Generic scaling

“But one of the reasons we’re very lucky is our engineering team has selected to use PHP as the primary development language. That allows us to use a fairly generic server type. So we, with a couple of exceptions, have three main server types and run a fairly homogeneous environment, which allows us to then consolidate our buying power.”
—Jonathan Heliger, VP Site Operations, Facebook (in interview with Dan Faber)

I think homogenous horizontal scaling (when possible) is a great idea for operations.

Continue reading about How dare you profane Rails. A pox on your server (after the jump) after the jump

PHP anthem

IM from a friend:

See ya.
Oh, by the way in OS X shell:

say -v Good oh PHP ow ow oh PHP ow oh PHP ow ow oh PHP ow oh PHP ow ow oh PHP ow oh PHP ow ow oh PHP ouchie

for PHP anthem.

ROFL

Update (2010-08-05)

If you came here from a blog search, here is another anthem.

Internationalization PB&J

I had to suffer, now it’s Andrei’s turn.


OSCON 2008

Badges, we don’t need no stinkin’ badges.

No, what I mean is that Andrei needs to practice his talk before OSCONdebut his talk!

Description of the talk:

PHP 6 brings fully functional and mature Unicode support to the Web world. This talk will cover all the layers of the PHP (bread)/Unicode (butter)/i18n (jam) sandwich. Come and find out how to work with locales, use collation to compare and sort strings, and format numbers, currencies, and dates for any country in the world. Bring your appetite because the toasty goodness is waiting.

What: PHP::$unicode->i18
When: Thursday, July 10, 2008 at 7PM
Where: CNET networks, 235 2nd street, San Francisco, CA
Why: Because I only speak one language and every character can be described with 7-bits. Plus. PB&J is yummy!
RSVP: The great thing is you show up. Just don’t give security the queer eye…PHP meetup, download iCalendar, whore this on Facebook., list on Upcoming

Unlike my talk, this one’s a new one. So even if you’re going to OSCON this year, you know you might miss it, so see it here:

(I hope he talks about “mojibake” (mo-gee-bah-kay) in the talk. I love that word. I’d use it all the time, but it gets me slapped in the face by girls at tech parties.)

This is awfully close to the the anniversary of a full year in the city—the Andreiversary! So be there!

Zombie vs. Pirate

OR:

Zombie: What, oh what is this secret that you will never tell? Your status keeps threatening to not tell. It even reads “EVER!”
Zombie: Muuuuuuuust knoooooooooow gosssssip!
Zombie: p.s. Braaaaaaaaaaains

Zombies

Zombies
Z. Cioccolato, North Beach, San Francisco, California

Panasonic DMC-LX1
1//125sec @ f/4, iso 100, 6.7mm (30mm)

Pirate: I could tell you, but then I’d have to, you know, kill you. 😉

Pirate: Do you know what vegetarian zombie’s say?
[More Zombie vs. Pirate after the jump.]Continue reading

Egos and assholes

The strange thing about search is it’s a lot like academia: full of assholes. I know, since I’m one of them. So I was trying to figure out why this twitter about my Keynote bothered me so:

“@tychay apparently serving red meat to the faithful at #phptek proving there are language Nazis on both sides.
tweet from a stream follower

Then it hit me. I act like an asshole, I’m probably an asshole, but never, not once, do I engage in personal attacks that aren’t obvious jokes. I don’t go up there like the founder of Ruby on Rails [Ed: corrected (see comments)] and in every talk say (to me):

DHH says…” by planetargon

“Then he clicked over to the next slide, white letters against a dark background that spelled out his response to the naysayers: fuck you. The crowd erupted into laughter and applause.”
Wired Magazine

Haha.

No, really!

That’s hilarious!

In my current talk I have a slide that says to the viewer that if they disagree they should give me a big “Fuck Y—.” on their blog. I suppose that’s a bit ironic since this is the same talk where people explicitly create F-bomb counters on IRC and and twitter.

[Ego, assholes, internet architecture, being wrong, and learning after the jump.]Continue reading

McMusings

Because Morgan thinks I need to blog more fast food…

Today at lunch, I was talking really fast when a friend corrected me, “That’s a Sausage McMuffin, not a Egg McMuffin with Sausage. But the one with the ham is just called an Egg McMuffin™.”

“Actually, it’s the Sausage McMuffin with Egg™, because I think they used to have a plain old Sausage McMuffin before they added the Sausage Biscuit™ to the Dollar Menu™,” I corrected the correction.

Then I decided to mess with his mind.

“You want to hear something weird? In the Egg McMuffin™, they put the Canadian bacon above the egg, but the the Sausage McMuffin with Egg™, they put the sausage below the egg, but above the cheese. What’s up with that?”

Trust me, his world was rocked.

Job: PHP UI Engineer (Mountain View)

Restarting this policy

Job listing – User Interface Engineer (PHP) in Mountain View, California. Contact aknight [at] this site.

The company has developed a shopping search engine that delivers comprehensive lists of products and their corresponding images, ranked by the leading products, brands, stores and styles on the very first page of results. They call this technology their “Product Ranking Engine.”

Their unbiased Product Ranking Engine crawls over 500,000 stores to find over 200 Million products web-wide. There team has a strong background the start up world and Search space with companies like: Onebox, Bridgespan, Vialto, Scalent, Impresse; Frame; Apple; Oracle; Buy.com; AltaVista , AOL; TURN; AltaVista, Yahoo Search; Zip2 and Verity Corporation. They should be profitable in 2008.
They believe that shoppers should have access to all of the products on the web – not just the ones that pay to be there. With their unbiased and objective “Product Ranking Engine” technology, we have made that dream a reality.

Their patent-pending technology ranks the product results for your searches by the most relevant and market-leading products, brands, stores and styles for your search. These rankings can never be bought or sold. So you can feel comfortable knowing that you are covering a ton of ground in just one search.

Plus, they provide large images of these leading products so you can easily see exactly what you are shopping for. No more wading through millions and millions of text links – the best matches for your search are easily visible and are right there on the first page!

They take care of the science, so you can enjoy the art of shopping!

They believe that shoppers should have access to all of the products on the web – not just the ones that pay to be there. With our unbiased and objective “Product Ranking Engine” technology, we have made that dream a reality.

[job description after the jump]Continue reading