Jun
16
Database sharding unraveled - part III
Filed Under MySQL, Programming, Scalability tools | 8 Comments
Before continuing, please read the first parts of the database sharding adventure:
Database sharding unraveled - part I
Database sharding unraveled - part II
Chapter 1. The small guys
Before really diving into high scalability principles, I want to take a moment to talk about why database sharding has an important role even in small startups or medium sized web-sites (5 - 30k unique visitors/day).
It is equally important and benefic for a smaller web business to prepare itself from the beginning to tackle large amounts of users cheap. If it’s not obvious enough, think about what happens to a web-page that gets some plain old Digg attention. The server quickly collapses and the user experience immediately turns from positive to mega negative.
As I’ve explained before, the whole purpose of sharding is to be able to use an unlimited number of cheap machines topped by an open-source database. As experience taught me, the web server will rarely die. Instead, the DB server will choke easily when having to deal with many simultaneous connections.
The database doesn’t even have to be very big.
May
29
Cool trick to extract only what you need using regular expressions
Filed Under JavaScript, PHP, Programming | Leave a Comment
I have a lot of article drafts sitting unused in my WP DB and I’ve decided to release them even though I don’t have very much time to get into details.
Here’s one of them.
I always comment the code I write like:
// Bogdan -> initializing dispatcher $this->dispatcher->init(); //-
Very often I’m required to extract the parts of the code I wrote, even though they are not full functions or classes, but just simple variables, or…
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May
24
Symfony quickies 1
Filed Under Programming, Symfony | 2 Comments
When issuing symfony-propel-build-model and using sfGuardPlugin, some errors might appear.
Error: Attempt to set foreign key to nonexistent table, sf_guard_user!
Solution: The solution is very simple and involves changing the name of the database in the schema.xml to propel. Don’t worry, the database name will remain the one set in propel.ini, this is just to leverage the different xml files so that foreign keys can be processed.
The whole line should be:
<database name="propel" defaultIdMethod="native" noxsd="true" package="lib.model">
If that doesn’t work, try changing the package from lib.model to plugins.sfGuardPlugin.lib.model (not recommended but if it does the work, why not…;)).
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May
21
Is SEO going to die?
Filed Under WEB 2.0 | Leave a Comment
These days there’s a lot of talk about the slow but steady decrease in importance of the whole SEO phenomenon in the search engine world. So, the question on everyone’s lips is: Is SEO going to die?
The answer, no.
The discussion must first start with spam, because that’s the main reason why something needed to change. Search engines play a key role in a site’s traffic and that implies that Google’s or Yahoo’s or …’s job is to continuously try to give the user the best results possible. The strategy they were relying on was to measure the number of links and also the quantity and quality of keywords, but all these can be easily faked. There are tons of Black-Hat techniques out there (if you’re really looking for hardcore dummy content, checkout website generators and stuff like that), but that’s beyond the purpose of this analysis. Read more
May
7
IE Object required error and other common coding mistakes
Filed Under JavaScript, Programming | Leave a Comment
Been having a lot of work on customizing Dokeos for a client, so didn’t really have any spare time to write. 
This post is about common mistakes or overlooks when developing RIAs with JavaScript.
First of all, something to always keep in mind when working with Internet Explorer: it will never ever act like you wish from the first time.
Pay extra attention especially when dealing with DOM elements, as it tends to throw errors that FF doesn’t - I’m not talking about the fact that IE is not DOM compliant and methods that work in Mozilla family browsers don’t exist in IE or have different names.
Here’s a list of things to remember:
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