Category Archives: tech

Chrome and Firefox Ad Blocking and Privacy Addons

Posted on November 19, 2016 by

For a while I’ve been using AdBlock Plus and Ghostery in both Chrome and Firefox to reduce the amount of shitty ads I see and also reduce the number of “trackers” that I’m exposed to on various web sites. But … Continue reading →

Posted in misc, other, tech | 8 Comments

GNU Parallel and Block Size(s)

Posted on November 17, 2016 by

I’ve been a fan of GNU Parallel for a while but until recently have only used it occasionally. That’s a shame, because it’s often the simplest solution for quickly solving embarrassingly parallel problems. My recent usage of it has centered … Continue reading →

Posted in craigslist, mysql, programming, tech | 7 Comments

Installing Ubuntu (via crubuntu) on a Samsung 300 Series Chromebook

Posted on April 5, 2014 by

We’re getting ready for a trip in which we expect to take a lot of pictures. So I’d like to take a small, indexpensive computer along to handle the task of copying pictures from the cameras and memory cards to … Continue reading →

Posted in tech, travel | 1 Comment

Seeking Sucks: Spoiled by SSDs

Posted on April 4, 2013 by

I’m in the process of rebuilding full-text indexes for a good sized document collection that lives in a sharded MongoDB cluster. And the funny thing about this is that I don’t really use MongoDB that much. I mean we put … Continue reading →

Posted in craigslist, mongodb, nosql, sphinx, tech | 10 Comments

Handling Database Failover at Craigslist

Posted on September 18, 2012 by

There has been some interesting discussion on-line recently about how to handle database (meaning MySQL, but really it applies to other systems too) failover. The discussion that I’ve followed so far, in order, is: GitHub’s report on their automated failover … Continue reading →

Posted in craigslist, mysql, tech, yahoo | 12 Comments

Looking forward to Redis 2.6

Posted on November 9, 2011 by

In reading Short term Redis plans, I’m happy to see the “More introspection” section. For a long time some in the Redis community have asked for the ability to publish key names to a channel when they expire. And, while … Continue reading →

Posted in programming, redis, tech | 1 Comment

Experimenting with Real-Time Search using Sphinx

Posted on October 27, 2011 by

In the last few weeks I’ve been experimenting with using real-time indexes in Sphinx to allow full-text searching of data recently added to craigslist. While this posting is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to what I’ve implemented (that … Continue reading →

Posted in craigslist, sphinx, tech | 12 Comments

Databases 10 Years Ago

Posted on April 11, 2011 by

In preparation for the talk I’m giving tomorrow, I was assembling a slide that looks back about 10 years ago and remembering what our database infrastructure was like back then. I was at Yahoo! during that time and our leading-edge … Continue reading →

Posted in mysql, tech | 3 Comments

MongoDB Pre-Splitting for Faster Data Loading and Importing

Posted on March 6, 2011 by

Once nice thing about playing with Webdis is that I can watch the import rate of my multi-billion document MongoDB import in nearly real-time. The downside of that is that I quickly found that once I got a few hundred … Continue reading →

Posted in craigslist, mongodb, programming, tech | 24 Comments

Finally Learning Python using Google’s Videos

Posted on March 1, 2011 by

Back in 2006 I asked which language I should learn next: Ruby or Python. Well, I finally got around to feeding my brain a bit. I recently discovered Google’s Python Class and have watched the first few videos. So far … Continue reading →

Posted in programming, python, tech | 8 Comments