Excellent mongo meetup again – their meetups are always informative and have good presenters, today all three were great.

1) Custom shard balancer from GameChanger
2) Mongolian – node.js driver for mongo by Marcello
3) Variety – schema analyzer for mongo by James Cropcho

I especially enjoyed Marcello’s and James’ presentations, because both of them are so passionate about what they do and defy the awesomeness of NYC tech scene today: take a NYC-made product and make it better, and open source too. I took James’ ruby class a couple of weeks ago and it was great as well, his easy and engaging manner of speaking and unusual fashion sense just draw attention – highly recommended.

Shard balancer demo was very cool as well, but seemed to solve kind of a custom problem, which wouldn’t apply to as many mongo users as the other two.

Shard balancer (python): https://github.com/gamechanger/presplit
Variety: https://github.com/JamesCropcho/variety
Mongolian:https://github.com/marcello3d/node-mongolian

Just randomly came across this issue again today, as one of the vendor apps didn’t render correctly in IE8 (sigh).

Remember to include at the very top of the page. That’ll do it.

Well, of course it turned to be that hosting was not an issue. Someone found a hole in one of the test sites I’ve had there and sneaked in a pretty interesting script, in Chinese! I had a good laugh once I found it: chinese script injecting redirects to Russian sites, pretty darn cool, isn’t it.

So after I’ve removed all suspicious files and the script in question, everything came back to normal. Phew!

And it was a good time to tidy things up anyways, so all’s well that ends well!

I’ve been staying on the same hosting provider for years now just because it’s cheap, worked OK, and there was no real need to change it. However, big disappointment – something that I just discovered by chance: all htaccess files were hijacked and a bunch of weird redirects were added to the top and bottom of each file. The site would load fine, but you see a lot of traffic going to some shady Russian site (duh, not surprising, and I’m from Russia) before it actually loads.

So I spent the past 20-30 mins removing that junk, only to discover that shady redirects were still going on. Then I looked into the root web directory, and there I found a non-previously-existent master htaccess file with same traffic going to basooo dot ru. WTF! Not only existing files were compromised, but also a new files were inserted as well.

Moving off hostmonster ASAP. Screenshot of the shady stuff: https://ntanya54.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/screen-shot-2012-04-13-at-11-28-07-pm.png

Just found this awesome deck from Justin Searle on small teams, agile development and a couple related things:

Deck: http://speakerdeck.com/u/searls/p/the-mythical-team-month

Video: http://vimeo.com/38321427

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon classes offered at General Assembly, and one of them was a 3-hour class on Ruby. So of course I had to sign up!

I don’t necessarily want to become a Ruby developer, but I’ve always wanted to at least know the basics and how it works and if it’s really as easy as they say to get up and running with a ruby/rails powered web app.

So what’s the answer? The short answer is: it is fairly easy to get the gist of it and put together a quick prototype. Gotchas: lots of things to install, and with any language, you have to know what you’re doing (things such as MVC, database schema design, version control, etc.)

Overall, it was a great experience! I loved that the class was full (30 people), close to 1/3 of them were ladies, and the instructor (James Cropcho) gave us plenty of hands-on time and was available to answer all questions (and chewed like 25 pieces of gum during the course of the class).

Will definitely be checking out more Glasses at General Assembly – highly recommended.