Until recently I worked for a small local company with < 50 staff. We used Qmail, and Exim for mail handling.
Then we got bought by another company. The new owners immediately ripped out our mail server (working wonderfully for years) and installed a whole new set of Windows based infrastructure to match their "Corporate standards".
Now we have Lotus Notes running away in a corner. Sure it's pretty nice in some respects, but a lot of staff hated the change from their mail client (mostly Eudora) to Notes. It didn't seem like money was an object though. Brand new Dell machines were provided and dropped in to host the Domino server.
Previously simple jobs like restarting the mailserver, scanning for viruses, now take much longer and require additional ongoing expenses. Still at least we match the Corporate Standard Platform... *sigh*
I'd rather have Exchange (5.0) than Notes personally..
If you need High Availability (ie: almost, but not quite, 100% uptime) then you want two or more boxes which you can either load-balance between (dropping crashed servers from the list)
And using software such as Pound that can be setup fairly easily. Of course if you're running a massive site like/. you might be better off with a hardware load balancer.
But Pound can be used to easily pool a collection of back-end hosts, and avoid forwarding connections if one of them dies. It will even take care of maintaining state if you need that.
Dark Angel was listed as #19 which I thought was a reasonable enough placement given the other rankings present. That was a show I loved, it was a shame it was cancelled and didn't really complete the story...
Like many I thought the list was bogus, and gave too many high ratings to "current" shows, eg. BSG / Atlantis.
Still it was a fun reminder of series I used to watch. Funnily enough I was only watching a rip of Thundercats last night!
Yeah I realised after I posted the link that I'd been too quick. I should have added that to the list.
I guess the points do apply to other environments generally, thinks like "write tests", and "use source control". It is just presented as a perl piece, with the sample code to match.
Short article by the same author
on
Perl Best Practices
·
· Score: 3, Informative
In a similar vein there was a recent article by the same author printed on perl.com:
I rarely touch PHP, because I write most of my code in Perl. So feel free to hold that in mind..
That said I've found some nice PHP code, and some bad. I think that PHP suffers a lot from people who are new to coding in general writing bad code. I don't believe this is a problem specific to PHP coders, there is a lot of generalisation which goes on "Perl is unreadable", "PHP is insecure", etc..
My biggest gripe with PHP is the inconsistent function naming. (eg. "stream_get_line" vs "readline", or "strip_tags" vs "stripslashes").
For somebody who uses PHP a lot this is probably something you just learn, but for me as an occasional PHP programmer it bites me almost every time I have to make significant changes - I find that I have to refer to the documentation far more than I'd like, and far more than I would in Perl/C/C++/Java.
Another minor gripe is the way that no two PHP installations are the same. Because functions can be disabled, or restricted, in the php.ini file you can't assume that two servers with the same version of Apache + PHP will behave in the same way. Ditto for PHP extensions.
Sure if the license fee hadn't previously existed then the shows wouldn't have been made in the same way.
But I can rationalise that away becasue I've been paying the license fee for the past 10+ years, and only recently stopped watching actual new content of theirs.
I think you're probably right overall, I'm probably whining a little bit too much.
(Glad you like the site, I've been pleased with the way its been growing. It even managed to stand up to two slashdottings:)
I don't think many people could convincingly argue that the BBC doesn't produce an enormous range of programs, and services.
But I do personally object to the license fee. As things stand I currently own a TV which I use for watching DVDs almost exclusively.
Despite this I have to pay the mandatory BBC-tax every year, just because I own a television.
I would love to see the TV license changed to a BBC license, and would happily have my set neutered if it meant that I didn't have to pay.
At the moment I watch a lot of BBC produced content on DVD, which I've paid for (Red Dwarf, Faulty Towers, Monty Python, etc, etc), and it irks me that I must give them more money every year for little obvious benefit.
Sure I'm listening to their radio station, and watching their website - but so are thousands of other people in foreign countries (with things like the BBC World Service) who don't have to pay this tax.
A while back I was looking for a CMS to run a slashdot-like site, and whilst I was pretty sure I'd not need the complexity of the full slash codebase I decided not to use it partially on the grounds that the slashcode website looked so "dead".
(I'm sure that the CVS repository, and mailing lists are alive; but it's not a thing to instill confidence in potential adoptors).
How does one get into the web of trust? Google (my city) key signing doesn't seem to produce any relevant results.
You could do worse than look for a local Debian Developer - they are often willing to do keysignings.
Plus they are often well-connected in terms of trust.
Failing that if you have a local LUG, or similar you could try posting.
(As for BigLumber; I've had results with them. I've registered and never approached anybody. But three or four people have got in touch over the past couple of years to say they were "visiting the area" and we've exchanged signatures).
Since it is Debian you're talking about I'd be interesteding in publishing your description on my site too, if you don't have any exclusive AnandTech relationship.
This should gain you increased security because it means that a password hash is "MD5(salt+password)" - and the hash isn't known.
However it doesn't gain you much if your database is compromised and all the salt's can be stolen. Although you say the salt "cannot be secret" I don't see that, it should be purely used internally...
(On plus is that multiple users with the same password will have a different hash in the database).
In short you modify all the parts of your code that fetch from the database to first check from the memory cache - and when storing invalidate the cache. In general most sites read data more than they write it so most of your accesses come from the cache - thus reducing the load upon your DB.
If you don't want to modify your code you could look at optimizing the setup of the database server, moving it, setting up replication, etc.
Still without more details it is hard to know what to suggest.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect you are right.
Until recently I worked for a small local company with < 50 staff. We used Qmail, and Exim for mail handling.
Then we got bought by another company. The new owners immediately ripped out our mail server (working wonderfully for years) and installed a whole new set of Windows based infrastructure to match their "Corporate standards".
Now we have Lotus Notes running away in a corner. Sure it's pretty nice in some respects, but a lot of staff hated the change from their mail client (mostly Eudora) to Notes. It didn't seem like money was an object though. Brand new Dell machines were provided and dropped in to host the Domino server.
Previously simple jobs like restarting the mailserver, scanning for viruses, now take much longer and require additional ongoing expenses. Still at least we match the Corporate Standard Platform ... *sigh*
I'd rather have Exchange (5.0) than Notes personally ..
And using software such as Pound that can be setup fairly easily. Of course if you're running a massive site like /. you might be better off with a hardware load balancer.
But Pound can be used to easily pool a collection of back-end hosts, and avoid forwarding connections if one of them dies. It will even take care of maintaining state if you need that.
Dark Angel was listed as #19 which I thought was a reasonable enough placement given the other rankings present. That was a show I loved, it was a shame it was cancelled and didn't really complete the story...
Like many I thought the list was bogus, and gave too many high ratings to "current" shows, eg. BSG / Atlantis.
Still it was a fun reminder of series I used to watch. Funnily enough I was only watching a rip of Thundercats last night!
And if you're not running KDE you can still do the same thing (mounting filesystems over SSH) which will work in all applications:
Very useful.
I guess this explains why they felt so comfortable giving away registration codes for their 10th anniversary.
I'd imagine that was planned, partly to see how much demand there was for the browser if it were free.
Personally I use Firefox 99% of the time, but I have taken the time to test sites in Opera in the past.
Or the Wiki After Dark?
That contains some funny pages, I remember visiting it by accident once via a google search...
Yeah I realised after I posted the link that I'd been too quick. I should have added that to the list.
I guess the points do apply to other environments generally, thinks like "write tests", and "use source control". It is just presented as a perl piece, with the sample code to match.
In a similar vein there was a recent article by the same author printed on perl.com:
It is always nice to see more gnump3d users around :)
A new release came out earlier this week - upgrade now if you've not done so already ..
I rarely touch PHP, because I write most of my code in Perl. So feel free to hold that in mind ..
That said I've found some nice PHP code, and some bad. I think that PHP suffers a lot from people who are new to coding in general writing bad code. I don't believe this is a problem specific to PHP coders, there is a lot of generalisation which goes on "Perl is unreadable", "PHP is insecure", etc..
My biggest gripe with PHP is the inconsistent function naming. (eg. "stream_get_line" vs "readline", or "strip_tags" vs "stripslashes").
For somebody who uses PHP a lot this is probably something you just learn, but for me as an occasional PHP programmer it bites me almost every time I have to make significant changes - I find that I have to refer to the documentation far more than I'd like, and far more than I would in Perl/C/C++/Java.
Another minor gripe is the way that no two PHP installations are the same. Because functions can be disabled, or restricted, in the php.ini file you can't assume that two servers with the same version of Apache + PHP will behave in the same way. Ditto for PHP extensions.
