Doing some late spring cleaning in my Gmail account … like a boss!
Category: Web work
These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.
SSO with Nginx auth_request module
SSO with Nginx auth_request module – SSO as in Single Sign-On. Absolutely beautiful solution for one set of requirements, and a horrendous for another. Worth knowing though.
Nginx and Memcached, a 400% boost!
Here is an idea to try on a slow weekend: Nginx and Memcached, a 400% boost!
Memcached, the darling of every web-developer, is capable of turning almost any application into a speed-demon. Benchmarking one of my own Rails applications resulted in ~850 req/s on commodity, non-optimized hardware – more than enough in the case of this application. However, what if we took Mongrel out of the equation? Nginx, by default, comes prepackaged with the Memcached module, which allows us to bypass the Mongrel servers and talk to Memcached directly. Same hardware, and a quick test later: ~3,550 req/s, or almost a 400% improvement! Not bad for a five minute tweak!
Important Announcement about SMS notifications in Google Calendar
Catching up with emails, I saw this email from the Google Calendar team:
Starting on June 27th, 2015, SMS notifications from Google Calendar will no longer be sent. SMS notifications launched before smartphones were available. Now, in a world with smartphones and notifications, you can get richer, more reliable experience on your mobile device, even offline.
Too bad I say. SMS notifications is one of the features I use and love the most about the Google Calendar. My smartphone is full of all kind notifications. In this day and age, it seems, every up considers it it’s duty to add something to the notification bar. I’ll never configure each one of those to have a different sound, vibration mode, or LED color. I don’t really care about them no more.
The ONLY notification that I care about 24×7, since my sysadmin shift days, is the SMS. An SMS wakes me up in the middle of the night. An SMS draws my attention in the noisiest of places. An SMS interrupts my meetings. That’s the one and only instance notification that I respect.
And now, it’s disappearing from the Google Calendar…
WordPress Plugins GitHub Mirror
WordPress Plugins GitHub Mirror (or on GitHub):
Say hello to fully automated GitHub mirrors of every plugin in the WordPress.org plugin repository. These aren’t your typical plugin Git repositories. These mirrors can be used for fast, efficient, and automated plugin updates using Composer, and don’t require “sync scripts” or separate Subversion checkouts for plugin development. They also offer a way for plugin developers to make the move to Git even while others continue working on the same plugin using Subversion uninterrupted.
Impressive, and quite useful.