Juho Mäkinen's blog

I had the privilege to do a presentation at yesterdays (2011-05-11) Frontend Finland event. Thanks for everybody who had the time to listen my presentation even when the time was a bit late. I’ve uploaded my slides so you can download them (PDF). Remember to check our career page if you would like to work with [...]

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Are you a sysadmin who is new to Java? Then you might find this post to be helpful. Java has its own memory management system with garbage collection which is most of the time really nice, but you need to know some details how it works so you can admin your JVM instances effectively.

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I’ve just created a zabbix template with a script which can be used to feed performance data from haproxy to zabbix. The script firsts uses HTTP to get the /haproxy?stats;csv page, parses the CVS and uses zabbix_sender command line tool to send each attribute to the zabbix server.

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We had a situation where our image thumbnail memcached cluster somehow got empty thumbnails. The thumbnails are generated on the fly by image proxy servers and the thumbnail is stored into memcached. For some reason some of the thumbnails were truncated. As I didn’t have time to start debugging the real issue, I quickly wrote this oneliner which detects corrupted thumbnails when the thumbnail is fetched from the memcached and issues a delete operation to it.

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We have released our open BigPipe implementation written for IRC-Galleria which is implemented by loosely following this facebook blog. The sources are located at github: https://github.com/garo/bigpipe and there’s an example demonstrating the library in action at http://www.juhonkoti.net/bigpipe. BigPipe allows speeding up page rendering times by loading the page in small parts called pagelets. This allows browser to [...]

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The NoSQL versus RDBMS war started a few years ago and as the new technologies are starting to get more mature it seems that the two different camps will be moving towards each other. [read more...]

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We have built a facebook style “messenger” into our web site which uses cassandra as storage backend. I’m describing the data schema to server as a simple example how cassandra (and nosql in general) can be used in practice…

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I recently had a long night debugging this: My application using PHP, Sajax and MySQL truncated messages from the first non-ascii character to the end of the message. For example: if I typed “yö tulee” (finnish sentence means that “night is coming”) only “y” was inserted into the database. The problem was with Sajax library. [...]

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I’ve successfully created a Python script which can extract username and login password from a mac running OS X tiger (going to test with leopard asap) via firewire using a linux laptop, based on great paper Hit By A Bus: Physical Access Attacks with Firewire by Adam Boileau. Once the attackers Linux laptop is connected to target machine via firewire, the password can be automaticly extracted from memory via firewire in about 10 seconds.

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I recently installed WPG2 and Gallery2 to my block to manage the photos and images which are related to my blog entries and generally to store the photos taken by me. I found WPG2 quite good, but it lacked a feature I missed: To display random images from an album which is related to a [...]

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