Tech News
by Aldo Armiento- all
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Cache Miss Storm
I worked on the problem recently which showed itself as rather low MySQL load (probably 5% CPU usage and close to zero IO) would spike to have hundreds instances of threads running at the same time, causing intense utilization spike and server very…
iOS 4.1 restores limited Field Test mode
In older versions of the iPhone OS software, it was possible to enter Field Test mode to get a lot of useful data about the cellular connection. This capability was removed in iOS 4.0, and caused some angst while trying to examine the iPhone 4 antenna…
Windows and Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) builds
Windows and Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) daily builds of BlueGriffon are now available monday-friday at 1pm french local time here. Build and push to the web site are automated so it will never be guaranteed that builds are fully functional or even don't crash…
GNU Parallel 20100906 released
GNU Parallel 20100906 has been released. It is available for download at: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parallel/ New in this release: * Using --shebang GNU Parallel can be used as the parser for a script. E.g: #!/usr/bin/parallel --shebang traceroute…
iTerm 2 in early development
Power users of the command-line are no doubt familiar with iTerm, the free replacement terminal application. iTerm has been the go-to alternative for people who wanted tabbed windows and other advanced features. Development of iTerm has been fairly slow…
Set up your own Priority Inbox with Apple's Mail
Last month, Google released Priority Inbox, a system that learns which messages are the most important to you and highlights them automatically over time. It's in beta right now and Google is slowly turning it on for its users. If you're tired of waiting,…
How long Innodb Shutdown may take
How long it may take MySQL with Innodb tables to shut down ? It can be quite a while. In default configuration innodb_fast_shutdown=ON the main job Innodb has to do to complete shutdown is flushing dirty buffers. The number of dirty buffers in the…
Introducing tcprstat, a TCP response time tool
Ignacio Nin and I (mostly Ignacio) have worked together to create tcprstat[1], a new tool that times TCP requests and prints out statistics on them. The output looks somewhat like vmstat or iostat, but we’ve chosen the statistics carefully so you can…
iPhone App In App Store Limbo Open Sourced
recoiledsnake writes "The author of iPhone prototyping tool Briefs has decided to open source it after the App store submission has been in limbo for over three months. The app had got into trouble for what Apple believes is being able to run interpreted…
Firefox 4: HTTP Strict Transport Security (force HTTPS)
This article is about a new HTTPS header: Strict-Transport-Security, which force a website to be fetched through HTTPS. This feature will be part of Firefox 4. How do you type URLs? Do you prefix them with http:// or https:// systematically? Or do you…
Mac indie dev asks The Pirate Bay to keep a torrent of his software
As a software developer myself, I know how hard it is to see your product being ripped off. We have recently reported on how even $2 iPhone games (like Stardunk) or iPad games (like Aqua Globs HD) are not immune despite their low cost and closed platforms.…
HTML Timing
{ No ducks were harmed in the making of this weblog. } I’ve just been hired by INRIA to develop a Mozilla-based, multimedia-dedicated, web authoring tool. I’m working in a team that has been very active in the SVG and SMIL working groups and that has…
Mail.app plugin for bottom posting of reply text
The QuoteFix plugin for Mail.app formats your email reply for bottom posting. It puts the original message on top of your reply and sets the cursor between the original message and your signature. Mail's default action in to place the reply text at the top…
CSS Units Changes Landed
The CSS units changes that I blogged about in January have landed and will be in the next Firefox milestone. With these changes, 1in = 96px always. Likewise 3pt = 4px, 25.4mm = 96px, etc. This matches the behaviour of Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome.…
Video+html5+Popcorn.js=hyper-video
You may have seen that Brett Gaylor is joining Mozilla (see also Mark Surman's post). For those who don't know Brett, he's particularly famous for his "Open Source documentary" Rip! A remix Manifesto[1]. One may ask why Mozilla has hired a film…
Safari extension highlight: Awesome Screenshot
With the addition of the Safari Extensions Gallery to Apple's website, TUAW will be highlighting extensions that we think are special, useful, or just plain fun. Today's featured extension is Awesome Screenshot which lets you capture, annotate and share…
Simplify CSS 3 With Online Code Generators
New advancements have made cascading style sheets much more powerful than they once were, but remembering all the new forms of syntax can be overwhelming. Sometimes, it’s simpler to let an automated tool do the hard work for you.
