Finding a highly available datastore has proved a tough topic in todays highly available zero downtime technological universe. With MySQL being the gold standard for startups and sites that don’t need to scale quickly on demand, it becomes a bigger problem when you finally hit the limits of MySQL as it does not scale well due to its active-passive nature. Although nearly impossible to maintain, to get an active-active MySQL cluster it would require tedious maintenance of auto incrementing keys and endless replication issues that are not suited for the faint of heart. Finding an open source solution that would guarantee eventual consistency and was active-active was not the hard part, deciding on a solution proved to be the challenge as each solution has its pros and cons as HA has still not been made turn-key and adopted the keep it stupid simple method. The Apache Project has come out with quite a few new tools to address this deficit, The Hadoop project has changed the world of offline processing with it’s Map Reduce functionality as the new NoSQL key/value datastore Cassandra has come close to solving the HA challenge with its eventual consistency but thats not good enough. Oracle offers the only enterprise solution designed to scale but at a price no one can or wants to afford. We can cherry pick pieces of open-source to solve our issues if done methodically and though careful consideration of the pros and cons of each piece. They may require more work to get off the ground and maintenance but the cost savings alone can put a workforce of 200 people together in no time when we save an IT organization from its highest expense, licensing and software.  If North America was split in half tomorrow and one side fell into the ocean would you still be serving people online is the million dollar question in todays complex every penny / second counts IT environments.

I recently prototyped out a project that I thought was the coolest thing, a RFID Door Lock. I saw a cool instructable that shows you how to build a RFID powered door lock utilizing an Atmel AVR chip with the ever so popular Arduino firmware all for under $50!! Basically the microcontroller sends a signal to an electric door strike to open the door if the RFID card matches what is programmed into the memory. There is a master card that is used to program other RFID cards, you just swipe the master the led flashes to state it is in programming mode and then you swipe the new RFID tag and voila, it’s saved to the chips memory. A totally cool project, I invite you to check it out here.. Stay tuned for pics!

I recently stumbled upon an amazing accurate article about how it would cost double to replace a developer on a legacy / complex code base. Being a developer myself I find that as time goes on the more under appreciated talent becomes, maybe the adage of familiarity breeds contempt but retaining good developers is imperative to keeping costs down and projects on track. Getting a new developer up to speed at a small company could prove to be the company’s downfall. Check out the article here

During a recent slave addition to our architechture I ran into a few problems getting the slave back up and running after it had stopped for a period of time. I ran into multiple errors which included Duplicate / Primary Keys,  missing tables, corrupted binary log entries etc. The solution was to use a handy feature in a one liner that would loop through and restart the slave and increment the SQL_SLAVE_SKIP_COUNTER until there weren’t any errors being reported by MySQL. The handy one liner is as follows, hope this helps someone else out as much as it has helped me:

while [ 1 ]; do if [ `mysql -e "show slave status\G" | grep "Duplicate entry" | wc -l` -eq 1 ]; then mysqladmin stop-slave; mysql -e “set global sql_slave_skip_counter=1″; mysqladmin start-slave; fi; sleep 7; done

Your mileage may vary to get this to work with your system depending on the shell and the mysql settings you use.

Here we go again, I work with some  Microsoft choir boys who insist on bashing on something they don’t have any clue about..  Just because they can’t use a command line and need they’re precious GUI to do anything remotely useful they constantly bash Ruby and open source in general.  It’s a sad day

During our recent efforts at work to integrate a different WYSIWYG into our email marketing application we had decided to try out TinyMCE. Boy was that a bad idea, we ran into problem after problem with the open source WYSIWYG and the way it takes it upon itself to format the source and add all kinds of funky attributes to perfectly good tags. I was finding sizcache and sizset attributes in my table tags and it took it upon itself to wrap my source in it’s own container div, also using the fullpage plugin  it could not even determine that they’re were html and head tags and kept duplicating  those and sticking them in arbitrary locations. Basically it messed everyones code up and boy they were pissed!! This editor lacks clear and consise documentation and needs a lot of work. For an editor that is as mature as TinyMCE is, it’s sad that it is in  the state it currently is in, I had to downgrade to get it semi working. Although I do sympithize with the developer as it is ever increasingly more difficult to write javascript to confirm to the ever changing DOM (or everyones different interpretation of it), especially with Microsoft’s one sided approach to making IE the worst browser in the world when it comes to following standards. Every browser has its own twerk and writing code for each one must be a nightmare, especially the complexity with writing a  WYSIWYG as it seems no one can get it right. Hopefully someday this will change maybe when the browser makers can get on the same page but I don’t foresee that happening anytime soon, especially with Microsoft’s ability to throw a wrench in the works!

Ahh yes, another fathers day and a special one at that!! It’s is my first fathers day for me, a father to be!! I figured that would warrant a post to my blog which has been feeling neglected lately to say the least. In less than a month and two weeks I am going to be a proud father of a baby girl that we still have not been able to settle on a name for but we have some good candidates. Who knew coming up with a name would be so difficult, but i’m sure we’ll figure it out before she’s here. These past few months have been pretty nerve wracking from dealing with so called friends who really aren’t my friends, to trying to muster up motivation to tackle projects left on the back burner. Hopefully I can get everything sorted out before the baby comes. Either way I just wanted to wish everyone a happy fathers day and promise to start posting more technology related content ASAP… Thanks for visiting and I’ll be talking to u soon!

Well I’ve decided to pick up on a new hobby that relates the digital world that I live in other than more web development. I’ve recently been heading over to sparkfun.com and browsing their different products. To my delight they have all kinds of cool breakout and development boards that a hacker like me can fiddle around with. I picked up a new breadboard and an Arduino Duellimenov some LEDs and resistors and went to town. I got my blinky lights going at my desk and loving it like Mickey Ds.. I’ve been experimenting with the PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) which make the LEDs look more like candles flickering. I was lucky enough to grab a course book on Digital Fundimentals from a co-worker which will hopefully enlighten me with more knowledge about circuitry and microcontrollers. I’ve started learning on the Atmel AVR series and am working my way up to the bad boy ARM processor. I’ll keep everyone posted with my new stories and pictures of my new projects and creations. Well thats all until next time, keep in touch with yourselves.

Merry Christmas and welcome to my latest effort to get my thoughts out and keep up with the latest happenings in the blogosphere. I am going to try to get a post out every few days. What you might find here are ramblings about my favorite technologies from programming languages to grapical design to embedded systems. Subscribe to my feed or keep checking back to keep up with my latest happenings!