Cayley – an open-source graph inspired by the graph database behind Freebase and Google’s Knowledge Graph. Its goal is to be a part of the developer’s toolbox where Linked Data and graph-shaped data (semantic webs, social networks, etc) in general are concerned.
I joined Easy Forex back in 2012 to work on a rather complex project – migrate main website of the company from a really outdated version of DotNetNuke to WordPress. WordPress, even though it is an absolutely amazing platform, turned out not to be the right tool for the job. But we’ve managed to deliver anyway. One of the annoying practices that we had to employ though was a semaphore flag for the database changes – only a single developer could work on the database at any given time. (Again, this wasn’t a WordPress limitation, but rather specifics of our environment at the time). That was the time when we introduced the Semaphore Bull to our development process.
It worked out quite well. But being a soft toy, it got abused a lot along the way. It lost a leg, which was screwed in for a while. Then it nearly lost the whole butt. Then the head. Beaten, barely alive, it still stood its ground and did the job! At some point it got so bad, that we’ve had to place it into the plastic container, where it survived for a few more month.
Today we’ve finalized our migration of the main website from WordPress to CakePHP. The system is so simple now that we don’t even need a database anymore. And with that, the job of the Semaphore Bull ends. Gone, but not forgotten though!
Because of its huge contribution to our work, because it saved us from countless painful hours of resolving SQL conflicts, we’ve decided to create a memorial. Ironically, the memorial to Semaphore Bull is built out Semaphore Bull itself, and the container it lived in. For the future generations to remember the deed, we’ve printed out the snippet of the developer’s manual and embedded it into the memorial together with the dates. Here’s how it looks altogether now.
Thank you, Semaphore Bull. You’ve done us a great service. Rest in peace.
According to an article in today’s issue of Phileleftheros newspaper, the Attorney General’s office is planning to purchase a server which will cost more than 600,000 euro in order to analyse the thousands of documents relating to economic scandals. The purchase was proposed by a British expert on the field in order the “strengthen the investigation”.
Always according to the article, the ‘electronic brain’ will store 150000 documents sorted and coded for each suspect for quick retrieval. As any owner of a mid range laptop today will tell you 150000 files are nothing by today’s computer technology and could probably even be analysed by any decent smartphone.
The whole article sounds as if it came out of a late 1960′s newspaper. Even though it made it to the front page we still hope this it was a farce or result of journalistic error.
Does anybody know of a WordPress plugin that would allow saving file uploads into the database?
Scaling the Facebook data warehouse to 300 PB
At Facebook, we have unique storage scalability challenges when it comes to our data warehouse. Our warehouse stores upwards of 300 PB of Hive data, with an incoming daily rate of about 600 TB. In the last year, the warehouse has seen a 3x growth in the amount of data stored. Given this growth trajectory, storage efficiency is and will continue to be a focus for our warehouse infrastructure.