Facebook adds geolocation, check-ins to iPhone and Web apps
Facebook has finally joined the rest of the social media world by announcing "Places," a feature that lets users "check in" to a geographical location and broadcast that info to friends. Made for use with mobile devices, Places also allows users to…
NGMoviePlayer - AVFoundation-based video player
I put up on bitbucket NGMoviePlayer — it uses AVFoundation to play movies. It does some of what MPMoviePlayerControllerView does. (I had to write a custom movie player because of a bug in iOS 4 where after you play a movie that’s embedded in a UIWebView,…
Google Geolocation API
I found today the API documentation to use http://www.google.com/loc/json in order to get a location from the seen wifi APs or GSM/CDMA cells. It is very easy to use: $ curl -X POST -d '{ "version": "1.1.0", "host": "perdu.com", …
Cache On Delivery — Memcached Opens an Accidental Security Hole
jamie spotted this eye-opening presentation (here's a longer explanation) about how easy it is to access sensitive data on many sites using memcached, writing "If you already know what memcached is, skim to slide #17. The jaw-drop will happen around slide…
Joachim Breitner: ipatch, the interactive patch editor
As a Debian maintainer, I often work with patches (files listing changes to text files), for example when tracking the modification I make to some software before I upload the package to Debian. To manage these patches, quilt is a nice tool: It helps you…
Caching could be the last thing you want to do
I recently had a run-in with a very popular PHP ecommerce package which makes me want to voice a recurring mistake I see in how many web applications are architected. What is that mistake? The ecommerce package I was working with depended on caching. …
Breeze: another fresh take on window management
Filed under: Software We've covered a surprising number of innovative Mac utilities for easily positioning windows, from MercuryMover to SizeUp and, most recently, Divvy. Well, a new one, Breeze, is taking yet another look at the task of window management.…
Estimating Replication Capacity
It is easy for MySQL replication to become bottleneck when Master server is not seriously loaded and the more cores and hard drives the get the larger the difference becomes, as long as replication remains single thread process. At the same time it is a…
Time Machine: Mount backup disk on demand
It is both inconvenient and less safe to keep backup volumes mounted when not in use. A mounted volume is more prone to corruption, and open file dialogs needlessly spin up mounted volumes, contributing to a user experience latency that is most apparent if…
Deeper understanding with Metaweb
Hey—we've moved. Visit The Keyword for all the latest news and stories from Google Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture Over time we’ve improved search by deepening our understanding of queries and web pages. The…
DasBoot 2.0 now supports Snow Leopard
Another valuable free utility has gained Snow Leopard support, with the release of DasBoot 2.0. This is a tool for making custom boot devices from a USB flash drive or other USB or FireWire media, including an iPod. It can import a variety of diagnostic…
Use Chrome like a pro
Hey—we've moved. Visit The Keyword for all the latest news and stories from Google Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture This week I sent a note to Googlers about some of the Chrome team's favorite extensions. So…
Scaling: Consider both Size and Load
So lets imagine you have the server handling 100.000 user accounts. You can see the CPU,IO and Network usage is below 10% of capacity – does it mean you can count on server being able to handle 1.000.000 of accounts ? Not really, and there are few…
Using Quick Look from the Command Line
Sometimes you need to Quick Look a file, but you're in Terminal or iTerm or something. If you're dealing with images, you want to see them before you do anything. But you don't want to use the open command. That's where qlmanage comes in.qlmanage is a CLI…
AppleJack 1.6 for Snow Leopard
AppleJack has been updated to work with Snow Leopard with the release of version 1.6. In a nutshell, AppleJack is a command-line utility and series of scripts for running repair tasks in Single User Mode when a bootable startup disc in not available. It's…
DasBoot 2.0 gains bootable Snow Leopard support
This freeware utility for creating a powerful troubleshooting drive gets a major upgrade that supports 10.6 Snow Leopard and Apple's latest Intel Macs.
Query Response time histogram – new feature in Percona Server
Recently we had couple posts dedicated to performance monitoring, i.e. Color code your performance numbers, Performance Optimization and Six Sigma, so you may understand we consider stability of performance numbers as one of important area for database…
High availability for MySQL on Amazon EC2 – Part 3 – Configuring the HA resources
This post is the third of a series that started here. From the previous of this series, we now have two working EC2 instances that are EBS based. The first instance is the monitor, usually an m1.small type instance and the second instance is hamysql, a…
mk-query-digest, query comments and the query cache
I very much like the fact that MySQL allows you to embed comments into SQL statements. These comments are extremely convenient, because they are written into MySQL log files as part of the query. This includes the general log, the binary log and the slow…
devsugar: Understanding iPhone 4 backgrounding
Filed under: Developer If you're looking for a simple and easy-to-follow introduction to iPhone 4's new backgrounding abilities, head on over to Oliver Drobnik's weblog and check out his latest write-up. You'll find a lovingly crafted graphic that walks…
How is join_buffer_size allocated?
