Today I taught myself how to use Zend_Cache and implemented it within 20 minutes. It’s super easy and very effective. Take a look at the code sample below and you’ll be up and running in no time.

Step 1: Setup the Cache

$frontendOptions = array(
	'lifetime' => 180,	// Cache for 3 minutes
	'automatic_serialization' => true

);
$backendOptions = array('cache_dir' => dirname(__FILE__) . '/cache/');
$cache = Zend_Cache::factory(
	'Core',
	'File',
	$frontendOptions,
	$backendOptions);

Step 2: Use the Cache

$data = null;

if(!$data = $cache->load('data'))
{
	$service = new Service(API_KEY);
	$result = $service->generateReport();
	$data = $service->getReport();
	$cache->save($data, 'data');
}

else

{
	print("Cache Hit!");
}

The page load time went from about 9 seconds to 0.5 seconds! 18x faster and it only took a few lines of code. Awesome.

My main motivation for caching the data ($data in the code example) was actually to reduce the load on the web service which provides the data. We have a good relationship with the company providing the service but there’s a good chance they would become annoyed if we hammered their system to get the exact same data over and over. The load time improvement was a good side effect, though!

For more information on Zend_Cache which comes with the Zend Framework, check out the reference guide and API documentation.

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Kara and I just returned from a seven-day trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. We stayed at Royal Decameron Costa Flamingos all-inclusive resort which had fantastic scenery and was reasonably priced at $1700 for the week including all meals, unlimited drinks, taxis to and from the airport, and airfare.

The best part of most vacations is being able to relax and we sure did. Most days went like so: wake up at 10:00; eat breakfast; get in the ocean until 12:00; swim until 1:00; eat lunch; swim some more; get ready for dinner and eat it; take pictures and enjoy one of five bars. Awesome.

We did venture out of the resort once on foot in an effort to go downtown but were too frightened by our surroundings so we promptly turned around after walking for about 10 minutes. After that we decided to book a snorkeling tour instead which was great because the taxi picked us up right in front of the resort.

My only complaints were lack of air conditioning everywhere except the rooms and mediocre food. But Kara and I quickly found a work-around by making reservations at the on-site Piccolo restaurant which was enclosed (cooler but not air conditioned) and had food at least three times better than the other restaurants we tried so therefore we ate there three out of the seven nights. Even so, a quick trip to Applebee’s when we returned was in order to get some decent dessert. For some reason only flan and nasty, hard cookies were supplied.

On-site Restaurant Rating (best to worst):

1. Piccolo (Italian)
2. Rodizio (Brazilian Grill)
3. Wok (Thai)
4. Buffets (each night the theme changes)
5. Mexicano (Mexican)
6. JapJap (Japanese)

The bars were numerous (5) and inviting. My favorite drink was the mango margarita followed closely by what they called a frozen brown cow which was simply Kahlua and milk. Many of the reviews we read prior to vacationing slammed the bars for putting very little alcohol in the drinks. I can say from first-hand ivory throne-visiting experience that we did not feel the same way. Hey Pepto-Bismol!

Enough rambling. Enjoy the pictures!

See the rest of the pictures!

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I was blown away by the price difference:

Amazon.com - Garmin Nuvi 250 - Price comparison between silver and pink versions

Silver: $109.99
Pink: $471.99
——————–
Difference: $362.00

The difference alone could purchase
3.3 units of the silver model!

Garmin isn’t the only company who discriminates based on color. Want a black Mac? Better have some “I’m rich!” money laying around. Apple used to have both black and white MacBooks and the typical difference was $100+.

What ridiculous discrepancies have you found?

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Midway through Heroes: Season 3 I realized how quickly video streaming technology has evolved in the last few years. Think about the multitude of ways you can now get your fix.

