MaisonBisson

I have over 1000 posts here at MaisonBisson, but even so, the table with all those posts is under 3MB. Now I’ve got a project with 150,000 posts — yes, 150,000 posts! — and the table is about 500MB. An associated table, structured sort of like WP’s postsmeta, has over 1.5 million records and weighs in at over 100MB (not including the 150MB of indexes).

Up to now I’ve been a “throw more hardware at it” sort of guy — and in a server with only 1GB of RAM, that’s probably the best solution — but I also think it’s time I learned some MySQL optimization tricks. Zach‘s been pushing me to get mytop installed for quite a while, and I finally got around to it.

mytop is a console-based (non-gui) tool for monitoring the threads and overall performance of a MySQL 3.22.x, 3.23.x, and 4.x server. It runs on most Unix systems (including Mac OS X) which have Perl, DBI, and Term::ReadKey installed. And with Term::ANSIColor installed you even get color. If you install Time::HiRes, you’ll get good real-time queries/second stats.

I’m not running it here (only because I’m too lazy), but I was happy to find Arne Brachold’s Del.icio.us – Bookmark this! WordPress Plugin. It puts a sweet Bookmark on del.icio.us link whereever you call this function: <?php dbt_getLinkTag(“Bookmark on del.icio.us”); ?>

Arne also wrote the Google sitemap plugin I use (though it turns out I’m a few versions behind).

Unattributable:

“Poetic justice is a lie. It’s no more real than military inteligence. The entire motivation for poetry is the unjust pain of life.”

Separately, what’s the appropriate LC classification for Scotch? My first thought was around PR600, but what do I know. Should it go elsewhere? What about other spirits?

Mike Evangelist’s look behind the magic curtain of Apple Keynotes during his time with the company.

My inner 13-year-old is cracking up over the notion of a shipwrecked load of toilets in the Mediterranean.

I can’t get Fido, Your Leash Is Too Long, from The Magnetic Fields‘ 69 Love Songs, out of my head. This entry is an attempt to kill this earworm by posting the lyrics. If this doesn’t work I’m checking out Maim That Tune.

Fido, your leash is too long

You go where you don’t belong

You’ve been digging in the rubble

Gettin’ bitches in trouble

Fido, your leash is too long

Fido, your leash is too long

I don’t know where I went wrong

You scare me out of my wits

When you do that Shitzhu

Fido, your leash is too long

Fido, you’ve gone far enough

I must have all of your love

You just run out of luck

I don’t care what you foxhounds

do, but your leash is too long

“The tag cloud is the mullet of the internet.”

Found at phpFlickr. Look closely.

For those people still using Gallery, here’s the last straw: Rasmus Lerdorf got to playing with the Flickr API and quickly wrote up a script to migrate his photos from Gallery to Flickr. He’s didn’t post a script or anything, he’s just saying it’s easy to do.

A lot of things are easy to do, of course, but that doesn’t mean they get done. So it’s probably a great relief to somebody that Paul Baron got on the job. Paul didn’t do any coding, but he posted a rewarding challenge to a Flickr forum, a Flickr member responded (and took home 200 bones for his trouble), and now Paul is sharing the solution with you.

So what’s the holdup now?

My hosting provider sent along the following message:

We have experienced a DDOS attack today January 4th, which resulted in latency across the entire network. During this time your domain, email, ftp and other services may have appeared to be offline, or intermittent. Our techs have been working as quickly as possible to block the attack and get the network back up to speed.

I was relieved to know that the unexpected downtime was the result of something I’d done. The problem, and I can feel for my hosting provider here, is that DDOS attacks aren’t so easy to block (while also leaving the network open enough to be usable), so I wouldn’t be surprised if performance here is rather variable for a while.

Way back near the end of 2005, Lot 49 reported that the Federal Election Commission had basically ruled that bloggers are journalists:

The Federal Election Commission today issued an advisory opinion that finds the Fired Up network of blogs qualifies for the “press exemption” to federal campaign finance laws. The press exemption, as defined by Congress, is meant to assure “the unfettered right of the newspapers, TV networks, and other media to cover and comment on political campaigns.” The full ruling is available at the FEC site. A noteworthy passage: “…an entity otherwise eligible for the press exception would not lose its eligibility merely because of a lack of objectivity…” (emphasis added)

So, yeah, it’s double-edged, I mean that last line is basically the Fox News Channel exemption, but it also gives those bloggers who consider themselves citizen journalists a leg to stand on.

And the folks in that camp should be happy to have the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s help. As Donna Wentworth says, Bloggers: You Have a Right to Remain Vocal.

Update: bugfix release b2v6 available.

WordPress 2.0 is out and available for download now. I don’t know how the development team did it — I mean with the holidays and all — but here it is. And now I have to admit that I haven’t even played with the betas, so I’ve got no clue how bsuite works with the big 2.0. For all I know it works just fine, or it drops all your tables and sends your browser history to your mother, so please take caution.

But WP2 has a lot of things I want too, so I’ll be checking things out and making any necessary changes to bsuite as soon as possible.