When examining MySQL configuration, we quite often want to know how various buffer sizes are used. This matters because some buffers (sort_buffer_size for example) are allocated to their full size immediately as soon as they are needed, but others are…
Francois Marier: Querying deleted content in git
If you have removed a file (or part of a file) from git, it's not immediately obvious how to query its history. Here are two ways to deal with deleted content in git. If we take the following two files: $ ls file1 file2 and then decide to delete one…
SQLite’s WAL, deleting a domain specific index
SQLite is working on WAL, which stands for Write Ahead Logging. The new logging technique means that we can probably keep read statements open for multiple processes. It’s not full MVCC yet as writes are still not doable simultaneously. But in our use…
XULRunner in large projects, part 1: What is that "XULRunner" thingy, anyway?
I applied to lead a session on XULRunner in large software projects at the Mozilla Summit. Unfortunately, that proposal was rejected, no talk for me at the summit. Yet there is apparently some interest in the topic, I got messages from two people who won’t…
Working on domain specific indexes
So … what is involved in a “simple change” like what I wrote about yesterday? First you add support for annotating the domain specific index in the ontology files. This is straight forward as we of course have a generic Turtle parser, and it’s just a…
Develop your Finder search savvy
Do you know the difference between Command-F and Command-Shift-F? How you start a Finder search affects what options you see. Learn the differences, and start your searches off on the right foot every time.
Rolling back your iPhone 3G to OS 3.1.3
You've updated your iPhone 3G to iOS 4 and it's reeeeeaaally slow. Here are steps for rolling it back to OS 3.1.3.
Domain specific indexes
We store our data in a decomposed way. For single value properties we create a table per class and have a column per property. Multi value properties go in a separate table. For now I’ll focus on those single value properties. Imagine you have a…
Icons and World Clock created with CSS3 magic, courtesy of Webkit
Filed under: Graphic Design Recent versions of Webkit, the browser engine that Safari and Chrome are based on, have allowed for extensive use of CSS3, as well as some proprietary CSS tricks. The result has been some very innovative art created entirely…
High availability for MySQL on Amazon EC2 – Part 2 – Setting up the initial instances
This post is the second of a series that started here. The first step to build the HA solution is to create two working instances, configure them to be EBS based and create a security group for them. A third instance, the client, will be discussed in…
Facilisi releases custom Pages templates for iPad
A Hong Kong-based firm has released a suite of templates designed specifically for use with the iPad version of Apple's word processing app.
Petter Reinholdtsen: LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI
The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI tool to browse the LDAP tree. The only one I was able to find in Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is LUMA, which has proved to…
Filippo Giunchedi: using git-svn with rsync
From time to time I find myself using git-svn with projects using subversion, this is all nice and fine but it takes quite some time to do the ''initial import'' if you are doing it over a remote transport such as ssh+svn. One trick to speed things up is…
How I Manage Memory
I’ve noticed, in looking at other people’s Cocoa code over the years, that sometimes people still do weird things with retain, release, and autorelease — as if they’re not quite sure on the basics of memory management yet. So I thought I’d talk about how I…
Review: Stanza for iPhone and iPad
Now available as a native app on the iPad as well as the iPhone, Stanza certainly differs from other e-readers out there -- most notably Kindle and iBooks. While the app has some minor flaws, it still offers a pleasant reading experience.
Spotlight on iOS 4: The hidden features
Steve Jobs's keynotes and Apple's product pages have a finite amount of space with which to tout what's new in iOS 4. These are the new features and polish that didn't make the cut, but may still make someone's day.
HTML5 adoption stories: box.net and html5 drag and drop
This is a guest post from Tomas Barreto, a developer who works at box.net. They recently adopted HTML5 drag and drop as a way to share files with other people using new features in Firefox. The included video is a pitch for the feature and service, but…
New Frameworks Give Mobile-Web Apps a Boost
The App Store and the Android marketplace are attractive lures for developers, but apps built to run on the mobile web can still impress. We take a look at the best frameworks available for mobile-web developers.
