Elphin

Rocket Commander is a nice looking Microsoft tutorial to produce a 3D game using C# and DirectX. I don’t have much use for C# at the moment, but this looks like a fun way of kicking the tyres!

There hasn’t been a source release of pastebin.com in over a year, and I promised one in April, and here it is!
There’s no new features yet, just what you see on pastebin.com, but the code has been substantially reworked from the last available release. Source is GPL licenced, if you have any questions, add them [...]

There’s an interesting article over at ONLamp which covers
Advanced MySQL Replication, covering how to go beyond master-master replication to create a circular cluster of MySQL servers. It includes details on how you can use MySQL 5.1 features to manage automatic failover to remove any failed node from the cluster.

A colleague pointed me at the Hack MySQL site which has a couple of nice tools available.

mysqlreport which can give a nice snapshop of how mysql is performing
mysqlsla which will analyse your query logs to tell the frequency of each query, its execution time and an EXPLAIN for each query too.

Interesting site anyway, I’ll stay [...]

This post by Mike Morgan “Scalable PHP with APC, memcached and LVS (Part 2)” includes the increasingly popular opinion that Smarty is a waste of time.
I’ve used Smarty successfully in the past and been pleased with the result, particularly on Geograph where we need to maintain reasonable code quality with potentially many developers of varying [...]

Lukas Smith recently wrote about the development processes surrounding Zend’s planned Eclipse-based IDE.
I never really understood why Zend have duplicated the existing PHPEclipse effort, but Lukas’s post shed a little light on it. It’s certainly a shame that they don’t appear to have fully embraced the community element of open source development, but in [...]

Geograph is taking a bit a hammering at the moment, which is frustrating for all those trying to submit new photos. A few months back I started working on a desktop application codenamed Guppy (”Geograph Uploader”) which would let you queue up your submissions quickly, which the application would then upload for you while you [...]

A quick round up of recent blog posts of interest to me…

Using MogileFS and MAID is a short post about an interesting idea – using MogileFS as a replication layer on top of a redundant MAID units.
Next up, lwqueue, “a lightweight, language agnostic TCP based message queue system with Perl, Ruby, and Python client libraries”. [...]

I’ve finally begun the transition from CVS to Subversion. Yay!
Aside from Subversion just doing it better, I’m looking forward to better tool support, like using it with Trac and FishEye.
CVS has served me well for many years though, farewell my quirky old friend

Interesting article on Digg and PHP’s scalability and performance. The article mentions 8 slave database servers for just 3 webservers, which seemed an odd configuration.
I posted a question but the author didn’t elaborate much aside from linking to an interesting set of slides about LiveJournal. This walks through increasingly elaborate scaling scenarios. (Edit: these slides [...]