NYC.rb Hackfest

Posted by Toby Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:06:00 GMT

I went up to Manhattan last night to attend the monthly NYC.rb Hackfest and it was pretty awesome! Lots of great people and conversation was had. I highly recommend checking it out if you get a chance to head up there.

Running on Thin 1

Posted by Toby Fri, 22 Feb 2008 22:29:00 GMT

After moving all my sites to Slicehost, I figured I could also now experiment with the backend of this blog, too. So, instead of a Mongrel-backed Rails app, I am backing Typo up with the Thin webserver. Thin is supposed to be faster and more concurrent than Mongrel in any case, even the evented Mongrel from Swiftcore. Here’s hoping things go well!

Yahoo! Moved to Hadoop for Production Search 1

Posted by Toby Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:57:00 GMT

Today a real validation for the Hadoop effort came in the form of Yahoo! announcing that their production search is now running on Hadoop. This should go a long way to allaying others’ concerns about Hadoop’s speed, stability or scalability. Cheers, Yahoo!: You’ve done some excellent work!

Slicehost, FTW 2

Posted by Toby Sun, 17 Feb 2008 01:24:00 GMT

A couple hours ago I moved this blog, my main website and the PhillyLambda homepage over to the Slicehost service. I’ve been a Dreamhost customer since 2002 and back then they were great and cheap. They were great for a while after that, and then they were OK but now they are pretty bad. Routinely, when I SSH into Dreamhost, I see load averages in the double digits (one time it was 135+). Every time I post to this blog, I have to hit Publish and then hit back about 5 times to get it to really commit because the FastCGI keeps snapping between Apache and Rails and throwing up a 500 error. I was getting pretty tired of it all.

So, for just a little bit more money I get my own dedicated VPS where I can run whatever I want. I’d heard really good things about Slicehost for a while so I decided that when I got the time, I’d move my sites over there. I also am using DNS services from Nettica as they were very good to me while I was at Commerce360. Here’s hoping that when I press Publish this time it just does it! ;)

Goodbye, Commerce360 1

Posted by Toby Wed, 13 Feb 2008 06:13:00 GMT

I’ve given my resignation to Commerce360. It just wasn’t the time or the place for me right now. I’m going to take some time now to regroup and evaluate my options. Everyone at Commerce360 was great and I will really miss the people but I feel like this is the best move for me to make. Thanks for the memories, C360!