All posts across the whole website belong to this category. They might also belong to some other categories as well, but this one holds all of them. Hence the descriptive name – All.
Famagusta Gazette reports that a partial Lunar eclipse will be visible from Cyprus tonight. For the photography fans among you, it’s probably a good time to review moon photography tips. The thing to remember is that even though shooting at night, the moon is lit by the sun, which means you’ll need to use pretty much the same settings as for the bright daylight – tele-zoom lens, tripod, f/16, 1/80 – 1/100. Good luck, and don’t forget to share your pictures after!
These days there isn’t much choice of what to watch in the movies. So I ended up at “Be Kind Rewind“. It’s a comedy with Jack Black and Mos Def, both of who are often funny. Also, I wanted to see how Danny Glover is doing these days, since the last time I saw him was in “Lethal Weapon 4” or so.
“Be Kind Rewind” is a bit of an akward film. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s cheap, and it’s kind. Some parts of it are so hilarious that I was laughing out loud. Yet other parsts of it don’t make any sense at all. Some scenes follow each other naturally, yet some other feel like they were glued together very roughly.
Overall, I’ll give it a 6 out of 10. Not something that I would strongly recommend, but not your regular movie experience either.
Via this CyberNet News post I got to Zoomii.com. There is a saying about all new being well forgotten old. And that’s exactly what Zoomii.com is about.
There is something magical about walking through a bookshop – touching books, flipping pages. Especially, when you don’t know exactly what are you looking for. Amazon has sort of taken it away. You get in, get your stuff, maybe grab something that is recommended nearby, and leave. Zoomii.com combines the best of both worlds. You can still get stuff from Amazon shop at Amazon prices, but instead of visiting a rather cumbersome interface of their site, you can browse through a familiar bookshelf area.
The combination of a good design with intuitive interface makes it almost a “Wow!” site fo me. It took me exactly three seconds to figure out how to use it. And even if I wasn’t tech savvy, there is a little friendly popup that appears when entering the site, which tells briefly how to navigate around. The control panel on the left is small, and has only the things that I care about – navigation, category selector, and information about my cart. Brilliant.
The only thing that I wish Zoomii.com had that it doesn’t have (or at least I couldn’t find) is the option of choosing which Amazon shop to buy from. If I could buy directly from Amazon.co.uk, it would be a 10 of 10 web site. Hope, they will add this option later.
Sites like this should be taught to web designers and developers. This is how the web should be – clean, simple, efficient, and intuitive.
After SugarCRM was deployed, we were experiencing some lock ups. Not frequent or dangerous, but annoying. About once a week or every ten days or so, SugarCRM would lock up and won’t answer any queries at all. Not even the login was possible. A brief investigation showed that somehow it was locking up the MySQL database – about 15 processes (using “show full processlist”) in Locked state, with no data being sent back or forth. All locked queries were rather complex, with several JOINs. The load on the system was somewhat high, since we have about a few dozen operators working on it at the same time.
A similarly brief Google search suggested (see here and here) and explained converting MySQL tables from InnoDB to InnoDB. A test has been performed and everything went OK. Our SugarCRM database is about 600 MBytes and it was converted from MyISAM to InnoDB in under 20 minutes. The best part is that it takes even less to convert back to MyISAM, in case you change your mind.
It’s been a few days now since we did the conversion and it looks OK. Also, the CRM itself feels a bit faster.
We spent a couple of weeks now at work, setting up our Nagios installation. This is one of those things that one can never finish. Monitoring is like security – no matter how good it is, it can always be better.
One thing that I particularly enjoyed figuring out was how to monitor dynamic stuff. Hosts and services are the easy part – they are always there and should be there. If they aren’t – let me know. But how to monitor dynamic values, that change based on the time of day or day of week? How to configure the monitoring so that we don’t need to update the limits every other week?
For example, consider the number of the user registrations through a web form. If we are to measure this number over any sensible (monitoring-wise) period of time, such as one hour, we’d see that it fluctuates a lot during the day. Furthermore, this number fluctuates differently depending on the day of the week. We have three separate pick hours during the day, and we have a great decrease in numbers over the weekend. Plus the amount of user registrations is linked to all the advertising that company does, so this week might different from the last week and from the next week. How can we measure it so that a notiification is sent when the number is abnormal? What is abnormal?
The solution turned out to be much simpler than I originally thought it would. It is sufficient to get a few samples of the data in same hour last week and a week before. If current value is more than twice the maximum or less than twice the minimum from the sample data, then we should be notified. This, in fact, works pretty well. The only time when we get a lot of false positives is when the values in the sample data are small. With values under 10, it’s very easy to jump over or under the limit. When the sample values are higher, there is more space between the boundaries and the system works as expected.
We’ll get some more sample data now and we’ll be adjusting the formulat accordingly. But as I said, even as it is, it’s pretty good.