• Regular old TV
• Digital Video Recorder (DVR): TiVo, MythTV, cable box DVR
• Hulu
• YouTube (and other video-sharing sites)
• NetFlix’s Watch Instantly
• Networks’ websites (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, etc.)
• NetFlix and Blockbuster DVDs to your door
• Video rental stores
• Red Box (at grocery stores and various other locations)
• On my iPhone using NBC’s mobile player.

EDIT:
Loren brought to my attention another category which I left off entirely, which is software/hardware combos for consuming the aforementioned services:

• Boxee
• Apple TV
• Roku Digital Video Player
• Xbox 360
• LG Network Blu-ray Players
• Samsung Network Blu-ray Players

Just 15 years ago that list was a lot smaller: TV, video rental stores, VCR.

What’s your favorite viewing service?

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Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

It is simple. So simple.

• Sign up for an account.
• Download and install the awesome S3 Firefox Organizer (S3Fox) Firefox add-on.
• Upload the files you want to be served up like hotcakes.
• Update the links in your HTML files to point to the new location.
  Example: http://s3.amazonaws.com/jeremy/blog/images/large_bandwidth_sucking_header.jpg
  Note that the example is intended to show the format of the URL and does not point to a valid resource.

Too good to be true? Nope. The S3 files are served up lickety split and best of all it takes the load off of your cheap host which allows it to function much more efficiently. So far I have moved my site’s header and the LightBox JS file. Why didn’t I move the other JS files and images? Because Google hosts all of the popular JavaScript libraries for free.

How much does it cost?
Very little, unless your site becomes wildly popular. 1 million requests costs one dollar plus 17 cents per GB transfered. That’s right. 1,000,000 GET requests = $1.00 + $0.17/GB.

Let’s assume the average size of the elements being served from your Amazon S3 bucket is 10KB.
10KB = 0.01MB = 0.00001GB
1,000,000 requests x 0.00001GB = 10GB
10GB x $0.17/GB = $1.70
1,000,000 requests x $0.01/10,000 requests = $1.00
Total Download Cost: $2.70

Your cheap site can now support 1,000,000 requests per month for a whopping $9.65 ($6.95 for BlueHost and $2.70 for Amazon S3). And if your site gets Dugg or on the front page of Reddit, Amazon S3 will scale without sweating a drop.

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Oprah’s House

3 sharks as seen through a glass-bottom boat

Related posts:

1. Welcome to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

While synchronizing the drives, I decided to monitor the progress. What I saw was truly amazing.


jeremy@fileserver1:~$ cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10]

md0 : active raid1 sda1[0] sdb1[1]
879084736 blocks [2/2] [UU]
[=>...................] resync = 8.1% (71688192/879084736) finish=116.2min speed=115709K/sec


Holy cow! 116MB/s!

That means the SATA bus is processing at least 332MB/s since it has to read the data from one drive and then write the data to the other drive. That’s 2,656Mb/s or 2,656,000,000 bits per second which equates to 2.7 bits per picosecond! I’d like to see anyone do anything 2.7 times in one picosecond.

I figured with this much throughput the CPU would be chugging away. Nope. 4%.

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sudo apt-get install openssh-server

You’re done. Now you can use ssh to remotely connect to your Ubuntu box.

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Do you have recommendations? Show off in the comments.

Now I’m sure you’re wondering why there are six (6) hard drives in this system.

• This system would double as a storage server for me.
• The motherboard supports striping and mirroring (RAID 0+1), so I would setup the drives to mirror and stripe for redundancy and for performance benefits.
• As cheap as drives are, why not?

My guess is that this system should last for about 8 years which puts it at $520.10 per year. Not bad at all…

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Kara and I have worked feverishly over the last year-and-a-half to pay off our high interest (8.25%) second mortgage. When we bought our home in October of 2006 we opted to do an 85/15 mortgage setup to conserve our savings. Instead of a down payment we got a lawnmower, washer, drier, refrigerator, king-size bed, grill, and paint for our entire house. Looking back, I’m glad we followed that route and I can proudly say that our only debt is our primary mortgage!

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