August 25th, 2009
And just as people who run technical companies are reaching an apex of confidence in their ability to invent new forms of community based on sharing everything, craigslist still treats social life as dangerously complex, deserving the most jaded caution. Corporate isolation, user anonymity, refusal of excessive profit, glacial adoption of new features: These all signal Newmark and Buckmaster’s wariness about what humans, including themselves, might do if given the chance. There may be a peace sign on every page, but the implicit political philosophy of craigslist has a deeply conservative, even a tragic cast. Every day the choristers of the social web chirp their advice about openness and trust; craigslist follows none of it, and every day it grows.
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_craigslist
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August 23rd, 2009
Did Charlie write these?

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August 8th, 2009
We love watching pro’s doing their thing on the track or circuit… but there certainly is a fair bit of… less quality footage present on youtube.
Now you can get just the good stuff on RideVids.com:
Road Bikes
Trail Riding
Downhill
Moto-X
Or Watch Adam Riemann training for the Erzberg Enduro and Sam Hill Downhilling. If Trials is more your thing, there’s a category for that also.
RideVids.com – accepts a Youtube link submission from anyone that’s found a noteworthy video relating to bikes / riding / racing… if its quality, it gets posted.
So register an account soon before all the cool names are gone
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August 4th, 2009
A lot is said about PHP and MySQL time storage and formatting. I don’t want to say any of it.
What worked for me was using the DATETIME field in MySQL – which will give me the benefit of running server side time-aware queries.
And converting to a nicely formatted time within PHP.
date('F j, Y, g:i a',strtotime($mysqFieldValue))
Obvious isn’t it….
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March 1st, 2009
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February 26th, 2009
Anyone watching in the past weeks would have noticed the CFA and DSE websites struggle under unusually high load from visitor traffic.
Taken from Tuesday 24th, 2008 Financial Review – “In order to keep this valuable resource online, techies at Google took the CFA’s data and overlaid it onto Google Maps to create a map of the state dotted with coloured balloons showing the location and status of each blaze”
“The number of queries went from two per second to more than 200 per second within less than 24 hours”
If the database server is overloaded because the site is making live queries – that is, queries based on user page-requests, it could easily be resolved by outputting the query data to a static .html file, which is then served to clients by the web server. The query for generating the file could be run as often as every second, giving people ‘to the second’ information which would still only equal 1 query per second on the DB server, an improvement on the the claimed 200 queries per second during the bush fires.
Something like the below code stops the client browser caching any pages, and gets the new version from the server with each request.
header("Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate");
header("Expires: -1");
Now the web server is doing all the hard work, and that is limited to serving static text based content to clients… which is much easier to manage.
Something like this would improve performance assuming the database server and web server are network connected (ie, not both the same box).
Tags: bushfires, database, google, web server
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February 13th, 2009
The poor old Bullit is still going to have to last a few more years yet… as i just cant afford the $5k+ for that shiny Sunday.
The main problems being poor brakes and the play in the rear linkage.
So… wanting the job done this year… i took the Delrin bushing (sits between the inner steel bush and the shock) to John at DCH Engineering in West Melbourne, who machined me up a brand new bush for as little as $20 in a few days. Good as new, no play in the rear linkage. There wouldn’t be any way of getting that problem sorted quicker!

And those 6 year old Hayes really do need an upgrade but… a new disc and set of pads will have to do for now. As long as they lock up, its good enough for me…

Tags: bullit, disk brakes, hayes, santa cruz
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February 5th, 2009
Struggling to see the value of Twitter, it occurred to me how useful can be to anyone wanting or needing regular status updates on a disastrous event like the recent problems at social bookmarker Ma.gnolia. Any members or anyone wanting to get an update on how recovery or status is going, can simply check Ma.gnolia’s Twitter Page to satisfy their urge for up-to-date information.
So perhaps the infamous Miki ticketing system roll out in Melbourne which has hundreds of thousands of punters watching and waiting for the next phase, or a general update on the latest delay… in the absence of promised or expected service, i suppose people appreciate even the most basic information on the issues at hand.
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