Google thinks i’m a virus or spyware

Google thinks our office is some sort of menace and have blocked the entire office. It appears to be the result of one of my colleagues tracing multiple back links. Here is an extract from the page and and a screen shot.

Your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

A temporary solution is to delete your cookies from Google. That seemed to work for a while at least. Once Martin stopped doing huge numbers of queries to Google they ‘unblocked’ us.

Google virus spyware error

Whitepaper on Memcached with MySQL

If you have or are in the process of developing a decent size web app you will have to address some performance issues at some point. Caching is good way to address some of the performance problems. The guys at MySQL have a nice whitepaper on Memcached. Unfortunately you have to register and then they will send you an email with the file.

Here is the address: http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/white-papers/mysql_wp_memcached.php

A quick extract from the site with the usual marketing blurb.

Memached is an open-source, distributed memory caching system designed to tackle today’s web-scale performance and scalability challenges. Many of the largest and most heavily trafficked web properties on the Internet like Facebook, Fotolog, YouTube, Mixi.jp, Yahoo, and Wikipedia deploy Memcached and MySQL to satisfy the demands of millions of users and billions of page views every month. By integrating a caching tier into their web- scale architectures, these organizations have improved their application performance while minimizing database load. In doing so, they manage to increase their scalability to accommodate more concurrent users and spikes in traffic while at the same time making the most efficient use of their existing computing infrastructure.

Should I stay in England or go back to South Africa?

A question that is often asked by many South Africans. The church I go to is holding an event to give some guidance on the question.

An event for South Africans to think Biblically about whether to return to SA or stay in the UK

Guests are welcome – both South African and non-South African, Christian and non-Christian. (The event though is geared to South African Christians)

There is an event posted on facebook. Please let the organiser know if you are coming along.

Car Car Park

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.

Timber!

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.

Alt 3 or should I say Hash #

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

Facebook for the family – see family news on Kindo

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.

Homer Simpson family tree

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.

Export birthdays from Facebook into iCal format

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.

Facebook scaling and replication with MySQL

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?