Conference review: Distributed Matters Berlin 2015

“Kept you waiting, huh?” – to start the post with a pop culture reference. Yesterday, I was privileged enough to attend Distributed Matters Berlin 2015. The focus of the conference is, you guessed it, distributed systems, often within a NoSQL context. It was hosted at the awesome KulturBrauerei, a refurbished brewery. The format of the… Continue reading Conference review: Distributed Matters Berlin 2015

Book Review: PostgreSQL Replication

So for my series of System Engineering books, I will proceed with a short review of PostgreSQL Replication by Packt. The reason this book came to be a part of my collection is that while there is a lot of information regarding PostgreSQL replication out there, a lot of it is out of date, given… Continue reading Book Review: PostgreSQL Replication

Book Review: Web Operations: Keeping the Data on Time

For my kickoff of systems engineering book reviews I have chosen this book. While not being technical in the strict sense of the term (if you are looking for code snippets or ready-to-use architecture ideas, look elsewhere), this collection of 17 essays provides a birds-eye view of the relatively new principle of Web Operations. As… Continue reading Book Review: Web Operations: Keeping the Data on Time

P For Paranoia OR a quick way of overwriting a partition with random-like data

(General Surgeon’s warning: The following post contains doses of paranoia which might exceed your recommended daily dosage. Fnord!). A lot of the data sanitisation literature around advises overwriting partitions with random data (btw, SANS Institute research claims that even a pass with /dev/zero is enough to stop MFM but YPMV). So leaving Guttman-like techniques aside,… Continue reading P For Paranoia OR a quick way of overwriting a partition with random-like data

Hello world demystified

Hello all, in the finest programming tradition, I take it that every time one took a programming course or decided to have a quick look into a programming language, writing a “Hello World” program was one of the first things done. However, even in such a small program, do you really know what it does… Continue reading Hello world demystified

CPython threading vs multiprocessing – the 5 minute introduction

MJC brought to my attention the following piece of code which attempts to provide some empirical data comparing the use of threads vs processes in CPython. This code, which I understand that it is stored for historical purposes, has some bugs, which I have pointed out in the comment section, but this is not the… Continue reading CPython threading vs multiprocessing – the 5 minute introduction