Posts from: May 2007

Crawfish, Crawfish, more Crawfish!

Almost every weekend, my family always have a cookout. This week we are doing it at my uncle’s house. TJ (my uncle) suggested we do crawfish this time, and off we did. I honestly never have boil crawfish before, so this is the first time. The weather was so nice (cloudy and cool), we decided to do it on his patio at the backyard.

I have to say, boil crawfish is awesome! It’s close to how shrimp would taste like, but it’s a little bit tastier. Next week we are doing Indonesian Kalasan chicken. My other uncle’s wife and my sister are planning on some of the menu already. I love family cookout, it brings everyone closer and we always have fun doing it. Vincent, you better make it next time, we might do fear factor style cookout (Daniel – a close friend of the family, suggested we do fear factor style lol!)

Feedburner sold! Acquired by Google

Well, it was previously reported by Sam Sethi that Google is trying to acquired Feedburner, and today the deal has been confirmed. Google spend $100 millions on this acquisition and I personally think it’s one of the best purchase Google made. Not much information other than this being reported as everything is sealed until the next 2-3 weeks according to TechCrunch. Way to go Feedburner!

Big Wave of Traffic at SlashGear – Nice but deadly

As I previously posted, SlashGear got digged again. Usually Digg will brings us around 15-20k visits on entry that goes into popular pool. However, yesterday was a different one. We did not only get dugg, but also increases in linked in traffic from other blogs. As a result, we have a big traffic increase from 20000 visits daily average to 100k. I spent almost the whole day trying to keep the site accessible. With great help from Litespeed tech support and The Planet technician, we were able to stay online.

The good thing about this traffic is it allows me to learn on how to deal with it on server end and optimize some MySQL queries on SlashGear. We are going to be ready for the next wave of big traffic flow.

Ewdison Then
21st May 2007
Business, Development, Technology, The Web
No comments yet

One of our story in SlashGear was dugg and it send a lot of readers to SlashGear for the whole day as it made the top 10 story of the day in Digg’s site. We weren’t entirely down, but some users are experiencing slow down on the site. Aside from http, everything feels like normal. So i contacted Litespeed tech support and they were helping me tweaking around the setting to optimize it. I have to disable couple plugins on SlashGear to keep the site from crashing.

I use Mint on SlashGear, but it does not scale well for this kind of traffic, not even thin Mint. So I’ve decided to dump Mint for now until we have our load balancing and slave MySQL in place.

The guys at The Planet – our sponsors, works very hard to put up with us on this day and keeping the site alive. I really want to thank them not only for sponsoring SlashGear, but also helping us out when we needed them the most.

On the side note: SlashGear, SlashPhone, MyiPhone will go down for maintainance tonight at 11PM central time. It will porbably go down for less than 15 minutes.

Ciao…. and to Vincent, have fun in New York!

NBA Playoffs : Four Team Left – Who will you pick?

Phoenix is out, and NBA Playoffs has reached Semi Finals. I think Spurs will take the Western Conf Finals series, and Detroit will take on the East. Cleveland has played great, but Lebron still needs to be able to get his teammates involved and without that, Detroit will definitely take over the games.

Phoenix vs San Antonio is one of the best series I’ve seen this year, I was hoping it will go for best of seven, but that did not happened. Steve was great, he’s one of my fav player in the league, however during the 4th quarter he should opt to score instead of looking for passes as the rest of the Suns were in the hole. He was on fire in 4th quarter!

Well, i cant wait for the next round…..

WordPress 2.2 “Getz” is Out!

Named after a tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, WordPress 2.2 is finally released. After some delay, the 2.2 packed in some quite interesting new features.

WordPress Widgets allow you to easily rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with drag-and-drop simplicity. This functionality was originally available as a plugin Widgets are now included by default in the core code, significantly cleaned up, and enabled for the default themes.

Full Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 standard spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement our XML-RPC interface.

A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Google’s Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.

Infinite comment stream, meaning that on your Edit Comments page when you delete or spam a comment using the AJAX links under each comment it will bring in another comment in the background so you always have 20 items on the page. (I know it sounds geeky, but try it!)

We now protect you from activating a plugin or editing a file that will break your blog.

Core plugin and filter speed optimizations should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server.

We’ve added a hook for WYSIWYG support in a future version of Safari.

So go to WordPress.org and grab yourself a copy!

SlashGear Forum and MYiPhone Forum Tweaking

I’ve been tweaking the forums on SlashGear and MYiPhone. I can finally say the forums are done for now. I’m going to work on more things on the back end but front ends part are pretty much done. If you have any suggestions please contact me on the forum, or here. I also rearrage forum categories on SlashGear, so hop on and Join the Talk!

We are also looking for moderators, so if you are interested in helping out, shot me an email and you might in for a ride of gadgets experience :)

Now, time for me to heat up the grill and start making tuna burgers (well my wife makes them, I just grilled them)….catch ya’all later.

Intresting Job Offer, But I think I’ll Pass

I received a call this morning from a consulting firm in Dallas. Apparently I’ve been under their radar for a year and I was pretty flattered with the offer and opportunities they give me. The job was to head research and development of statistical application and managing 24 programmers. However I turned down their offer as i have bigger things I want to do in life.

What is this “Bigger thing?”. Well my father basically convinced me to do it and I wont spill the bean yet on what it is, but it will be so big, I might need some help on my way up. As for now, my primary focus is R3 Media LLC and all our network sites (slashgear, slashphone, myiphone, phonemag, and etc).

……and i want to thank James Long for putting good words about me to them and I hope we can work together in the future J.