All posts by Alistair Lattimore

About Alistair Lattimore

My name is Alistair Lattimore, I'm in my very early 30's and live on the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. I married my high school sweet heart & we've been together for longer than I can remember. Claire and I started our family in September 2008 when Hugo was born and added a gorgeous little girl named Evie in May 2010. You can find me online in the typical hangouts, Google+, Twitter & facebook. .

Google Webmasters Facelift

Internet, Websites

The development team behind Google Webmasters have been at it again, releasing a new interface and additional features to the much loved utility.

Some points of interest about this particular update:

  • The landing page for Google Webmasters has been updated with a nicer layout and some groovy little icon action; all of the familiar links and utilities are still present on the page.
  • The user interface within the Webmasters Console has been refreshed, with stacked left navigation similar to what Google Analytics provides. At this stage, the overall bling throughout Google Webmasters doesn’t compare to Google Analytics; however it is great to see that they are making improvements to the interface regardless.
  • Subscriber statistics have been added in, so it is now possible to see how many people subscribe to the various XML feeds that your site provides. While it is quite useful to see a raw number, it would be nice to see more information about that data such as how it is trending over time, how often people are checking it and so forth. I had expected that Google would have already started exposing services provided by the recently acquired Feedburner, which would provide that level of granularity and more – maybe this is the start of that movement?

I don’t recall if the user interface had this before or not, however each section in the stacked navigation now features an overview page. Frustratingly, the overview page doesn’t actually ‘overview’ anything but provide a link into each section within it (which are already in the menu itself); so in effect you get a link and a tiny blurb per sub-section.

Nothing earth shattering in this particular release, however the constant improvement of the Google utilities is on of the things that makes them so good. I can’t wait for the next update, where I’m sure we’ll see a vastly improved user interface with better data visibility across the board.

Californication With David Duchovny

TV

If you haven’t seen the new TV series featuring David Duchovny named Californication, you need to do yourself a favour and watch it. David Duchovny plays Hank Moody, a previously successful but currently troubled novelist who struggles with his life after separating from his long time partner. Channel Ten are airing it on a Monday night at 9:30 and it is spectacular; if you liked Sex & The City – you’ll love Californication.

Nothing Like Spam To Lower Your Opinion Of A Site

Advertising, Photos, Search, Websites

Squidoo spam, regarding cat urine removers.Last year, Seth Godin launched a new service named Squidoo, which aimed to bring the power of recommendation to search. Squidoo has been gaining reasonable momentum since it launched and as a result, it has now become the next haven for spammers.

I appreciate that it might be difficult to manage the problem, however if a site like Squidoo can’t get it under control then it completely erodes the usefulness of the site in my opinion. The Squidoo spam problem has been happening for quite some time and the owners are aware of it, however it seems that they have yet to find a way to curb it.

It’s a shame really, as I hate spam so much that it has now tainted my opinion of Squidoo as a useful service. Fortunately, I find the site pretty much useless, so at least I don’t have to put up with it while browsing their site.

Are Daily Backups Really Sufficent?

Database, Hardware, Work

Monday afternoon we had a critical failure of an Oracle database at work. Within a few minutes of the fault taking place, I started seeing block corruption errors whilst I was reviewing some information in the production environment. At this stage, I was thinking that we might have dropped a disk in the SAN but referred it onto our database administrator to rectify it.

As is quite common, our environment consists of multiple Oracle 10g RAC nodes connected into a shared data source. The shared data source in this instance is a SAN, where we have a whole bunch of disks configured in groups for redundancy and performance. As soon as the database administrator became involved, it became apparent that we didn’t drop a single disk but had in fact lost access to an entire group of disks within the SAN.

Due to the manner in which the SAN and Oracle are configured, we were not in a position where running in a RAID environment was going to help. If we had dropped a single disk or a subset of disks from any group within the SAN, everything would have been fine; unfortunately we dropped an entire disk group. The end result of this was that we were forced to roll back our database to the previous nights backup.

The following days have been spent recovering the lost days data through various checks and balances; but it takes a lot of time and energy from everyone involved to make this happen. We’ve been fortunate enough to trade for several years without ever needing to roll back our production database due to some sort of significant event; which I suppose we should be thankful for.

After three years without performing a production disaster recovery, had we become complacent about data restoration and recovery as haven’t really needed it before? I believe that since we haven’t had a requirement to perform a disaster recovery for some three years, that our previous data recovery guidelines have now become out of date. Whilst a daily backup may have been more than sufficient for this particular database two or three years ago, the business has undergone significant growth since that time. The daily changeset for this database is now significant enough that, whilst having a daily backup is critical – it requires significant amounts of work to recover all of the data in a moderate time frame.

As a direct result of this disaster, we’re going to be reviewing our data recovery policies shortly. The outcome of that discussion will most likely be that we require higher levels of redundancy in our environment to reduce the impact of a failure. Whilst it would be ideal to have an entire copy of our production hardware, it probably isn’t going to be a cost effective solution. I’m open to suggestions about what sort of data recovery we implement, however I think that having some sort of independent warm spare may win out.

What have we learned out of this whole event:

  • daily backup of data is mandatory
  • daily backup of data may not be sufficient
  • verify that your backup sets are valid, invalid backup data isn’t worth the media it is stored on
  • be vigilant about keeping data recovery strategies in step with business growth and expectations

Maybe periodic disasters are actually healthy for a business? Whilst every business strives to avoid any sort of down time, I expect that as a direct result of the typically high availability of certain systems that disaster recovery isn’t put through its paces often or rigorously enough; which may result in longer downtimes or complete loss of data when an actual disaster recovery is required.

Helpful Domain Utilities

Internet, Websites

It used to be quite cumbersome and slow to perform domain research, then the domain registers became a whole lot smarter by providing you with a list of alternative ‘suggested’ domains. While the suggestions that the domain registers were suggesting were at times useful, more often than not they were utterly useless and weren’t worth the money to purchase.

Some time ago I stumbled across Domains Bot, which is an AJAX enabled domain search utility. You enter the name of the domain that you’d like to use and it comes back with an AJAX dropdown list with information on whether the domain is available or if it is for sale on one of the big domain clearing houses.

Yesterday, I followed a link into Bust A Name, which is a similar service with a twist. This time around you enter in a bunch of key words or phrases that you’d like in the domain and it goes away and tries to find all of the domains within your suggested list that are available; drastically cutting down research time.

Next time you’re looking to buy a domain, give one of these utilities a go; I’ve found them very useful.