Stephen Pontes [.com]

Small Team, Big Impact: The People Behind Photos (video above) from Facebook’s “Life at Facebook” page

Whoa! According to the above video Facebook is currently (as of three months ago) storing roughly 19,000 Terabytes of photos.

The video states that they’re growing at a rate of 1 billion new photos a month (2,000 every second). Based on a VERY rough guesstimate of 500K a picture (half a megabyte) which doesn’t include the various “versions” of a file that they store including thumbnail, “medium” and the full size, that works out to an additional 476 Terabytes in a month. To give you a sense of size, that’s approximately the space required to store 142,606,336 songs… which is increasing each month.

It must be mindblowing to see the infrastructure that has to be in place to not only handle that number of photos but to also accommodate the explosive growth! Anyone at Facebook want to give me a tour?

I always feel bad messing up the bed!

If you couldn’t tell from the title, this one’s a bit nerdy.

I was (as I always am) working on the media server tonight and noticed I wasn’t getting the speeds I used to when transferring data locally. I was maxing out at around 4-5MB/sec (indicating 100Mbit speeds). The router and ethernet card in the Ubuntu machine are both Gigabit capable, and worked in Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04). After some googling, I stumbled on to this thread which showcased how to disable the RTL8169 driver in 8.10 (since it’s apparently causing headaches to people others than just myself).

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-network

Press enter after the above command is entered into the Terminal. Now paste the following:

# Prevent r8169.ko from loading and allow r1000.ko to load
blacklist r8169

Now save the file by pressing Control + O then Enter. You can now exit the document by pressing Control + X

Now reboot Ubuntu (or restart the networking interface if you know how) and you should see 1000Mbits listed when you right click the network icon in the task bar and get info about your connections!

Safari has the ability to use a custom stylesheet to modify how you see content on the web. For example, if websites’ text are frequently too small for you to read you can modify a css file to override the text size setting for all websites to increase your text’s size. Unfortunately, most people haven’t heard of this feature.

This file, in addition to increasing text size, can block ads. Read on for the “how”.
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I know there’re a million other stories just like mine – but here it is anyway.

I’ve been a Comcast customer for roughly 4 years (off and on) – and I’m fast approaching the point of canceling my service completely. While the service itself has been steady and reliable over the 4 years, the customer service varies wildly. I’ve had extremely positive experiences: Call center CS rep and Supervisor Michelle and Judy were extremely helpful; But I’ve also had downright horrible experiences with other call centers (I’m looking at you – Guadalajara, Mexico) and service centers (260 Potrero Hill location).

Read on for my complete and fun-filled experience.

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I just recently worked on a redesign of 1984jobs.com – a website that aggregates and has user submitted job postings catering to the Apple community. The postings are for designers, developers and support technicians that want to work with Apple technologies. The old website wasn’t horrible per se, but it was definitely worthy of a facelift.
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The title won’t make sense unless you’re experiencing the issue.

I recently noticed that I had some weird behavior with input boxes in Safari (not sure if this affects other browsers). When horizontally resizing my window, the input box randomly decides to add a ton of padding below itself. We’re talking at least 50px of space here.

The issue boiled down to bad math. See if you can spot my mistake:

form {
	background-color: #d6dde5;
	width: 90%;
	margin: 20px auto;
	border: 0;
	text-shadow: #ffffff 0px 1px 1px;
	border: 1px solid #B7BDC4;
	padding: 1% 1% 1.5% 1%;
	}

form input {
	font-size: 1.25em;
	height: 1.5em;
	padding: 1%;
	width: 98%;
	border: 1px solid #999999;
	}

Catch it? The input is 98% wide, with 1% padding on all sides (top, right, bottom and left). This does add up to 100% of the space we allocated (98% of the form itself)….but I didn’t take the border of just 1 dang pixel around the inputs into consideration. This 1px border apparently wreaks havoc when dealing in percentages and caused the behavior I experienced.

Changing my css to read border: 0; fixed the issue.

Moral of the story: always double check your math.

Just wiped my Ubuntu Installation to have a fresh 8.10 start.

This is my archive of what I did after installation

• OpenSSH
• Transmission
• LAMP Server
• Boxee!
• Samba

OpenSSH

To install openSSH I used this guide, but basically the command is as follows:

# sudo apt-get install openssh-server

Transmission

Installing Transmission was incredibly easy.

Applications > Add/Remove > Transmission

Then you can also install the daemon so it runs automatically on launch (from this site):

# aptitude install transmission
# wget http://www.vanutsteen.nl/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/transmission-daemon -O /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon
# chmod +x /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon
# adduser --home /dev/null --shell /bin/false --no-create-home --disabled-login transmission
# mkdir /etc/transmission
# chown transmission:transmission -R /etc/transmission
update-rc.d transmission-daemon defaults

LAMP Server

Referenced this guide for my installation process. A LAMP server is one that uses “Linux, Apache, MYSQL and PHP”…and it’s fortunately easy to setup in a desktop Ubuntu installation:

First, we’ll set up apache2:

sudo apt-get install apache2

Now, because I backed up my apache docs and whatnot, I have to make sure to enable all the modules referenced by my apache configs. Time to install WebDav! I referenced this website for this part…

# sudo a2enmod dav davfs dav_lock auth_digest

PHP comes next:

# sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5

Then MySQL (from this site)

# sudo apt-get install mysql-server
# sudo apt-get install php5-mysql

Lastly, PHPmyAdmin as well as the modules to allow MySQL to work with Apache:

# sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql php5-mysql phpmyadmin

You can verify PHP and mySQL are running correctly by navigating to /phpmyadmin and logging in using the root / password combo you set during the phpmyadmin setup in the step above.

Boxee!

via Boxee.tv:

• Go to System > Administration > Software Sources.
• In Sources Software dialogue, select Third-Party Software tab, click Add, and enter: deb http://apt.boxee.tv intrepid main
• After closing this dialogue you can either use Synaptics and select Boxee for download, or use a terminal window, and enter sudo apt-get install boxee.

Then, to run Boxee:

Applications > Sound & Video > Boxee

…and fix Boxee playback…via this site

# sudo rm /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio
# killall pulseaudio
# sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio
# sudo apt-get install esound

Also important: enable the restricted video drivers (proprietary) for best results in Boxee.

Samba

From help.ubuntu.com, a Samba installation is pretty easy…

sudo apt-get install samba

I just transferred to a new host. The images in my posts, as you might have noticed, haven’t transferred over. I’m working with the old host to see if I can still access my old site to grab them. If not, no biggie

Let me know if you notice any issues.

In the ongoing debates between Obama and McCain issues like foreign policy, tax rebates and the war in Iraq are often referred to as hot topics. But what about the topic most important to me, a young voter? What’s being done about my education?
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