'Technology' Category

  • OpenSolaris Dead

    August 13, 2010

    Basically, the open source development model has now been axed and OpenSolaris is officially now dead. OpenSolaris wasn’t widely used to begin with, by most definitions it could even be called a non-starter. These non-organic “open” projects using peculiar licenses which are generally incompatible with the established community choice are all destined to fail.

  • Puppet 2.6

    July 21, 2010

    I use Puppet for configuration management. It’s a great way to ensure consistency and comply with organizational policies for system configurations. Version 2.6 was released recently and has a pile of new features. Most surprising to me was “basic Windows support”.

  • Barada Two Factor Authentication

    July 21, 2010

    I ran across this interesting project called Barada the other day. Barada turns your phone into a two factor authentication device. It’s an implementation of the HOTP protocol in the form of a PAM module (the server) and an Android applicaton (the client). Their approach solves several inconveniences, which they highlight: …the problem with systems [...]

  • A Day in the Life of Facebook Operations

    June 28, 2010

    A systems engineer at Facebook reveals some details on how they maintain their infrastructure.

  • Lessons Learned Scaling Reddit

    May 17, 2010

    7 Lessons Learned While Building Reddit to 270 Million Page Views a Month. Steve Huffman, co-founder of social news site Reddit, gave an excellent presentation (slides, transcript) on the lessons he learned while building and growing Reddit to 7.5 million users per month, 270 million page views per month, and 20+ database servers. High Scalability [...]