Grep My Mind Wonder what’s on my mind? Now you know.

Below is a copy of the letters that I’ve sent to my US Congressman and Senators regarding my views of #PRISM and spying on US citizens.

I am extremely saddened, frustrated and angered by the revelations of spying of Americans citizens by the US government as reported in The Guardian this week http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data and http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order

I strongly believe this violates the 4th amendment of the US constitution and requires a vigorous investigation into what monitoring the US government does of its citizens. The results of this investigation should be made public with frequent and detailed updates for the American people.

I also strongly believe that President Obama and any other politician involved should be impeached for supporting such a blatant violation of the US constitution.

I look forward to hearing your response and seeing what action you take to protect the civil rights of all Americans.

I also created a petition on whitehouse.gov https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/create-new-church-committee-investigate-how-when-and-why-us-government-monitors-and-tracks-us/qLSdHkt0 calling for an investigation into the legality of #PRISM and other programs that may violate the 4th Amendment of the US Constitution.

I strongly urge everyone to do the same.

Posted under Uncategorized

When you think about SEO do you remember to think about how your website handles HTTP status codes? The odds are that you don’t. Your “page not found” probably returns a 404 (everyone knows about that one) but what about programmatic error pages or login pages? Search engines index pretty much anything that has a 200 status code. This means if you don’t pay attention you can end up with pages indexed & findable that shouldn’t be.

For example, if you are logged out, Washington Post’s newsletter page 302 redirects you to a login page that then serves a 200. This means a Google search for newsletters for washingtonpost.com gets indexed with the text from the login page. If they were to serve a 401 “Unauthorized” on the pages that require logins, these login pages would not be indexed. Use caution with that scenario though. It might be better to handle search engines differently than normal users so the content can be indexed.

Read on for more examples

Posted under Internet, SEO, Tips & Tricks, Web Development

When: 6:30pm Monday April 6th, 2009
Where: CBS Interactive – 235 2nd Street San Francisco, CA
RSVP: How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data

Join the SF MySQL Meetup for our April meetup where Bret Taylor from FriendFeed talks about how they store their data in a "schema-less" system on top of MySQL. FriendFeed stores over 250 million entries and a bunch of other data, from comments and "likes" to friend lists.

As the database has grown, they have tried to iteratively deal with the scaling issues that come with rapid growth. They did the typical things, like using read slaves and memcache to increase read throughput and sharding our database to improve write throughput. However, as FriendFeed grew, scaling their existing features to accommodate more traffic turned out to be much less of an issue than adding new features.

In particular, making schema changes or adding indexes to a database with more than 10 – 20 million rows completely locks the database for hours at a time. After some deliberation, FriendFeed decided to implement a "schema-less" storage system on top of MySQL rather than use a completely new storage system. This talk attempts to describe the high-level details of the system.

More about the event after the break

Posted under Events, Internet, mysql, Technology, Tips & Tricks, Web Development

When: 6:30pm Thursday April 2nd, 2009
Where: CBS Interactive – 235 2nd Street San Francisco, CA
RSVP: Diving into the Yahoo! Open Stack

• Overview
  • What is the Yahoo! Open Stack?
    • Developer Tools – YUI, Tutorials
    • YOS SDK for PHP
  • Data APIs – YQL, BOSS …
  • Social APIs – Profiles, Connections, Updates, …
  • Application Platform
    • OpenSocial Support
• How does it all work?
  • Development Workflow
• Building an open application with PHP and YOS
• Common Problems & Solutions
  • CAJA
  • OpenSocial

More about the event after the break

Posted under Events, Internet, PHP, Technology, Tips & Tricks, Web Development

• Uploading phptos from this weekend to Flickr #
• Watching Airwolf from netflix on the xbox #
• 2minutes is a *really* long time if you have a screaming baby #
• Just wrote a quick blog entry about how I like to use svn hooks: http://tinyurl.com/dk4wfe #
• I can’t believe I actually did this…but I just purposefully clicked on a ad on a website. That’s the 1st time except in testing @GameSpot. #

Posted under Twitter