Im Not Playing Any More

After a little googling I stumbled over this PDF from Matt @ Last.fm, which gives a wonderful idea of how Last.fm deal with their scaling issues.

While some things won't work for our implementations of products, mainly because we're using Cloud Computing rather than maintaining our own hardware - however there are some very good ideas in here.

Worth a read while you're digesting the last of the mince pies!

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/12/10/how-to-explain-to-clients-that-they-are-wrong/

How to tell your clients that they are wrong in what they want!

I'm trying to resolve the problems caused by the self taught nature of my PHP coding.  It's not a huge problem, however I do know that there are things that I don't know, don't do with the greatest efficiently as I could be doing.

So, how do you un-learn those years of bad habits?  Those methods for doing the every day mundane and routine things that I've developed over years of programming?

We've two Thecus products in the office, both N5200 boxes, now both dead or dying.  The first died about a month ago, and while Thecus are trying to recover the falled raid, it's not playing.  It started to report one of the HDD's as broken, which isn't quite true.  Then it decided that there isn't a raid there, which is also not true.  So that' broken.

So this leaves us one Raid with aaall those lovley files on... which was found this morning flashing on and off in a very

worrying way....  It took about 10 minutes to take out all the disks and realize that it was the base unit that is broken.  God knows how many of the disks it's taken with with the dam thing, we'll have to get the other one fixed to fix this one, simply to get another replacement raid to put the dam data on!

Some days back to work after a week off are always fun.