Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

Updated: March 26th, 2008

April 14-17th is going to be an exciting time. Why? Because the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo is going to be held in Santa Clara, CA. Who would want to miss out on a chance to lurk around, let alone talk to, some of the smartest people in the MySQL world? Well, those who don't have at least $1000+, of course. A 3 day pass to the conference without tutorials costs a whopping $1199. A full pass would dry up your pockets $1499.

Well, "good news everyone". Thanks to Sheeri Cabral of The Pythian Group, PlanetMySQL.org, Jeremy, and, most importantly, LinuxQuestions.org, I am now in possession of a 3-day conference pass!! I'm incredibly excited that I …

Updated: September 16th, 2012

If you're like me, you constantly move and rename files and directories. You are also an extremely productive person with evangelical ideals of making every task as efficient as it can be. In this tutorial, I will use my favorite must-have file manager called Total Commander (formerly, Windows Commander) and its brilliant Multi-Rename Tool.

You can download a shareware version of Total Commander at www.ghisler.com. I encourage you to buy it after you try it as it'll soon become an integral part of your life. I've been using it for more than 10 years now and seriously can't imagine my computer without it.

Now for some quick tasks I'd like to accomplish using the Multi-Rename Tool in under a …

Updated: March 18th, 2008

"Didn't see that one coming. Their blog contains details to what this could mean for both companies. May as well be one of the most important takeovers of 2008 already!"

read more | digg story

Could this mean that the mysql cluster is finally going to get proper development attention? I don't know but sure as hell hope so. Congratulations to all mysql employees!…

Holy mother of god. This is the monitor of all monitors. This is the monitor king. 2880×900 resolution. Sign me up when it comes out, all I'll have to do is move into a bigger room that can actually fit it.

Source: http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/01/ces-2008-alienw.html…

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

…

Read the rest of this article »

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):

…

The iPhone is a piece of shit, and so is your face.

By Maddox

No, I'm not going to get an iPhone, quit emailing me about it. I'm not getting one because I already have a phone that's better: it's called the Nokia E70, it's the pinnacle of human achievement, and I love it more than my family:

You've probably never heard of the E70 because Nokia's marketing team is busy finding every last dick in the universe to suck, so I'm going to do their job for them and tell you about this product. And no, I'm not being paid to do this. I'm just tired of the iPhone fanboys shooting huge sticky wads and high-fiving each other (literally) …

Let's say you want to upgrade to Windows Media Player 11 or just accidentally upgraded and are now presented with the WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) prompt to verify how legit that Windows copy of yours is. Hypothetically speaking, something is going wrong and Windows Genuine Advantage isn't able to verify the validity of the Windows license but you still want to use WMP 11. Here is the easiest way to do this (wtf exactly were the MS programmers thinking?!):

Step 1. Install WMP11. The Windows Genuine Advantage check is built into the program and will show itself once installation is complete. You will possibly need to reboot.

Step 2. Quit the Windows Genuine Advantage prompt.

Step 3. Go to …

Click this sample map and then try dragging the blue path around to create via points. You can also do the same to the start and end points. Now I feel that the Google maps are truly 21st century. Live traffic (maybe live traffic cams soon?), street view, multiple destination, dragging and zooming with the mouse… can this thing get any better?

This announcement is also currently one of the top diggs…

Updated: June 6th, 2008

Update: The method described here is obsolete. Youtube and Google released a beautiful API located here: http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/developers_guide_protocol.html. You can do everything mentioned in this article and a lot more using it. Here's a sample: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?alt=rss&racy=include&vq=BBC+Five&start-index=201&max-results=50

So it looks like YouTube updated its RSS page recently and now has the ability to create RSS feeds by tags or user, like so:

Tags:
For example, if you wanted to create an RSS feed for the tag "monkey," you would enter: http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/monkey.rss

Users:
http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/[insert_username_here]/videos.rss
For example, if you wanted to create an RSS feed for the user "YouTube," you would enter: http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/youtube/videos.rss

The search by tag approach, however, won't necessarily get complete results because it will depend on user tagging the videos. …

Jeff Han is a research scientist for New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Here, he demonstrates—for the first time publicly—his intuitive, "interface-free," touch-driven computer screen, which can be manipulated intuitively with the fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure.

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Updated: July 15th, 2006

AMD is scared of the new Intel monster Conroe. GO INTEL!

According to memos recently obtained by DailyTech, AMD will drastically cut prices on its desktop processors after the July 23rd release of Intel’s Core 2 Duo Conroe processors. The memos that DailyTech has secured are between AMD and Japanese system manufacturers and indicate the following price cuts will become effective July 24th, 2006:

• AMD Athlon 64 price cuts will receive price cut up to 30%
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 will receive price cuts up to 50%
• AMD Sempron processors will receive price cuts up to 15%

… http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=2800…