Category Archives: Uncategorized

I redesigned the schema for one of our MongoDb clusters today. In doing so, I managed to reduce request times by 1.5 orders of magnitude! We’re now sustaining request times of roughly 30ms. The first mongo schema was about 400ms on average, with occasional bursts to over a second. 30ms is also much better thanContinue reading “MongoDb optimisation for scale”

Ran into a gotcha with PHP+MongoDb the other day. Now, PHP ain't my favourite language, but its what Piwik is written in so I'm stuck with it for that. I've partially ported Piwik to use mongodb (vs mysql) as a storage system for scalability reasons. The problem is that if you're connecting to a mongodbContinue reading “PHP MongoDb replicaset gotcha”

Now that Intel have a slightly less crap driver for the Poulsbo/GMA500 chipset, with the more recent EMGD driver, I’ve converted one of my O2 Jogglers to be a touchscreen media player in the kitchen. I’m using Arch Linux, and I’ve just released some AUR packages to support it. If you install: joggler-xorg-conf linux-joggler It’ll have aContinue reading “Return to the joggler”

A 15 minute walk in the winds currently battering Edinburgh. NOTE: This is a binaural recording; you MUST use headphones to get the proper effect!  

While I'm at it, Check_fus Downloader is a windows app, which can download and decrypt official Samsung firmware updates directly from Samsung's servers. Avoids having to hunt about on forums!

I’ve been happily using my Galaxy S II for the last few months, and of course I’ve replaced the original firmware with a custom one. However, recently a colleague acquired one as well. His had the stock Orange firmware, and has a special app called “Signal Boost”. Searching around, I found that this is actuallyContinue reading “GAN / UMA / WIFI Calling / Signal Booster on the Galaxy S II”

Meet my favourite new backup tool: Duplicity. It can do incremental encrypted backups to a variety of destinations, for example ssh, webdav, Amazon S3. It also seems fast compared to other solutions I've tried, and its really really simple to get going! Farewell, rsnapshot and rdiff-backup!

I’ve been following this project for a while; I’ve even contributed some reverse engineering work to it. (I bought one of the devices from dabs a while back). Note that the majority of the work has been done by Steve Kerrison and Antti Palosaari. However, up until today I’ve been unable to use it as IContinue reading “HD DVB-T2 terrestrial TV using the PCTV Nanostick 290e”

Garden of Cosmic Speculation, a set on Flickr.

Beltane Pillars Panorama, a photo by adq_uk on Flickr. Interesting; didn’t think this would have worked at all!