Christian Biggins Design, Technology, SEO, General Ramblings. Something for everybody.

31Dec/070

Happy New Year


Here's some amazing animal pictures for new years!!

Clicky

16Dec/070

What the hey?

Who in their right mind would make an ipod speaker and cram some poor hapless fish into it to be carted around and play peoples stupid music? And, then, who would be stupid enough to fork out 70 bucks a pop for them?

Dudes must be outside their minds.

Stupid product.

15Dec/070

Ostrich Skiing – Unbelievably

Seriously funny video. Very well made.

14Dec/070

There are some seriously messed up people in the world.

And I think I have just concluded that women can pull better faces than blokes.

Clicky Clicky

13Dec/070

Final Salute Gallery – The Digital Journalist

It's impossible to fathom how you yourself would handle a situation like this.

Final Salute Gallery - The Digital Journalist

13Dec/070

Boy, he showed them!

What an idiot... a 64 year old guy chuggs 1 litre of vodka as a protest and almost dies.

Read article

10Dec/070

Googlepedia

Fantastic Firefox add-on which shows a link to relevant wikipedia pages when searching google.

Get Firefox
Get Googlepedia

6Dec/070

Whales Revenge

http://www.whalesrevenge.com/

Sign the petition to stop Whaling. I am always skeptical of petitions and the like because, really, if the corporations and countries behind whaling actually listened to the people, it would have been stopped a long time ago.

Also, the flash game doesn't actually let you get revenge... :(

5Dec/070

Abraham Bin Lincoln

5Dec/070

MySQL Monitoring and Tuning

I own / run a fairly large site (www.skylinesaustralia.com) which is on the cliche PHP/MySQL setup. The database is fairly large with the 'posts' table being 3.4 Million rows. As its also a non profit site, I try to keep the costs associated with hosting a site this large to a minimum.

The site is on a single box with 4 x 10k sas drives, 4 cores and 2gb of ram. I started seeing big load spikes due to MySQL lock contention in the logs and needed to tune a few different aspects of the db (We are slowly moving to innodb engines from MyISAM).

Where I am trying to go with this is that I found a script named Tuning Primer to be a fantastic tool in tuning MySQL for optimum performance. While it doesnt delve into the more complex, technical side of things, it certainly helps if you are not great with MySQL's running gear (like me).
The other tool that I think everybody with a MySQL server should have, is Innotop which is a monitoring app that will show you a running processlist as well as lots of other data.

Both scripts are simple to setup and use and do not take any (or much at all) of your resources.