Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a neat idea, but I’ve often wondered why people don’t consider it slave labor the way they might a Nike sweatshop. (Nike settled.)
And then High Scalability has a post about getting work done for free albeit this time to fight spam.
Some top picks from the last few days:
A good overview and comparison of various Virtualization technologies from the ever interesting Kris Buytaert.
The High Scalability blog pulls together a list of places that are discussing the state of the art in scaling in the cloud. Not entirely un-related is High Scalability’s overview of the Second Life Architecture. 12Gbit/sec in 2007 and growing huh?
The Bend in the Weather blog covers how to setup your networking in VirtualBox.
Enjoy! Comments or email always welcome.
What technology platforms do the big boys run (Digg, ebay, Amazon and YouTube)?
What architectures do they use?
What tips and lessons can they share?
How cool - Stanford’s three-course Introduction to Computer Science and seven more advanced courses in artificial intelligence and electrical engineering. Online and free.
Materials, tutorial notes, handouts, exams and a social network to interact with other students.
Not any old rubbish either - the Introduction to Computer Science is “taken by the majority of Stanford’s undergraduates”
A bunch of things we’ve found interesting of late:
Read the rest of this entry »
Munin offers a number of options to control the appearance and style of the graphs it generates. One is how the data is drawn on the graph.
What the documentation doesn’t currently do is show you visually how these different options render. So we thought we’d do that. Read the rest of this entry »
We now have a public (read only) git repository. Currently containing the vast total of our Munin plugin template and a work-in-progress plugin for timing how long urls take to download.
git clone http://sysmonblog.co.uk/git/ [your dir name]
Access via http is read only. We’d be delighted to accept patches either by email or via comments below.
Those new to git might be interested in our git by example tutorial.
We’ve recently been learning and using git, the version control or distributed source code management tool, similar to Mercurial or Bazaar.
There’s some really good documentation out there already, however we wanted a simple step-by-step tutorial that guided you through learning git without cluttering the process by explaining a whole bunch of theoretical jargon or concepts first.
One of the annoyances we find with using Munin is writing plugins.
It’s not hard or complicated per se (or any worse than with any of the other monitoring tools).
However it often seems confusing and fiddly to our little brains. We’ll admit we aren’t Munin Experts, nor want to be.
The implementation details we do know tend to leak out of our heads over time as, although we use the reports frequently, we typically don’t fiddle with the guts of Munin very often. Which is perhaps a good thing.
Yet from time to time we need to tinker and it is mostly with the plugins.
Kris Buytaert and Tom De Cooman have posted the slides to their OLS 2008 talk:
For anyone evaluating monitoring solutions, it is a great read. They’ve obviously done a lot of research and if nothing else highlight a huge bunch of issues and topics you would want to consider when selecting a product. Read the rest of this entry »