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Archive for June, 2008

Use memcache better

30 Jun

I believe I have already mentioned a couple of times how memcache makes Grooveshark Lite possible.

Well, while implementing memcache for Grooveshark Lite, I ended up making a wrapper class called GMemcache for lack of a better name, which inherits from the PHP Memcache class, adding on just a few cool enhancements:

1. Singleton. Has static variable $instance that is set in the constructor and is also available in a getInstance() method.
2. Disable-able. Integrating with memcache can involve writing a lot of memcache-specific code, which means it can be quite a pain if you then need to temporarily disable memcache for some reason, such as testing. We define MEMCACHE_DISABLED to true when we wish to have our code bypass memcache altogether. The class wraps get, set, etc., and if memcache is disabled returns false for get (equivalent of saying “I couldn’t find it”) and doesn’t do anything when set is called. otherwise it calls parent::get etc.
3. Version-able. We also define an app version, which is then automatically appended to all keys. That way new releases never get stale data (or worse, data in a different structure from what it expects!). For situations where versioning does not make sense, set, get, etc all take an extra boolean parameter which indicates whether versioning should be skipped (defaults to false).

The nice thing about inheriting from Memcache this way (as opposed to having a Memcache instance as a member variable) is that we don’t have to rewrite all of the functionality. Whatever parts we do not need to change or do not care about, do not have to be written and they will continue to work when accessed via GMemcache.

 
 

Have some tips!

26 Jun

In order to improve the quality of your life, I am providing some tips! I’ll start with some geeky stuff and move on to life tips.

Did you know that there is built in pager functionality in MySQL command line? I sure didn’t! It’s pretty cool, and extremely simple to use:
mysql>pager less
PAGER set to less

or, as Travis suggests you can even use vim:
mysql>pager vim -
PAGER set to vim -

Another MySQL tip is one that I figured out for my own uses a while ago and didn’t think much of until both Skyler and Travis also needed the use of it: it’s quite easy to search for tables containing a certain column.
For example, if you need to find all tables that contain a UserID, the following will do the trick:
SELECT table_name FROM information_schema.columns WHERE table_schema=’your_database_name’ AND column_name=’UserID’;
It’s great if you name all of your columns consistently and are doing this just because you don’t want to have to look that information up, but don’t rely on it when you’re trying to mess with an externally developed project. For example, Bugzilla actually has several different names for the UserID column depending on which table it’s in.

One last MySQL tip: disable name resolution if you haven’t done so already. MySQL attemps to do a reverse lookup on IP every time a connection is made, whether it needs to or not. Normally that behavior is fine, but if your DNS server goes down, becomes unreachable or (even worse) becomes slow, it can take MySQL up to 10 seconds per connection to authenticate or time out. It becomes incredibly easy to use up all of your allowed connections when this happens.

On to some life tips:
I recently bought a 2005 Scion xB. Aside from being a hideous solar yellow, it’s a great car and I got a great deal on it, so I couldn’t say no. A lot of people were surprised that I was able to pay cash for the car, considering that I don’t make a lot of money. The trick is that years ago I resolved to only ever pay cash for a vehicle, so I’ve only purchased vehicles I could afford at the time, while setting aside what would otherwise go towards a car payment. For the past 3 years I’ve been driving a jalopy that I bought for $800. About a year ago I bought a Yamaha C3 scooter for commuting to work and other in-town driving to save gas, for about $2,000. So for the past 3 years I’ve spent $2,800 for transportation. How much would I have spent on car payments? Let’s be conservative and estimate a payment of $300/month.
$300/month * 12 months/year * 3 years = $10,800
Having saved that money (while collecting interest!), it should be no surprise that I had enough to pay cash for a nicer car. And of course I still have my scooter for in town commuting, so I’ll continue to get excellent gas mileage in town and keep the wear and tear on the car down to a minimum, and based on the above math the xB only has to last me about 3 years to pay for itself. Chances are, of course, that I’ll get many more years of service out of it than that. Moral of the story? Don’t pay any more for a vehicle than you can afford. Sounds obvious when you put it that way, doesn’t it?

And now, a housekeeping tip from Skyler. If you enjoy cooking but hate doing dishes, a nice “trick” is to cook a relatively simple meal, something like rice where it’s not very involved but a bit time consuming, where you kind of have to be around keeping an eye on it. Once you get your dish going, you kind of have to sit around the kitchen anyway, so you might as well do some cleaning. It feels much less like a boring waste of time if you’re already stuck in the kitchen doing something you like. I tried this last night and it was much more tolerable. Now if only I could find a similar trick for making picking up after myself more enjoyable…

On the topic of being messy, I highly, highly recommend getting bunches of tackle organizers for all sorts of organizational needs. Tackle organizers come in all different shapes and sizes, and many have removable dividers (like this one) for ultimate flexibility. Have a junk drawer, or two or three? Put your crap in these and then put these in the drawer, it’ll be easier to find your stuff and you’ll probably be able to make more efficient use of the space. I also use one of these in my toolbox, and one for my sewing supplies.

 
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Posted in life, SQL