New server

June 19th, 2007

Finally moved all my sites to a new dedicated server, they should be stable now. Server is located at ThePlanet datacenter and performs thousand times better than previous virtual dedicated at GoDaddy (not mentioning other problems with GoDaddy that I got rid of now). Will start adding new features very soon.

Wiki #2

April 22nd, 2006

Returning to Wiki post, I might choose Wiky, it suits better in my case (example).

( via )

DB2 and VDS

April 15th, 2006

Tried to install and configure IBM DB2 on our virtual dedicated server. It just doesn’t work well - half of operations were aborted due to memory limit. So we’re moving to 1and1 dedicated root server (Fedora Core 4, Plesk 8, 1Gb RAM, unlimited traffic). They have 2Gb RAM option as well, but I don’t think we will really need it soon, even though DB2 is not very lightweight software :)

P.S. DB2 is just fantastic, I’m able to do things that MySQL can only dream of, and it still works fast, despite of the fact that I didn’t set up any indexes yet - except of primary keys in tables.

Web 2.0 Awards

March 31st, 2006

SEOmoz Web 2.0 Awards - Honorable Mention
All three of our websites, Reader², MyFilmz and MyProgs, have received an honorable mention awards from SEOmoz.

DDoS attack on DNS

March 31st, 2006

Several days ago, all our websites were unaccessible from time to time, this problem is fixed now. Here’s the quote from Joker.com, company that we use to register our domains and for DNS support:

A distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) of unknown origin started Monday, 2006-03-20

Upstream providers reported traffic peaks of about 1.3 Gigabits per second on a single line. This was enough to overload our lines, causing communication problems between our border routers and the upstream providers, and thereby interrupting all services for a short period on 2006-03-20

We responded by adding more nameservers, some of them being hosted in external data centers with own DDoS protection. We reserved more bandwidth for Joker.com exlusively, and implemented automatic systems to react on certain incidents.
These measures seem to have helped, since the later attacks did not affect our systems as much as the first one. In the near future, we will do more to protect your domains and our business against such criminal activities.

We know Joker.com as a very reliable service for already 2 years of good work and recommend it highly.

Wiki

March 21st, 2006

I’m thinking about the idea to add personal page to each book author, movie actor and director, and so on (as well as adding a separate comments to all them). The question is - how to implement it? I vote for wiki. Then I need some wiki engine, that I can easily change for my needs - perfect variant would be if it has functions for working with database (database layer) that I can redefine - to use my users info instead of internal usebase, to store data in my database. Or even better - if I can take just the wiki-part (working with separate page, storing history) and use it alone, without all other functions. Does anybody know such wiki engine? Or maybe you have something else to suggest?

[I’ve already built such mini-wiki-engine for eMule Plus forum, but I prefer to use something more powerful if possible]

Update. I’ll probably look into TiddlyWiki first - when I get to this feature at all.

DB2 remark

March 16th, 2006

Auto-increment (as in MySQL) is called Identity in DB2 (value generation parameter). And it wasn’t too easy to find it out…

Copycat

February 28th, 2006

Somebody is trying to copy one of my projects… :D

MySQL

February 21st, 2006

I’m having constant problems with MySQL, it is very slow now, especially when there are dozens of search bots parsing my sites.
I also found it very annoying that simple subqueries take a lot of time to execute - it works about 10 times faster after I separate them and use two queries instead of one, passing the data from first to second via PHP script.
It appears to be a well-known problem for MySQL 4.1 - I’m not sure if that’s still happening with 5.0 version - but I don’t have too much time to make thorough tests, so I’m going to move to PostgreSQL, as it seems to be a much better solution. Right now my database code is not too complex (yet), so it won’t take long.
Any comments?

P.S. I understand that this move also means ideology change - things should be done with stored procedures, foreign keys, triggers and so on - so part of business logic is moving to DB. But actually this is exactly how it should be, IMHO.

Update. I’m seriously thinking about IBM’s DB2

Duplicate entries

February 3rd, 2006

Fixed a problem that caused duplicate data entries being added if you used browser’s back and forward buttons after adding a new book/movie/program to your list.
It was easy, actually :)
Fix: don’t send all those ‘page expired’ headers on the page after POSTDATA has been submitted.