beer planet

Updated: August 8th, 2010

In the past few weeks I've been implementing advanced search at Plaxo, working quite closely with Solr enterprise search server. Today, I saw this relatively detailed comparison between Solr and its main competitor Sphinx (full credit goes to StackOverflow user mausch who had been using Solr for the past 2 years). For those still confused, Solr and Sphinx are similar to MySQL FULLTEXT search, or for those even more confused, think Google (yeah, this is a bit of a stretch, I know).

Similarities

• Both Solr and Sphinx satisfy all of your requirements. They're fast and designed to index and search large bodies of data efficiently.
• Both have a long list of high-traffic sites using them (Solr, Sphinx

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Updated: August 31st, 2011

The Problem

My fiancée Emilie has had her Palm Pre for about 2 weeks now, and one specific problem that started showing up last week has been incredibly annoying, causing us all kinds of trouble.

After Emilie got the phone, she added 3 email accounts – Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo. One day, after sending an email through the Pre, a popup showed up that said "Error sending" followed by the subject of that specific email. Swiping the error away didn't help – it just came back 5 minutes later. In fact, it has been coming back every 5 minutes of every day since, lighting up the screen each time. Thus, not only it was annoying, but it was running down …

Updated: January 4th, 2009

I want to get opinions from outside of my daily circle of people on the best server hardware to use for MySQL. I remember from the conference somebody (Pipes?) mentioning a particular Dell server with multiple disk RAID10 that could supposedly be had for about $6k but I completely misplaced the model number (Frank, did you get my email?).

I know that a multi-disk RAID array with a bunch of fast disks (15k RPM?) is probably the most important method of improving performance, followed by the amount of RAM, so I'm trying to find the best combination/balance of the two. However, server prices on the Internet range so much that I don't even know where to begin to tell a …

Today Travis was messing around with a Chinese site blinkx has indexed a short while ago http://www.tudou.com and saw a cryptic error message that started coming up on all pages. The message looked something like this:

各位土豆：
为了给大家提供更好的服务，我们正在搬迁扩建土豆的中心机房。
3月14日凌晨0:00 ~ 夜间24:00，我们的服务暂停24小时。
3月15日凌晨0:00 新机房就搬迁完成了，土豆会准时回家。

Now, neither Travis nor I know the language of Chinese, so what do we do? Go to Google Translate, of course. Here's what Google Translate produced:

That's:

Members potatoes:
In order to provide you with better service, we are expanding the relocation of the central room of potatoes.
March 14 at 0:00 to 24:00 at night, our services will be suspended for 24 hours.
March 15 at 0:00 new room on the relocation is …