My last RAID discussion was about growing the size of an existing RAID1 partition. I thought I’d back up a little bit and show an example of how we get a RAID1 in the first place.
Archive for August 2011
Common RAID and LVM RAID1 Setup
Wednesday, August 31st, 2011
Wireframing to Keep the Ball Rolling
Thursday, August 25th, 2011
Every project that comes across my desk gets a wireframe layout right before I hit Photoshop. These usually take moments and establish a quick plan in my notebook before I create a polished layout.
Symfony 1.4, Component Caching and SOAP
Thursday, August 18th, 2011
I recently found myself having to get some data from a SOAP service onto a Symfony 1.4 site. The data consisted of a simple title, location and posting date of the two most recent records from the service.
When accessing a SOAP service – especially when your API access is metered – it’s often a good idea to set up a local cache of the data. That way you’re not burning your page load times with server-side HTTP requests, using up precious request allotments or concurrent connection limits. Which means you have to mirror or abstract the remote inside of your app.
Initially my design consisted of creating a local Doctrine 1.2 data model, a handful of application configuration options and then adding some methods to the model and table classes to fetch locally and update the database with forced or timed expiries.
Bacula Server Backup Complexities
Friday, August 12th, 2011
Bacula is a very powerful backup managing product. Free (as in beer and speech), and quite mature. I recently had the task of setting up proper backups of a new server to a backup server. The way we wanted to do it caused a lot of complexity. I needed to minimize bandwidth use, minimize disk use, and keep increments back to about two weeks. I also wanted multiple jobs to be running at the same time, and didn’t want to transfer a complete full backup every month.
Bacula lets us do that! But it’s not immediately obvious how things work from the documentation. The documentation is probably geared towards someone familiar with this style of backup product, but coming from using rsync for backups, I had some learning to do. I’m still learning in fact, so if you have a better way of doing things, let me know!
Compressing Transparent PNGs for the Web
Thursday, August 11th, 2011
Today is a very exciting day: HTML5 Boilterplate v2 came out and I discovered that transparent PNGs don’t have to be massive.
There was one change from h5bp from v1 to v2 that would be easy to overlook: “We feel tools like imagealpha and pngquant, and techniques like using 8-bit PNGs are more useful than using stopgap fixes like belatedpng.”
What’s this? pngquant? Huh? It turns out pngquant is an OS X only GUI for pngnq. What is pngnq? From the pngnq website: “Pngnq is a tool for quantizing PNG images in RGBA format.” I don’t know what that means but it sure can make a difference in your transparent PNG’s file size.
Dog Hip Replacement
Monday, August 8th, 2011
In online marketing two common goals are to blog about something that will drive a lot of visitation and to offer content that is going to help people make decisions. I am going to give you a real life example of a topic I think will drive a lot of traffic and will help people make decisions.
Social Media and Sales Referrals
Thursday, August 4th, 2011
In this video, I speak to the opportunities available through social media such as LinkedIn and Twitter to increase referrals, and ultimately see real ROI from social media.
