginning Oracle DBA I now know that all memory should be occupied by Oracle, not by OS. :-) Serious mode on: I'm sure it's a big problem to be narrow expert. They can be brilliant specialist in their field, but one step aside and they are absolutely helpless.
Re:What Happens to the Coke in Coca-Cola? on Sunday February 26, 2012 @05:58AM (#3635332)
Me too. I highly suspect Coca Cola was specifically designed in a way that it can not quench one's thirst. Once you open a bottle, you can not stop drinking it until it is finished. That's why I completely stopped drinking Coca Cola few years ago.
Re:How to set up a mail server on a GNU / Linux system on Monday January 30, 2012 @11:08AM (#3529267)
I have much better recipe. You go to zimbra.com, download ZCS Open-Source Edition and immediately have all the functionality out of the box. As a bonus you have much more beautiful web-interface than ancient Squirrelmail.
"The one most valuable asset at Oyster.com is our photo collection. ... In strict accordance with KISS methodology, we opted against LTO and S3, and decided to build a big BOX."

I can only imagine how much they will be scared each time they need install updates or reboot THE BOX. They will eventually decide to build identical BOX and mirror their data on daily basis. Then they will notice that mirroring such big volumes of data is wasting tooo much system resources and start evaluating in-house distributed storage solutions, such as OpenStack Swift. Then they will notice it is way too overcomplicated and finally decide migrate their data to Amazon S3.

I'm writing it as a person who walked the same path over the last few years. :-)