beer planet

I've recently installed eAccelerator on the web server that hosts this site and I wanted to share some of my impressions after a few days.

• What does it do? Nobody put it better than the eAccelerator team itself: "eAccelerator is a free open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, and dynamic content cache. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times."
• Does it work? Hell yes. beerpla.net loads on average twice as fast as before. The results are consistent, so I'm very

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Nissan is showing their new concept vehicle at the Frankfurt Auto Show. The fact that the car looks like a bat mobile, as jalopnik.com correctly noticed doesn't entice me very much. However, the seat design immediately caught my attention. It's a… 3-seater? And the driver is in the middle? That's f$%#ing cool. Judge for yourself:

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Pure awesomeness.

Part 1:

David Blaine Street Magic #1

Part 2:

David Blaine Street Magic 2

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The DailyMail reports on some crazy ocean foaming in Sydney. What exactly are they talking about? Perhaps the pictures will explain better (or not).

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At the recent Seattle Conference on Scalability organized by Google, Cuong Do, an engineering manager at YouTube, talks about YouTube's growth over the past 2 years and the scalability problems they have overcome. All in all, it's a very interesting presentation that I can recommend to anyone remotely interested in large-scale projects, such as YouTube.

One interesting fact that Cuong mentions is that the pre-Google YouTube tech team consisted of only 2 sysadmins, 2 scalability software architects, 2 developers, 2 networks engineers, and 1 DBA. It's quite impressive that such a small team managed to maintain and scale such a widely popular service.

Here's the presentation (52min long):

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Updated: January 18th, 2009

In this article, I will show how to resize a VMware disk if you didn't make it large enough when it was created. Furthermore, I will show how to resize partitions following the disk augmentation using OpenSUSE 10.2 as an example. You will even be able to resize the Linux root partition (/) that is mounted and is normally unmountable.

The story: this is simple – you made a VMware disk without thinking ahead and now it ran out of space. Here you have a few options, the most notable ones being create another disk and mount it or grow the existing disk and …

Updated: November 9th, 2007

How many times did I want to watch a directory waiting for a file to appear in it? Constant ls, for example, quickly got boring. A quick Perl script that would reload ls every 5 seconds… yeah it works but it takes a while to type up, and often enough I'm too lazy for that. And then I found 'watch' – a utility that comes with most *nix distros. Look at this beauty [man watch]:

NAME
watch – execute a program periodically, showing output fullscreen

SYNOPSIS
watch [-dhvt] [-n ] [--differences[=cumulative]] [--help]
[--interval=] [--no-title] [--version]

DESCRIPTION
watch runs command repeatedly, displaying its output (the first screen
full). This allows you to watch the program output change over time.
By default, …

If you haven't seen The Bourne Ultimatum yet, go see it. It's a great finale of the Bourne series. Matt Damon really delivers. In fact, I'm starting to feel obsessed with this movie.

Here's the clip of a shared scene between the 2 movies (this one is from The Bourne Supremacy). The song at the end is still breathtaking:

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The "awwww" factor is through the roof.

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Albertson's is no more. Now it's back to Lucky. And this is what $4.99 buys you at Lucky. Life is good (although I believe that this is the sole reason for food shortage in Africa).

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#16 is priceless.

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