Category Archives: Technology

General technology topics.

Reading list for scaling Solr

By Ross | Published: November 30, 2011
Brain dump time. I kinda need this as a memory aid for myself, and I figure it’ll be useful to anyone else who is building a Solr cluster. There’s probably a lot of crossover here for tuning any JVM-based application servicing a large number of requests, but this is my first, so it’s all together. [...]
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Bots are crawling new domain registrations and namesquatting Twitter handles

By Ross | Published: August 20, 2011
Something to be wary of when you’re domain shopping for that perfect .com: bots are watching. I’m not sure what combination triggers it, but when I was done brainstorming for an app name, I checked Twitter to see if the handle was taken, then registered the domain name. It was quite late and I didn’t [...]
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“Levelling the playing field” in education

By Ross | Published: July 28, 2011
Came across a post via HN which suggests levelling the playing field in CS by teaching with obscure functional programming languages. The reasoning is that there are “privileged” students who begin a computer science degree already knowing how to code, and that this is unfair. Beyond the impracticality of doing this (you’re going to have [...]
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Munin plugins for Solr

By Ross | Published: July 18, 2011
I’ve been mucking around with Python recently and have written a couple of simple Munin plugins for Boards.ie’s Solr cluster (in the hope of helping to track down some annoying performance bugs). If you’re not familiar with Munin, it’s a bit like Nagios, (and if you haven’t heard of Nagios, it’s a network monitoring tool). Munin [...]
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Google Plus

By Ross | Published: July 4, 2011
I’ve been playing on and off with Google’s new toy, Google+, for the last few days and while there are a plethora of opinion pieces all over the place, I figure what the hell, one more can’t really hurt (especially a nice short one that isn’t too gushing.) The Bad I think one way in [...]
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Getting Windows 7 onto a USB stick using Ubuntu

By Ross | Published: June 24, 2011
I spent way too much time trying to do this so maybe this will save someone else some time. I haven’t owned a copy of Windows for years, and have been using Ubuntu as my solitary home and office OS for some time. Last week though, I decided I should have a copy of Windows [...]
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Searching Boards.ie – Solr, EC2, SQS, SNS, Node.js

By Ross | Published: May 26, 2011
This is the first in a series of posts about the design and implementation of a search engine for Boards.ie. Boards.ie recently launched a new search engine – http://www.boards.ie/search/ – which is built upon Amazon Web Services using Solr with PHP as the glue. Currently, Boards.ie users are searching nearly 30 million posts almost a [...]
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EC2: Create AMI from a running instance

By Ross | Published: January 13, 2011
Log into the AWS web console, find the instance you want to create an AMI from, right click and select “Create Image (EBS AMI)”. Follow the wizard. All the top results in Google are for The Long Way™ to do this. The Long Way has a bunch of useful things to take into consideration (security, [...]
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Gender breakdown for software development in Ireland

By Ross | Published: January 3, 2011
This post was inspired by this TED talk from Sheryl Sandberg, which reminded me of this brilliant blog post by Jolie O’Dell. The whole women in tech thing is something which interests me (as a techie, as well as a human being), and there are loads of great discussions (and terrible ones) about it. Have [...]
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Links for Friday, 3rd December 2010

By Ross | Published: December 3, 2010
Paul Conroy has written a little bookmarlet to add imgur previews to the Twitter web interface, and has a detailed explanation of how he’s done it. The Algorithm + the Crowd is not enough. I have a response post gestating. Defecting by Accident, A Flaw Common to Analytical People. This is “How to Win Friends [...]
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