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Showing posts from August, 2012

Simple Script to test Sharding on MongoDB

Sharding, eh? There's so many questions on a daily basis about sharding - What is sharding? How do I do shard? When do I do shard? How do I know I need to shard? How many shards do I need? What shard key should I use? Can I change my shard key? What's a hotspot? How many shards do I need? Do I have a replica set within a shard? etc  and everyone is unique with a different use-case so the answer isn't always the same. Here's the official documents page (on sharding) and Kristina's blog , which is simply excellent on so many levels - I recommend reading both links (btw, it'll take a while :). Kristina uses some awesome analogies to explain sharding. This blog post isn't about the technicalities of sharding, there are much more intelligent people than me who can explain that. I wrote a simple script to learn a bit more sharding and for reproducing issues and I thought I'd share it. It's written in bash beca

Help, someone's trying to hack my Facebook account!

So I received a phone call with a friend saying the exact words in the title. This friend suddenly started receiving password notifications for several of their social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter etc) and other applications. The more interesting aspect is that this friend has an upcoming legal case so the multiple password notifications from independent applications and sites was a little more than conincidental. Given all the incorrect uses of the word "hacker", I refuse to call this person or people "hacker(s)" and really, what he/she/they did is not that subtle. I had some advice for my friend, which I first bounced off another good friend, Brian Honan , who was extremely helpful as always and had some awesome additions. So this post is not intended to tell you how to be safe on the Internet or how to harden your laptop/destop/phone. I simply thought I'd publicise this advice in case anyone-else ran into the same scenario (bear in mind that this