What’s more, Amazon AWS is introducing Free Usage Tier, where you can try almost all of their services for free for a year, isn’t that great? You can get 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support), or you can get Microsoft Windows-based Server if you want, together with all other supporting services (Elastic Load Balancer, Amazon S3, etc.).

svn update .

The command above will update all files under the directory you are in. The trailing “dot” is required, and represents the current working copy you are currently in.

Sometimes, the update result can be surprising, as some of your modified local copies may have modified the same section as the most recent copies that you are trying to update with, thus it creates conflicts. You need to resolve the conflict by manually editing the conflicted files, or just simply accept any version of the files (working copy, or repository).

After sometime, I was wondering, if there is a way that I could know what would the update result be, that would be awesome! I will be able to know, which files are going to have conflict, and which files are safe to update.

After spending some time on searching, I found that this command could tell me what going to be the update result is:

svn merge --dry-run -r BASE:HEAD .

Specifying the revision BASE:HEAD will make the merge command behaves the same as the update command. It will show you what will be the result of the update command.

By using svn merge‘s --dry-run parameter, it will try the operation, without making any changes. So, no need to worry when a conflict happens. Just be prepared to resolve the conflict when you run the svn update command later.

I’ve been reading other Steve Jobs’ books, one of which is “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs“, which has been giving me great inspirations.

Looking forward to reading the life story about a person who transforms the world!

While rumor says that Facebook Timeline will be available for all Facebook users on 29 Sept 2011, there’s no sign of it until today, 2 Nov 2011. No one knows what could have caused the long delay.

However, Facebook Timeline is currently offered for Facebook developers. Here’s mine:

Have you get your Facebook Timeline? If you want to convert your Facebook’s profile page into Facebook Timeline now, even before it is launched to most Facebook users, just simply drop a comment below.

On 22 Sept 2011, Mark announced a “major” profile redesign called Facebook Timeline, which will be the biggest Facebook interface change yet. It will completely change the way users interact with Facebook. It will be available to most users on 29 Sept 2011. Let’s see how Facebook users react to it.

Memcache vs. Memcached in PHP

There are 2 PECL memcache libraries in PHP, memcache and memcached. Memcache is older, but more widely used; whereas memcached is newer, more feature rich, but less used. This wiki article explains the difference between the two libraries. Since it is more popular, memcache library is preferred.

Memcached In Action

In a very basic usage, memcached is used when trying to get a data. If the expected memcached key doesn’t exists (either never been created, or has expired), fetch the data from database, and set the memcache key for future use.

Here’s how it would look like in PHP:

// memcached configurations
$memcacheServers = array('host1', 'host2', 'host3');
$memcachePort = 11211; 

// initialize memcached
$memcache = new Memcache;
foreach($memcacheServers as $memcacheServer) {
  $memcache->addServer($memcacheServer, $memcachePort);
}

// memcached simple usage
$data = $memcache->get('mykey');
if (FALSE == $data) {
  $data = databaseQuery(); // get data from database
  $memcache->set('mykey', $data, 0, $expiryTime);
}

The program above will try to get mykey from memcached. It will fail initially, and will do database query and store the result in memcached for a specified expiry time. Subsequently, it will successfully get mykey from memcache, because it has been set before, until the memcached key expires.

Despite all the greatness that Google has now, have you ever wondered, how did the original Google website look like? Some of you might not even familiar with Internet at that time. Back in 1997, here’s how Google looks like:

Looks familiar? What do you think?

Review Board is one of the tool where tool-assisted code review comes in. Review Board consolidates all review request, lets you review codes, without any pain.

For the past month, I have troubled system team in my company to set up Review Board on one of our server. But all the efforts are paid off. At least, for my development team, where we normally use email to send out a review request, sees a light from it.

More people are involved in code review, and reviews are better in quality.

Since Review Board is introduced in my development team, there are more people involved in code review. I guess it’s because now it is easier for them to give reviews using Review Board, rather than sending out emails. Reviews are also better in quality.

Review in context makes code review easier

The best thing about Review Board is code reviews are done in context. To review codes, you only need to click on line numbers where you want to comment on, and type your review.

Knowledge Sharing

Review Board supports multiple projects and keep track of past reviews. Anyone can get back to older reviews and learn something from past reviews. Learning possibilities are endless.

Right now, Google+ is under field trial, which allows only invited people to get in and try Google+. If you haven’t get one, you might need to wait until Google+ is available for public.

Google+ vs. Facebook

Google+ introduces “circle”, which is more like “friend” in Facebook. To add friends in Google+, you need to add people to your circle. Unlike Facebook, Google+ adopts asymmetric follow. It means that you can add other person to your circle without him adding you to his circle.

Learn More

You can learn more about Google+ if you haven’t get an invitation yet.