Sure if the license fee hadn't previously existed then the shows wouldn't have been made in the same way.
But I can rationalise that away becasue I've been paying the license fee for the past 10+ years, and only recently stopped watching actual new content of theirs.
I think you're probably right overall, I'm probably whining a little bit too much.
(Glad you like the site, I've been pleased with the way its been growing. It even managed to stand up to two slashdottings :)
I don't think many people could convincingly argue that the BBC doesn't produce an enormous range of programs, and services.
But I do personally object to the license fee. As things stand I currently own a TV which I use for watching DVDs almost exclusively.
Despite this I have to pay the mandatory BBC-tax every year, just because I own a television.
I would love to see the TV license changed to a BBC license, and would happily have my set neutered if it meant that I didn't have to pay.
At the moment I watch a lot of BBC produced content on DVD, which I've paid for (Red Dwarf, Faulty Towers, Monty Python, etc, etc), and it irks me that I must give them more money every year for little obvious benefit.
Sure I'm listening to their radio station, and watching their website - but so are thousands of other people in foreign countries (with things like the BBC World Service) who don't have to pay this tax.
More information would help, such as what language/environment you used to develop your game.
Since you've not given much details why not look at this previous ask slashdot:
(A previous discussion about finding a porter for a Windows game).
It is a shame that slashcode doesn't seem to update its website very often.
e.g. Googles cache of the front page shows the most recent front-page story dated December 20th 2004!
A while back I was looking for a CMS to run a slashdot-like site, and whilst I was pretty sure I'd not need the complexity of the full slash codebase I decided not to use it partially on the grounds that the slashcode website looked so "dead".
(I'm sure that the CVS repository, and mailing lists are alive; but it's not a thing to instill confidence in potential adoptors).
Upside down.
In a mirror.
After warming up.
Isn't progress great?
I love my phone. It only has one "needless addon", the camera.
Sure the quality of the camera isn't great, but what makes it useful is that I suddenly have the ability to take pictures everywhere.
This was also covered on groklaw, yesterday.
You could do worse than look for a local Debian Developer - they are often willing to do keysignings.
Plus they are often well-connected in terms of trust.
Failing that if you have a local LUG, or similar you could try posting.
(As for BigLumber; I've had results with them. I've registered and never approached anybody. But three or four people have got in touch over the past couple of years to say they were "visiting the area" and we've exchanged signatures).
Since it is Debian you're talking about I'd be interesteding in publishing your description on my site too, if you don't have any exclusive AnandTech relationship.
Site details in .sig.
You can also cache the database queries if you're happy to mess with code.
This introduction to memcached shows an overview; using memcached - used by /., Livejournal, etc.
Deliberately misspelling asinine? That's just asinine.
I can so identify with that imagining one.
I had to install fourty Windows XP desktops, so I figured I'd do something similar.
Installing the drives in a host machine and using Knoppix to do the dd.
The golden master was perfect, had all our applications installed on it, was setup with sysprep so I could patch up the IDs afterwards.
All in all I reckon I spent a day on that machine, getting all the fixes, and software configured.
Then I blew it away by getting the disks hooked up badly.
The next time I did it I didn't spend as long on the "golden image", but the copies worked out well enough in the end.
You're right you're storing the extra "salt" in the database, kinda like this:
username VARCHAR( 16 )salt VARCHAR( 2 )
password VARCHAR( 32 );
This should gain you increased security because it means that a password hash is "MD5(salt+password)" - and the hash isn't known.
However it doesn't gain you much if your database is compromised and all the salt's can be stolen. Although you say the salt "cannot be secret" I don't see that, it should be purely used internally...
(On plus is that multiple users with the same password will have a different hash in the database).
It's funny but I'd already heard about this because I've received spam trying to sell me crocodile related cures.
There is at least one chain of spam circulating using this research from the BBC of all places to back their claims.
Pretty much, yes.
Here's an introduction to memcached I wrote which might explain it for you.
In short you modify all the parts of your code that fetch from the database to first check from the memory cache - and when storing invalidate the cache. In general most sites read data more than they write it so most of your accesses come from the cache - thus reducing the load upon your DB.
If you don't want to modify your code you could look at optimizing the setup of the database server, moving it, setting up replication, etc.
Still without more details it is hard to know what to suggest.
Qemu is simple to use, and something I've fallen in love with since discovering.
(Although I admit I have never tried VMWare)