Car Car Park

Originally uploaded by DrewPreston

How do you park your car? Well this guy decided to park on another car. How in the world did they do that? Imagine trying to explain this to the insurers.

It was an entertaining end of the day seeing this in Putney Bridge.

tree-storm-merton-park.

Originally uploaded by DrewPreston

I was almost taken out by a tree last week. The high winds in London during the storm caused part of this tree to sheer off. The falling branch hit the top of the glass tram shelter and fell onto the tracks nearly hitting us. After the initial shock all four blokes jumped onto the tram tracks and pulled it onto the platform without saying a word. A great way to start the day.

I’ve only recently starting using a Mac so imagine my joy when I got to teach a Mac veteran something. Ok it wasn’t anything that impressive but it made me laugh so I thought I’d share it with all of you. The Mac keyboards don’t have the hash key (#) so you have to use the Alt + 3 key combination.

I have to dedicate this to Caffeinehit

Most people really like finding out what their friends have been doing. Facebook seems to have done a great job at producing a feed of news for all your friends. Problem is that i seen to have far too many acquaintances and it is filled with irrelevant information.

Kindo have done something similar but focussed on your family. The Our Family section shows some interesting statistics on your family members coupled with a great news feed.

I personally like the calendar which shows all birthdays and anniversaries. It even shows details for people not signed up. This is great in my family because a lot of the oldies aren’t online.

Have a look at the family tree of Homer Simpson. I never knew the Simpson family had such an extensive list of relatives. There is an 80 person family tree to make any genealogy enthusiast happy.

Here is a picture of the family tree:

There is even some details on each person in the family tree. Here is a snapshot of Homer’s profile:

There are also a number of other family trees of various celebrities.

Facebook is great for reminding me when my friends (or acquaintances) birthdays are. There is one small problem in that I don’t always look at my facebook calendar. Demian put me onto this nifty birthday calendar exporter.

The app allows you to export all birthday events into iCal format which can be used by a number of calendar tools including: Google Calendar & Apple iCal. I tested imports into both of these and they worked perfectly

Thanks to Kurt Kluever and Christopher Tice for developing this.

I was wondering how Facebook handled the massive load they get each week. They receive on average 2 million new users each week - wow! Well with all the existing traffic and the new load just how do they cope?

There is a great blog post by Jason Sobel on the Facebook blog here. Some of the nifty tricks include:

• Replicating the MySQL databases
• Multiple data centres. One west coast and the other east cost.
• Splitting traffic dependent on your location effectively load balancing
• Caching data using memcached (developed for LiveJournal originally)

Those Facebook engineers are crafty. I remember hearing the guys at Friendster also did some similar things with MySQL. There is case study on the MySQL site.

Do you have any scaling advice when using PHP and MySQL?

It looks like the tech ninjas at Kindo have solved the performance problems. The site is looking much quicker for my tree. Nice work guys.

The guys at The Common Craft Show have produced a great video that explains social networking in plain English. Have you ever tried to explain this concept to someon and got one of those blank confused looks? I suggest you show them this video.

It’s winter and with the cold weather comes the dreaded lurgy - Man Flu. Men know that Man Flu is an entirely different strain than the ordinary flu that women sometimes get. This clip illustrates it well: