The NetCircle – Now hiring PHP Developer in Shanghai

I can’t remember when and why it started, but one day Viscape was following me on Twitter. I followed back. Every now and then a message popped up and added some more information to the rough idea the Twitter Bio had given me before. Being familiar with the name, Viscape passed my selective attention filter and I saw them on Facebook, Blog articles, their comments here and there. After a while Viscape had my sympathy even though at that moment I’ve spent about 11seconds on their site.

But finally our big day came. I saw on Twitter that there was a “be a travel writer” contest going on. It took a couple of reminders to look at the Blog entry itself and as I realized that I really need to hurry to participate, they got me and I signed up. Which led to my first real encounter with the site itself.

I didn’t find anything. I thought I could set up a destination and write a review but I think I was wrong. Actually I’m still struggling with the site and I really pray for some “Tine usability” improvements BUT I still like them. Normally I would have left after a couple of Clicks but Viscape managed to get my sympathy before knowing them and like you tread a friend with more patience I tread Viscape with more patience.

Here we see how Social Media developed a great relationship even before we knew each other. I think thats a power that the average Marketing person like myself gets tears in their eyes. On the other hand it’s as easy as that.

Dear Viscape I hope our relationship will bloom (winning the contest would not hurt too, here’s my Paris review: http://viscape.com/destinations/77/paris_france My name is Reisesteiss and I don’t have a profile picture – yet)

The picture btw was taken where I used to play as a child. That would have been a nice review I guess.

Update: I left a comment on the blog about my problems with the site and shortly after I recieved a private mail from the community manager Dorothy Carlow (from her Yahoo email address) that they are still in Beta but really appreciate suggestions … Great! Now I’ll become an official fan of Viscape on Facebook.

Update2: I also got a Welcome E-Mail inviting me to add the community manager Dorothy as a friend. AND look at the comments!!! Good luck to you Viscape. Dorothy rocks!

BarCamp for women, Munich, 30.08.2008

It could have been “Chicken Camp”, “CoffeeandCookies Camp” or “Bitching Camp” but it turned out to be exactly what we were hoping for a BarCamp for Women. Or was it even THE BarCamp for Women? I´m pretty sure it was the first one in Germany addressed to Women. Does anybody have informations about Women´s BarCamps in the rest of the world?

Starting the session planning it was obvious that we had a lack of routine. My take is that less than 15% of the girls have been to a BarCamp before. But a hint of chaos didn’t effect the quality of the sessions. We had a lot to share, discuss, learn, eat and laugh.

The question why we needed the woman´s BarCamp and what was different to a “normal” BarCamp remains. I´ll try to gibe some answers to that here.

first thing:

- Me and my “has never been state of the art Siemens Amilo Laptop” didn’t feel out of place. Actually Apple products were kind of rare. At least compared to the average BarCamp. Women of cause love tech gadgets too and some of us were very well equipped, but women somehow tend to buy a “reasonable” car etc. You get the point, right?

- So one big difference is the 99,7% Macbook/ iPhone rate. Which is not meant to scare the women without off, but still it does…

- That might be one of the reasons why women like to get familiar with the concept of BarCamps first and that is easier in a more relaxed environment.

- I´m pretty sure that none of the girls was scared of the guys at BarCamps or thought they would be mean or so. It´s more about getting familiar with the atmosphere, getting to know what to expect, learning how the “knowledge level” of the others is, just getting beyond some insecurities. It´s just easier to get over your inhibitions when you are among other girls.

- Anita Pleschko, who I met during the camp answered the “why a BarCamp especially for women” in her Blog. The article is in German but to quote one thing: “women prefer a – men free – environment to experiment with new possibilities and ideas”

- A very important thing about this BarCamp: It wasn’t “against men” but “for women”. Personally I very skeptic when it comes to “only for …” events. But until we (the women) are a recognizable percentage at BarCamps we might need these “get familiar, training events”. When we are finally familiar with everything we still might keep that just because its a lot of fun.

- And yes there was a very female aspect about the women´s BarCamp – delivered by men. The guys responsible for the catering took very good care of us and had a very female selection of food and drinks (Chai latte, yoghurt with honey and walnuts, …). The party after the Camp took place at the restaurant which was also responsible for the catering “Kater Mikesch” and instead of a serious amount of beer the girls mainly stuck to white wine.

Great Camp, great people, great ideas, great everthing – thanks to everybody involved.

This weeks idea: Private Cinema, Popcorn and the choice between two Movies.

The incredible Hulk vs. Speed Racer (if i remember right)

Well it wasn´t really a choice – at least for me – because it was IMDB rating 7,5 vs. 6,5. I´m not sure, if all my colleagues decide this way, still it turned out that the movies to be shown was “Hulk”.

Today I was checking on one of my favorite blog and scrolling over the comments I had a relevation… There is a patch (a simple text file) which adds data replication to Memcached. It is called Repcached and it is the best thing ever… since the frozen fridge!

I mean Memcache is a very important software when dealing with high loaded website and we use it a lot in our projects. Your script is overwhelmed by slow queries?! No problem, just put a Memcache in between, store the results once and enjoy them until the expiration date. It is all about speed as it is only stored in-memory; and then there is no safety, no persistency. But it is ok as long as it is used as query caching for example; if the data is not stored in Memcache, it can still be found in the database.

The problem is more when using Memcache to store data that can’t be easily regenerated, like very complex and slow query (which will kill your app just by running during business hours) or user session. The later was a big concern for us. There are others alternative than Memcache to store session data but…

• File storage is not a solution anymore with a cluster of servers.
• Cookie storage is relatively unsafe and not adapted for our average session data size.
• Database is the most common solution but performance quickly can become a big issue when dealing with so much update queries (table locking, transaction overhead…).

Memcache was then chosen and quickly prove its efficiency at frequently delivering and updating data. But there is no persistency and by growing too fast the service starting to behave strangely; kicking out some users of the site randomly… Not nice.

Then began a month of uncertainty, watching Ganglia reports every morning, trying to find a pattern in those mysterious logs out. By profiling connection data, tuning (slab size especially) and partitioning the sessions between 2 instances (from the client code), we then came back to a normal behavior. And despite restarting them every day (for memory cleaning), we didn’t have any problem with it since 1 year already. Still I remember those times when Memcache died…

But yeah replication is there for Memcache and it solves all those problems. Basically this patch will allow 2 instances to replicate the data between each other. And then if one instance dies, the data will still be available on the other instance. There are some “nice” drawings explaining the whole process on the Repcached wiki. Raw, simple and powerful.

As a bonus, it then makes perfectly sense in PHP to use the function Memcache::addServer. This creates a pool of connection, in which you can retrieve data and then will handle naturally the replication. Switching from one instance to another in case one is unavailable. The users are now safe.