http://iamseanmurphy.com Thoughts, news, code by Sean Murphy Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:40:26 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en If you need to search through a large array, or you search arrays frequently in your Javascript code, or if you do both, chances are a binary search will give you better performance than a linear search (read: for loop). One caveat, however, is that binary search algorithms only work ... http://iamseanmurphy.com/2009/04/29/binary-search-for-javascript-arrays/ Nobody wants their website to go down, or worse, for users to notice the site is down. Because of this most larger websites will run on multiple servers to provide some level of high availability. In a multi-server architecture there is typically a load balancer (or cluster of load balancers) ... http://iamseanmurphy.com/2009/04/22/a-better-haproxy-health-check-for-dynamic-websites/ I thought it might be a nice idea to start posting useful little commands and bits of code every now and then--ones I've found to be particularly useful. So here's the first one, recursive find and replace. A masterfully crafted regular expression paired with this command can save you hours ... http://iamseanmurphy.com/2009/04/11/recursive-find-and-replace-with-grep-and-perl/ Coming up with a suitable name for a business, product, or website is something I do on a fairly regular basis. In brainstorming a name I often make lists of words I'd like to use, like adjectives and nouns than relate the product. Then I start combining the words to ... http://iamseanmurphy.com/2009/03/30/taking-the-pain-out-of-domain-hunting/ I've had my eye on the advances that are being made in the Comet arena for a while now, but it was only this past weekend that I finally sat down and used it for a project. In doing so, there was a particular configuration problem I needed to address, ... http://iamseanmurphy.com/2009/03/02/high-performance-comet-on-a-shoestring/ How's that for a search engine friendly title, eh? This is just a quick note for anyone who has to deal with Network Solutions hosting (for clients or otherwise). Apperantly Network Solutions doesn't run PHP with Apache's mod_php, but rather as a CGI application. That means if you try to put ... http://iamseanmurphy.com/2009/02/21/htaccess-file-causes-500-internal-server-error-on-network-solutions/ A week or so ago I was working on a bug in the auto-linking code for Laconica, the software that powers Indenti.ca. Squashing that particular bug wasn't too hard, but I wanted to take the functionality a step further (closer to the calibre of Gmail) and it turns out, writing ... http://iamseanmurphy.com/2008/12/01/auto-linking-urls-with-php/ I wasn't sure it could be done, but I've done it. I'm happy to say that I've made it even easier to use the LongURL web service, specifically on your own site. Today I wrote a jQuery plugin that allows you to add LongURL support to a website in like, ... http://iamseanmurphy.com/2008/10/10/longurl-integration-for-your-website/ An alternative technology quickly gaining popularity these days is CouchDB, a document-based database system for semi-structured data. I wasn't sure what that meant at first, so I read as much as I could about it. The result? I couldn't wait to use it. I decided CouchDB would be a good fit ... http://iamseanmurphy.com/2008/09/08/couchdb-view-generation/ It's been two weeks since I conceptualized LongURL, and a productive two weeks at that! Last Monday I officially launched the service (which provides a handy REST API) with support for a dozen or so shortening services like TinyURL.com. Once I stepped away from the problem for a little while ... http://iamseanmurphy.com/2008/08/28/longurlrestoring-order-to-the-universe/