I have a couple of spare invites for Yahoo’s new location service Fire Eagle, which had a limited beta launch today. Leave a comment if you want one.
I had a quick play earlier and as TechCrunch noted, it’s a little light on features right now! If nothing else, the current beta gives a glimpse of how they will manage the privacy issues surrounding a “always on” awareness of your location.
I might see what I can hack together to use it while doing the Trailwalker Challenge later this year!
geohash.org popped up recently with a method of generating short hash codes for geographical locations. The codes have some interesting properties and the algorithm is documented on wikipedia.
I recently started doing a Project Euler problem a day as a fun diversion. I found the geohash algorithm intriguing, so it became my “Euler problem” for the day!
Having done it, I’m not sure I’ll find a use for it myself, but if anyone else finds it handy, do let me know!
I wanted to track the delay of a mysql slave server in Munin, and found nothing appropriate after a quick google. So, in case anyone else finds it useful, here is a plugin which will allow you to do just that.
Here’s a typical graph:
Download: mysql_slave (1 Kb)
EDIT: I wrote this so I could better understand the recovery time of a slave which had 13 hours of updates to catch up on. While it was good for that, it’s less useful for the day-to-day lag as munin will only be polling it every 5 minutes. A better way would be to use mk-heartbeat to get a more accurate moving average.