Woah. This one smarts.

 We've been running SafariNow with a subdomain wild card DNS record for some time. We supported some integrations that allowed partners to link using subdomains for e.g. getaway.safarinow.com.

 So we implemented the wildcard DNS record.

Sorted. Except we recently discontinued this integration, but we continued seeing all kinds of weird subdomain traffic including our staging server: staging.safarinow.com plus a bunch of other 'internal' ones.

Not really sure how these domains got out into the wild but they did, and we were receiving traffic from various bots including Googlebot for them.

 So ... 301 redirected. Sorted.

 Weird thing happened though.


Our overall server response time went down dramatically.

 I dug into it via New Relic and found that our main accommodation search procedure throughput had more than halved.

 My assumption is that each sub domain being hosted in its own appdomain, and each appdomain has its own EntLib cache

 Once all traffic got consolidated to www, the cache suddenly came into its own.

Queries which once hit the database, now hit the cache. CPU on the database server is way down. Average server response has almost halved to around 2-300 milliseconds.

the temporal (i think)

before i forget - another piece of afrikaburn awesomeness.

The rise of the pig of love

This is the first incarnation of the pig. I had bigger plans for him, but ... there's always next year.

Photosynth: The Wish

i took these photos around 8 am on the second day of the burn. I was too hungover to focus on getting it fully 'synthy', so some of it got a bit lost. but the feeling of the wish is pretty amazingly captured.

i wish i'd noticed that it was also the most beautiful morning ever. all i remember is thinking i ought to take the photographs. >sigh<

Get off facebook permanently

After some time on facebook I started to get that echo chamber / goldfish bowl feeling.

So I can upload badly focused photos, 'tag' people, write on 'walls' and get all manner of well meaning lentils asking me to save darfur, all the while having to read the self aggrandizing status updates of a few idiots for whom facebook is the equivalent of actually having a life?

Well, color me underwhelmed..

And my mother in law is hanging around too?

ciao baby:

you can delete your account too: just go here

(you know you want to)