Recently it's been a task of mine to setup a new SQL database cluster. My favourite database engine of late has been Percona's XtraDB, and so naturally I was quick to choose Percona Cluster as a solution.

This installation was a Cluster 5.5.28 install performed on a RackSpace public cloud server using a clean Ubuntu 12.10 image- your mileage with other platforms, OSes and Percona Server versions may vary. (more)

Recently I had to go about setting up my own configurations for Webalizer. Grouping user-agents into meaningful sections seemed a worthwhile cause, so I ran through the mobile user-agent string list and setup matches for mobile devices on top of some of the more straightforward ones for desktop. The result is a pretty clean config that handles (in my experience) about 90% of my incoming traffic. I've also tried to provide a little bit of forward-planning for version numbers on some of the browsers which now update their major version almost daily (curse you, chrome), but you should plan to keep that aspect up to date yourself. (more)

Whilst they offer some great free services (edit: Google Apps is now only offered on paid subscriptions, even under the previous 5 user cap. But if you got in beforehand, you do get to keep it for free...), Google's products with their user-friendly interfaces can occaisonally be confusing for those of us who know what we're doing - a whole new set of terminology to learn just to be able to do what you had previously learned in the 'normal' / 'homebrew' / whatever way.

This is a quick cheatsheet on how to achieve some of the fundamental and more advanced mail behaviours and operations that you'd expect from any mailserver via your Google Apps admin console. (more)

JSON schema is the modern equivalent to XSchema/DDML or the good old ancient DTDs. It provides a lightweight, self-describing and abstract protocol for describing and validating data formats and models. There are validator implementations in many languages, but the most obvious use is in pre-send validation for frontend JavaScript applications. A good validator and some simple wrappers or data binding (like say, this...) and you can code up a complex and powerful new application in days.

Its simple JSON structure and savviness of the community has thus far kept any kind of introductory documentation from cropping up, instead one must simply read through the spec and digest it for themselves. Since this is a time-consuming process, I did up a quick cheatsheet of the properties involved in schema declarations so that once one understands the basic principle you don't have to go back and check for what the name of something was repeatedly. (more)