Blogs

[05 May 2012 : Kacey Bui]    Making a loyalty program stick

Wouldn't it be nice to have simple rule in building a rewards program? Yes, it would. But this simple rule will certainly be invalid because every business is different. Size, culture, industry, budget, location, and so on, are some of the main aspects that separate businesses. Obviously, there are a host of things you ought to ponder over when planning and building your loyalty program. Read more...

[03 Aug 2010 : Emil Koutanov]    Fun with LVM - Part II: Moving an LVM

So you"ve resized the LVM partition and want to move it to make room for neighbouring partitions on the same disk. I have some bad news: no free product allows you to move an LVM partition. Acronis apparently lets you move raw partitions bit-by-bit. The good folks at parted have also promised that they will add support for raw partitions in the future - which will include LVM. Read more...

[02 Aug 2010 : Emil Koutanov]    Fun with LVM - Part I: Resizing an LVM

I"ve just had to go through a very daunting task of resizing LVMs and ROOT partitions for Fedora Core 12. This is always a big thing, particularly if you"re operating on the root partition, so I thought I"d scribble something down in a blog so the world can have a record of it. Here I"m talking about Fedora, but the instructions should work on any distro. Read more...

[02 Jun 2010 : Emil Koutanov]    Building a highly available disk stack using DRBD

Highly available disk stacks are nothing new. At the time of writing, Dell will happily sell you a no-single-point-of-failure MD3000 (SAS) or an MD3000i (iSCSI) array with a pair of 146GB 15K RPM SAS drives for about $4,500. Not bad, eh? Still, if you"re on a first name basis with Linux and have a couple of machines to spare, you can set up a shared-nothing disk cluster for next to nothing. Read more...

[07 Apr 2010 : Kacey Bui]    Gnome Shell

I’ve been using the new Gnome Shell for a little while now, and I’ve been refraining from making comments until I had a chance to adapt to some “controversial” things. Now that I have adapted to some, but not to others, I can comment on my experience. Read more...

[11 Dec 2009 : Emil Koutanov]    Database 2.0 - Part III

The next database won’t require a schema. It won’t require special tools to manage the tablespace. It won’t require a JDBC connection and it won’t require an ORM framework. You’ll give it an object and it will store it. You’ll ask for an object and you’ll get one back. Most importantly, it will be intrinsically aware of transactions. You’ll be able to query transactions, audit them and report on them, construct statistical charts: without a single line of code. Read more...

[08 Dec 2009 : Emil Koutanov]    Database 2.0 - Part II

Object-oriented databases are naturally fast. Much faster than their SQL counterparts. They are re-emerging in the world of embedded devices, video games, CAD applications – the general class of desktop applications that require persistent storage but don’t necessarily have a large server to connect to. They can get storage from an ODBMS, because they don’t rely on inefficient relational technologies that warrant large and expensive computer hardware. Read more...

[01 Dec 2009 : Emil Koutanov]    Database 2.0 - Part I

I wanted to see if I could pull it off. Write a fully transaction-aware native object database that would compete directly with other relational and object databases, and give them all a run for their money. It took months of painstaking work. But all this is behind me now. What lies ahead is even more painstaking work! Except this time I’m not trying to tell a computer what to do, I’m trying to tell the developer community what to do. Read more...