Let’s say you have a huge table in postgres and the table file on disk is bloated because it contains old versions of rows or deleted rows. You really want to run VACUUM FULL to reclaim that space. However, you can’t afford a maintenance window so that the exclusive lock from VACUUM FULL won’t block queries on that table. pg_reorg brilliantly creates a new table without the bloat, and it swaps into place without blocking a bunch of queries.

http://www.depesz.com/index.php/2011/07/06/bloat-happens/

This is a good comparison of the different services for using different fonts on your website. Google Web Fonts is the only completely free one, and it’s the only one I’ve used myself.

http://sprungmarker.de/wp-content/uploads/webfont-services/

The write cache does not have a battery, so you can lose data during a power outage, which is extremely important on a DB server. If you turn the write cache off, it becomes terribly slow.

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/03/02/ssd-xfs-lvm-fsync-write-cache-barrier-and-lost-transactions/

That’s funny.

http://www.techspot.com/news/41988-windows-98-traffic-higher-than-windows-phone-7-traffic.html

This is a nice tutorial of some of the features of the BZR Pipeline plugin. You will want to watch this in fullscreen (click the link in the bottom right corner).

This is an interesting article about how Google App Engine doesn’t make scaling as painless as one might expect.

http://farmdev.com/thoughts/89/the-promise-of-the-cloud/

Sloppy, the slow proxy, lets you see what is like to use your website from a distant or slow network. It is a java applet, so it will work any platform, but it only does HTTP unlike the more generic Linux solution to simulate latency:

sudo tc qdisc add dev lo root netem delay 500ms

In addition to Google’s PageSpeed analysis tool, they now have an apache module that will automatically apply best practices such as minimizing javascript (i.e. reducing extraneous whitespace such as indentation) or moving large chunks of inline javascript into an external file so that the browser can cache it.
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/overview.html

This is an interesting article on how to make VACUUM more effective at reclaiming space when you have a table that is so large that you don’t want to run VACUUM FULL on it, since it will lock the whole table to reclaim all the space.

http://blog.endpoint.com/2010/09/reducing-bloat-without-locking.html

hsandbox is incredibly simple, but it is definitely something I wish existed when I was taking my first programming class in C in college.

In addition to making it easier to deal with larger snippets of code in interpreted languages like python, ruby, and perl, it makes experimenting in C, C++, Java and other compiled languages. As soon as you write the file in your editor, it recompiles and runs the code. In the screenshot below, I am using vim in the top half the terminal, and the output shows up in the bottom half of the terminal. It splits the terminal using GNU Screen.