Technology
In the aftermath of Intermedia’s extended outage, an important lesson to be learned for SAS providers
As a current (and reasonably long time) customer of SAS Exchange hosting provider Intermedia.com, we at OleOle were naturally affected to some extent by Intermedia’s extended system outage on March 5th, 2010. For pretty much the entire morning on that day, we, along with thousands of their other customers, had zero email capability, no sending, [...]
Surprise! Not all Amazon EC2 compute units are created equal
A very interesting discovery made by our sys admin not so long ago: While Amazon EC2 sells its hosting services on the notion of leasing virtualized servers with a guaranteed amount of standard compute units, memory and disk space, it turns out that in fact, not all EC2 compute units are created equal. In other [...]
Getting Memcached working on Windows Vista with Symfony
I finally found a solution to a long standing issue that had been driving me crazy: getting memcached to work with the PHP development framework Symfony on my Windows Vista based development machine. For whatever reason, it just has not worked for me from day 1 since moving to Vista (from XP) and setting up [...]
Using Google Analytics To Show Unique Visitors By Country
I was surprised to realize today that Google Analytics doesn’t provide an easy way to view the unique visitors to your website broken down by country. You can see Visits by country, average pages viewed per visit (and hence, total page views by country can be calculated) and a few other metrics, but maddeningly, you [...]
Handy SQL snippet: Easily calculate average age of all members from DOB
The problem: Let’s say you have a database with a members or users list and you have the birthdate of these members stored in a date or datetime format (i.e. 1985-07-31 or similar). Now let’s say you would like to know the average age of the members in your list. This incidentally was exactly the [...]
Amazon, oh Amazon, You Continue to Disappoint Me
Following Amazon’s EC2 recently reaching capacity at certain EC2 zones, I now shake my head in dismay at what to me, is another poor showing by a service that I would love to love, if only they would let me! So today we get an email from them soliciting feedback to their SimpleDB service, which [...]
Twitter Doc Theft – Details Revealed: Step By Step To How It Was Done
TechCrunch posted a great step by step account this morning that details almost exactly how Frenchman Hacker Croll (HC) was able to steal over 300 sensitive Twitter corporate docs, as well as gain access to numerous online accounts of several Twitter employees. It’s a long article, but very interesting and if you have any interest [...]
Calling Apple Fanbois and Fangirls – Hail the iRing!
Now let me say first off that I am definitely NOT an Apple Fanboi myself. Although I do have an iPhone and think Macs are way cooler than PCs, I admit that I am a hardcore PC user. That said, this Apple concept piece from Victor Soto is SO cool. It’s not new, but I [...]
Cloud Computing – Amazon EC2 Zone Reaches Capacity
I’m planning to write a series of posts documenting in detail the experiences that we have had at OleOle migrating our entire website infrastructure from a traditional managed hosting company to Amazon’s Cloud Computing services (EC2, S3, etc.). This was a process we began scoping out at the beginning of ’09 and actually completed just [...]
Twitter Docs Stolen off Gmail. How it was done.
I’m interested to document how French hacker “Hacker Croll” was recently able to steal sensitive company documents from Twitter. My interest in this is to inform myself and hopefully others as to how to safeguard ourselves as best we can from suffering similar fates in future. What I have gleaned so far: From TechCrunch yesterday: [...]