EXPLAIN EXTENDED can tell you all kinds of interesting things
While many people are familiar with the MySQL EXPLAIN command, fewer people are familiar with “extended explain” which was added in MySQL 4.1 EXPLAIN EXTENDED can show you what the MySQL optimizer does to your query. You might not know this, but MySQL…
Designing for a More Readable Web
Want to keep people from firing up Safari Reader on your website? Learn some design best practices from the pros for formatting your pages for maximum readability on tablets, phones and on the good ol' desktop.
Animation with CSS Transitions Made Easy
There are currently two proposed additions to CSS to make animating easier and with better performance: CSS Transitions and CSS Animations. Both are unfortunately named. The later is complicated, overkill, and probably won’t be supported by non-Webkit…
Auto updates of the nightly builds of browsers
It's quite a hassle having to download and install a new version of three or four browsers every day -- one-click auto-update and launch to the rescue! Lately the different browsers have been adding support for the new features of HTML5/CSS3/etc at a very…
Safari 5 tested: Chrome, Opera still have JavaScript edge
Apple released the latest major version of its Web browser, Safari 5, earlier this week. Along with several new features—one of them somewhat controversial—the update was said to pack a number of performance improvements, including DNS pre-fetching and…
Reasons for run-away main Innodb Tablespace
So you’re running MySQL With innodb_file_per_table option but your ibdata1 file which holds main (or system) tablespace have grown dramatically from its starting 10MB size. What could be the reason of this growth and what you can do about it ? There are…
New LLVM Debugger Subproject Already Faster Than GDB
kthreadd writes "The LLVM project is now working on a debugger called LLDB that's already faster than GDB and could be a possible alternative in the future for C, C++, and Objective-C developers. With the ongoing success of Clang and other LLVM…
Our new search index: Caffeine
Hey—we've moved. Visit The Keyword for all the latest news and stories from Google Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture Today, we're announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine.…
Hacked iPhone Runs Android 2.2
A hack shows how to run the latest version of Google's mobile OS on Apple's iPhone 3G.
Removing Firefox’s Status Bar and Rehousing Add-on Icons (Part 2 of 2)
Recently, I wrote about Firefox’s status bar and how we’d love to remove it, relocate its functionality, and dedicate that area back to page content. Though many add-ons currently place icons in the status bar, these icons could be displayed elsewhere in…
One Video Card, 12 Monitors
Jamie found a story that might make your jaw drop if you happen to have some need to put 12 video cards in your machine. Although if that isn't enough, you can always install two of these. I don't think I'm kidding. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Native ZFS Port for Linux (OSNews)
OSNews is reporting that employees at the Lawrence Livermore (US) National Laboratory have ported Sun/Oracle's ZFS filesystem to Linux. The kernel module is distributed in source form to work around the licensing incompatibility between the CDDL and GPL.…
BSSAXTweetParserDemo
I had reason to look at MGTwitterEngine today. It had been a while since I looked at it, and I was reminded that the libxml-based parser in there was originally based on my BSTweetParser from a couple years ago. (Folks did a real nice job of improving it,…
My first iPhone app
I am proud to introduce my first iPhone App built entirely using standard HTML5 technologies. I felt that I had to go with HTML 5 as I did not want to write the app once for the iPhone and once for the Android. I am also open sourcing this application in…
Live Chat: Celebrate the worldPad with TUAW
Filed under: iPad Did you felt left out in April when the iPad hit the US? Well, we at TUAW haven't forgotten you! Please join us today as we discuss all things iPad as Apple's latest gadget goes global. Welcome to our World Wide iPad chat! If you've…
TUAW's Daily App: RunMonster
Filed under: iPhone, App Store There are quite a few "run tracker" apps in the App Store (I know our own Erica Sadun is a big fan of RunKeeper). However, RunMonster is also worth a look, if only because it's just plain gorgeous. It lets you do all of the…
devsugar: A better way to share ad-hoc builds
Filed under: Developer Hey, Dave Howell. This post is for you. Dave's company Avatron is in the midst of a beta program for its newest application, Air Display. Steve Sande took a first look at Air Display not too long ago, and I've been messing with it…
Apps that work together — on iPad
On Macs we have a long-standing culture of apps working together. I can think of a few examples from my own Mac app: you can send a podcast to iTunes, send an article to Twitterrific to tweet it, or send an article to MarsEdit to post it to your weblog. Of…
Review: The Guardian Eyewitness for iPad
Lovers of fine photography will be suitably awed by the incredible shots that characterize this app.
