Month: March 2008

3 articles on Building Internet Services

I’ve come across 3 great articles this week on best practice for building
Internet based Services.

*First* up [Simon Wilson](http://simonwillison.net/) gives a good overview
of what web orientated developers should be doing these days. As he says
“I tried to pull together all of the things I wish I’d been told before I
started building things on the Web”:

The slides are a good overview of the main areas of web engineering that have
changed in the last few years and what the current best practices are. Worth
a skim though and a subsequent Google if you find gaps in your knowledge. Simon
is a [Django](http://www.djangoproject.com/) developer so he references that
project a bit.

*Next* [Greg Linden](http://glinden.blogspot.com/) has
[a post](http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/03/designing-for-internet-scale.html) pointing
to and commenting on a [James Hamilton](http://research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh/)’s LISA
paper “On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services” ( [PDF here](http://research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh/TalksAndPapers/JamesRH_Lisa.pdf) ).

I’d advise reading James’ paper first and then Greg’s comments, both are useful. I was
also looking at some other papers on [James’ site](http://research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh/) including
[this related presentation](http://research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh/TalksAndPapers/JamesRH_AmazonDev.pdf) and on Modular Data Center design. James’s
[Blog](http://perspectives.mvdirona.com) looks interesting as well.

*Finally* the Yahoo! [Exceptional Performance](http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/) people
have added another 20 rules to the existing 14 on how to speed up customer access
to you website:

NOTE: Slideshare seems to be allowing the document to be viewed but not
downloaded right now, I grabbed a copy previously ( 3 MB .ppt) if anyone wants a copy).

Currently I’m still looking at the original 14 rules for ideas, [CSS Sprites](http://www.alistapart.com/articles/sprites) look
especially interesting and a big potential win.

END

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New Disk

It’s been three weeks since my last blog entry ( I aim to do at least one per
week) so I thought I’d best post something.

The main news is that I have left Telecom ( after 3.5 years ) and have been at a new
job for the lat two weeks. The new job is part of a small team ( approx 5
people ) which look after the servers (and some other equipment) for one of
New Zealand’s top 10 websites.

Things have been pretty busy as I’ve had to get up to speed on the environment
fast since one of the other guys is on leave for 4 weeks but learning the
technology has been interesting. Things also move a *lot* quicker than they did
at Telecom.

Technology wise I’ve been playing around a little bit with the [nginx](http://nginx.net/)
webserver for possible serving static content. Especially the [Mirror on Demand](http://hostingfu.com/article/nginx-and-mirror-demand)
concept looks pretty cool for syncing multiple servers.

I also had a bit of fun today getting a new 750GB Hard drive working. Because
my old machine doesn’t have any SATA ports I’m using a [SiI3114 – PCI to 4 Port SATA Card](http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?id=28)
to access the disks. However it didn’t recognise my new drive because it was too big.

A bit of googling around and found I had to flash the card’s bios to a new version
in order for it to recognise the drive. It took me a couple of goes since the
bios update programs only work for Windows or DOS so I have to boot into
[FreeDOS](http://www.freedos.org) but all working now:

# df -H /media/disk1
Filesystem             Size   Used  Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1              739G   207M   739G   1% /media/disk1

Useful links:

* [George Pantazis explains the problem and suggests using FreeDOS](http://ssh-lroot.blogspot.com/2007/10/sil-3114-add-on-card-bios-update.html)
* [The BIOS Update Utility and IOS images](http://www.siliconimage.com/support/supportsearchresults.aspx?pid=28&cid=15&ctid=2&)
* [A good article on how to create the FreeDOS boot image with the utility on it](http://www.linuxinsight.com/how-to-flash-motherboard-bios-from-linux-no-dos-windows-no-floppy-drive.html)

Anyway time to head to bed. I have to get up at 7am these days to get into work
and my sleep patterns are still adjusting. The good news is that I’m actually starting
to get through my TODO list and I’m only a little behind in my email.
END

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