Back when our team was dealing with operations, optimization and scalability at our previous company, we had our fair share of troubleshooting poorly performing applications and infrastructures of various sizes, often large (think CNN or the World Bank). Tight deadlines, “exotic” technical stacks and lack of information usually made for memorable experiences.
The cause of the issues was rarely obvious: here are a few things we usually got started with.
Tuesday, March 05 2013 @ 05:45 AM CST Contributed by: Linegod
GlusterFS is a distributed file system which is supposed to scale to large storage sizes. Besides file distribution it also offers “RAID” like features: if you have two GlusterFS servers you can either stripe the data on both of them, or mirror them. Or, if you got more servers, you can even create more complex setups with a mixture of striping and mirroring. The client protocol is very similar to NFS, and thus clients can GlusterFS servers via GlusterFS-Fuse or directly via NFS.
Thursday, February 28 2013 @ 04:51 AM CST Contributed by: Linegod
I ordered the new Project Sputnik laptop from Dell to replace my six-year-old MacBook. It’s basically the most-tricked-out version of the XPS 13, running Ubuntu 12.04 instead of Windows 8. I won’t get into why I dislike Apple’s OS, but I run Linux on my desktop and on any server machine I login to, and I enjoy a consistent experience. The most appealing part about Project Sputnik, as opposed to installing Linux on any ol’ Windows laptop (or a MacBook, for that matter), is that it includes a Dell-managed PPA for the hardware. In theory, this means that Dell is committed to making sure that the laptop’s hardware “just works”.
At some point over a decade ago I received my first real Unix account on Northeastern CCS’s computing infrastructure. I realized that my primary method of development — editing files in BBEdit and uploading them via FTP — wouldn’t scale for college-level projects, so I decided to learn how to efficiently edit files on a remote host. I used Pico for a while but became annoyed at its lack of syntax highlighting, so I used the only other editor I remembered bumping into: Vim.
What you can learn from the monster LibreOffice project
Saturday, February 16 2013 @ 08:04 AM CST Contributed by: Linegod
A large legacy code base is a challenge for any team to embrace and improve. So how well does a distributed team of volunteers address the problem?
A talk at FOSDEM shed light on how the large and diverse team assembled by The Document Foundation (TDF) is approaching the huge LibreOffice code base left in the wake of Oracle's withdrawal from OpenOffice.org. The result is not only an impressive sequence of on-time releases, but also a range of development innovation. In particular, the "bi-bisect" technique they've developed could be a great approach for others faced with large, complex code bases.
We are reaching the final run for Mageia 3 release: beta 2 isos are available for tests. This was a real release full of server failures and bugs . Still, the QA team did a fantastic work as usual.
Hairy Tales, the first game fully developed by Arges studio, is an Action/Puzzler built with Unity3D. It is already available for Win/Mac on Desura.
After many requests on Steam Greenlight for a Linux port the developers replied that it's all a matter of upgrading the game engine to version 4, but they are not sure if it's worth the cost.
This project is focused on building up an environment to let anyone write Python apps for the PlayBook and BB10 devices. As of PlayBook OS 2.0, a full Python 3.2 interpreter is included in the system, and is currently accessible to developers. We're building a community framework on top of this runtime to allow the development of complete, "native" PlayBook and BB10 applications using Python!
Since we first proposed systemd for inclusion in the distributions it has been frequently discussed in many forums, mailing lists and conferences. In these discussions one can often hear certain myths about systemd, that are repeated over and over again, but certainly don't gain any truth by constant repetition. Let's take the time to debunk a few of them: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html
Python Scripts as a Replacement for Bash Utility Scripts
Thursday, January 17 2013 @ 06:24 AM CST Contributed by: Linegod
For Linux users, the command line is a celebrated part of our entire experience. Unlike other popular operating systems, where the command line is a scary proposition for all but the most experienced veterans, in the Linux community, command-line use is encouraged. Often the command line can provide a more elegant and efficient solution when compared to doing a similar task with a graphical user interface.