AppleScript: Using Unicode the Sneaky Way
In my daily workflow, I often use AppleScript. Sometimes I need to use symbols in, say, TextEdit. Usually, you would open the Character Palette. But I found an interesting way to use AppleScript's power to insert Unicode characters using the «data» format…
10.6: Service to filter selected text using a shell command
Here's a little OS X service to filter selected text (from any application) through a shell command. This can be handy for performing quick operations, like replacing text with regular expressions, sorting lists or swapping fields around. Grab the Filter…
iPad apps we'd like to see
We've shown you some of our favorite iPad apps. Now it's time to list the iPad apps we want to see: the ones we use regularly on our iPhones that haven't made the jump to the iPad.
It's official: Steve Jobs will deliver the WWDC keynote
Filed under: WWDC Apple issued a press release this morning officially announcing that Steve Jobs will deliver the WWDC keynote on June 7th. The sold-out event will take place in San Francisco at the Moscone Center's West building, and Jobs will kick…
Shared code management
We have five Cocoa apps at NewsGator: TapLynx, Social Sites, and three versions of NetNewsWire. They share code. (You may not have heard of Social Sites. Written by Nick Harris, it’s an iPhone client for our Social Sites enterprise social networking app.)…
Agile Web Solutions takes over development of Knox
Filed under: Software Years ago I started using Knox for securing files, folders and drives. It's an easy and very secure way to keep your private files private. This week, long-time developers Marko Karppinen & Co. handed it over to Agile Web Solutions.…
Universal back button?
On ollicle.com appears an extension to my idea about URL schemes on iPad: a universal back button on Macs. Very interesting. I like it.
ETVComskip and PyeTV are great add-ons for EyeTV
Filed under: Software As Erica mentioned earlier, Elgato's EyeTV hardware/software bundles will let you record your TV programming, either over the air or via your cable/satellite box depending on the exact product and setup you have. The latest hardware…
Sync Wars: Address Book vs. Google Contacts
Filed under: Internet Steven Frank from Panic has outlined several important differences between the way that Address Book (on Snow Leopard) and Google Contacts manage data. This is on his personal website. He's quick to point out that it is not meant to…
Sonos update introduces Stereo Pair feature
If Sonos' S5 powered speaker sounds a little one-dimensional to you, the 3.2 update brings a welcome new feature to those with two S5s.
10.6: Time Machine using multiple backup disks
In Snow Leopard it's rather easy to have multiple Time Machine backups with different settings. You can simply write a script to change the preference files for the two (or more) different drives. Up until now, my Time Machine has always been backing up…
Essential iPad apps: 11 paid favorites
Macworld's editors kept an eye on the App Store for the past month, looking for the best iPad-optimized apps. We've come up with a list of essential apps that every iPad owner should consider for their device. In this first part, we focus on paid App Store…
PHP Mess Detector - Rulesets
Thanks to all of my @posterous peeps. Y'all made this a crazy ride and it was an honor and pleasure working with all of y'all. Thanks to all of the users. Thanks to the academy. Nobody will read this.
160% increase in H.264 video online since January
The increasing criticism of Flash as a vehicle for online video delivery(as well as Apple's dislike of Flash)appears to be driving the adoption of H.264 video. A recent study by video search site MeFeedia reveals a 160 percent increase in the proportion…
Create a new file in the Finder
Sometimes, it'd be handy to be able to create a new file in the Finder. One MacOSXHints.com reader figured out a way to do it.
Etc: The Omni Group has released several frameworks it used to build successful iPad apps as open source, including example code for a simple text editor app.
The Omni Group has released several frameworks it used to build successful iPad apps as open source, including example code for a simple text editor app. Read More: The Omni Mouth, GitHub Read the comments on this post
Five tips for speeding up iPhoto
Finding iPhoto a bit sluggish for your tastes? Here are five ways that you can turn Apple's photo program from a tortoise into a hare.
Goober 3 beta offers HD VoIP calls and video-conferencing
Goober Networks has announced a public beta of Goober 3.0, its unified communications software. The new version allows HD VoIP calling, multi-user video conferencing, and multi-protocol instant messaging.
Android overtakes Apple in US smartphone market
Google’s Android OS surpassed Apple in US smartphone market share during the first quarter of 2010. According to the NPD Group, Google now enjoys 28 percent of the smartphone market, earning the company the second-place spot behind Research in Motion (36…
International iBookstores opening on May 28th in most countries
Filed under: iPad When iPads fall into the eager hands of Apple fans in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK on May 28th, the iBookstore and Apple's free iBooks e-reader app may be there. Apple has confirmed…