Category Archives: Geek

We aggregate all kinds of usage data so help us make better decisions about how to improve PBwiki. Here are a few graphs I found interesting as a web geek, enjoy. Firefox Internet Explorer Browser family

We’ve been bringing up a number of new servers at the San Francisco data center. We’ve got some great Core2Duo machines which draw between 0.75A and 1.10A but have pretty substantial horsepower. So far so good, and almost all of the machines went in happy and stayed that way. An interesting aspect of hosting serversContinue reading “Hot and heavy – rackmount servers and thermal management”

I should have picked up on this earlier, but PHP does some crazy stuff with objects. Because they’re not objects. Take the following: function _init_storage($options) { if(!$se = $options[‘storage_engine’]) { trigger_error(“Error instantiating MetaStash – no storage_engine” ); } $this->engine = $se; } That looks fine, we’ve got some options defined at our constructor and it’sContinue reading “PHP OO pitfalls”

What makes PBwiki tick? For stability: – Debian Sarge Linux – rock solid with very good package management – grsecurity – paranoid security, the small overhead is worth the peace of mind – MySQL – just works – Apache – a known quantity For speed: – PHP – it’s fast and dead simple – memcachedContinue reading “Under the hood”

We’re working behind-the-scenes to seriously ramp up our server fleet. When David started PBwiki the core servers were a bunch of 2001-vintage VA Linux boxes from Craigslist — Essentially “San Carlos: 400 pounds of 2U servers $10 OBO, you pick them up tonight”. Since those heady days of off-brand ramen and Mountain Dew we’ve accumulatedContinue reading “PBwiki loves Core2Duo”

So as many of you astute readers may have noticed, we use PHP on the backend. Nathan and I ran into a curious quirk today; if you do a require_once() in a function’s context, the variables set in the required file are not visible as globals once the function returns, even to functions in theContinue reading “Interesting PHP Quirk w/require_once”

So we’re going to be working on an API for all you PBwiki coders out there to make it easy to pull PBwiki content into applications and other web services, push content from other sources into PBwiki, and get alerted when a wiki is updated. We’re just in the first design phases of rolling outContinue reading “The PBwiki API”