Some thoughts on outtages

Cloud, everybody wants it, some actually use it. So what’s my take away from AWS’ recent outtage? Background So first off, we had two pieces of our infrastructure failing (three if we include our Multi-AV RDS) — both of which involve EBS. Numero uno One of those pieces in my immediate reach was a MySQL server, which we use to keep sessions. And to say the least about AWS and in their defense, the instance had run for almost 550 days and had never given us much or any reason to let us down....

April 23, 2011 · 8 min

Tracking PHP errors

track_errors provides the means to catch an error message emitted from PHP. It’s something I like to use during the development of various applications, or to get a handle on legacy code. Here are a few examples why! For example Imagine the following remote HTTP call: So whenever this call fails, it will return false and also emit an error message: Some people use @ to suppress this error message — an absolute no-go for reasons such as:...

November 27, 2010 · 2 min

Fan Error

A Fan Error in this case is not when your Facebook fan page is down. I received this message after my Lenovo X61s notebook decided to quit and I restarted it. The screen said “Fan Error”, and the notebook refused to continue to the boot process. A rescue party Of course this is the last thing you want on a Sunday evening, but in true GTD fashion, I wanted to fix it right away....

October 18, 2009 · 2 min