Jaan Paljasma | Tech Blog

Google Trends updated recently with one cool (yet useless) and one good-looking feature. Visualized hot trends as they appear Google Trends Gets New Monthly Top Charts and Trending Topics Displayed In Color Visualizations. If you ask me, this UI and animation looks too similar to Windows 8 UI. Its cool to watch full screen, but in my opinion its useless and provides no real value besides trying to being cool. Google Trends - Hot Searches looks little bit too similar to Windows 8 UI Click here to open Useless Visualized Google Search Trends . Google Top Charts Now that's something I would like to see more from Google. They have this vast amounts of data being processed through their systems, and I would not even call it big data, gig (antic) data or pet (abyte) data would be more appropriate. What they have done is put together monthly TOP charts for everything thats happening, trending or interesting, and doing it absolutely nice way: Google Top Charts Categories -...

Route 53 Health Checks Website availability is utmost important if your business depends on it. There are lots of free services (and paid services, too) to constantly monitor your site's availability and send you an email if website is not available. Some of these services offer periodic checks for every 15 minutes, some in 5, and only few support checking your site's health every 60 seconds or less. While this sounds good, what can you do about when your site actually is down? Imagine scenario like this: it's 8pm Friday, nobody is in the office, tech support does not pick up the phone. And your website is down, totally. Yes, you received alert, even multiple alerts. Even some clients call, and your competitors rub hands. Here's what you can do: enable Route53 health checks and host backup site in Amazon S3 (the backup site can simply say that "Sorry, we are currently experiencing technical issues; please check back later." - it is 100 times better than...

Did you know that first Web Server in America was installed 22 years ago? That was almost a year after world's first web server was launched at CERN, Switzerland. It contained database of 300 000 research papers. "Today, if you don't have access to the web, you're considered disadvantaged," says physicist Paul Kunz, who on Dec. 12, 1991, installed the first web server in America on an IBM mainframe computer at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). Here's how SLAC default home page looked like (it was 1991, nobody knew HTML5 back then): Image credit: SLAC In a way, you could say that Paul Kunz built world's first search engine, for 300,000 high energy physics publications in a database called SLAC. It was pretty complicated to use; first of all you needed to have a mainframe account, and second, because of the language the database engine on mainframe used. Later on they added email interface to it, so people could query by email and g...

Upgrading your Amazon RDS instance from MySQL version 5.1 to MySQL 5.5 has never been easier, as Amazon Web Services announced earlier this week. Now you can modify your MySQL RDS instance using feature called Major Feature Upgrade . MySQL 5.5 includes several features and performance benefits over MySQL that may be of interest to you including enhanced multi-core scaling, better use of I/O capacity , and enhanced monitoring by means of the performance schema . MySQL 5.5 defaults to version 1.1 of the InnoDB Plugin, which improves on version 1.0 (the default for MySQL 5.1) by adding faster recovery, multiple buffer pool instances, and asynchronous I/O. Here's how you can upgrade your RDS instance: Log in to your AWS Console Go to RDS, and select your instance From Instance Actions  drop down, choose Modify Select latest version of MySQL 5.5 from the drop down, To upgrade immediately, select the Apply Immediately check box. To delay the upgrade to the next maintenance wi...

Setting proper Tax rates in Magento Go can be pretty frustrating, especially if you need to set up different tax percentages settings per zip code (or zip code range). And for some reason, Magento Go does not come with the default tax settings and they don't maintain the list. Luckily, Magento Go has feature to export tax settings, edit the rates in Excel, and then import them back. Sounds great? Export existing Magento Go tax rates To export your tax file, go to  Sales  →  Tax  →  Manage Tax Zones & Rates Open the file in spreadsheet editor you like, add more tax rules and export the file back to CSV. When you export CSV from Office, then by default the CSV contents looks like normal CSV: Code,Country,State,Zip/Post Code,Rate,Zip/Post is Range,Range From,Range To,default US-CA-*-Rate 1,US,CA,*,8.5,,,, US-NY-*-Rate 1,US,NY,*,8.375,,,, However there is a catch - if you try to import the modified file, it won't work. How to import tax rate...

Today, Amazon AWS announced yet another performance update to its EC2 Cross-Region EBS Snapshot Copy. Back in December 12, 2012, they announced EBS Snapshot Copy to allow cross-region transfer of existing snapshots for better disaster recovery. Starting today, they claim they will only transfer the data that has changed since your last snapshot copy, thus transferring and storing less data and completing the copy faster. Initiating Snapshot Copy Copy Dialog Copy Progress Even when copying from the first time, the cross-region copy performance is excellent; 10GB disk snapshot was transferred and became available 7 minutes after initiating the copy. EBS Snapshot Copy is simple to use. In the AWS Management Console, you can select the snapshot to be copied, set the destination region, and start the copy. This feature can also be accessed via an EC2 Command Line Interface or an EC2 API. Read more here:  http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGu...

+Amazon Web Services  Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Amazon RDS gives you access to the capabilities of a familiar MySQL, Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server database engine. This means that the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing databases can be used with Amazon RDS. But RDS it's not just any regular cloud MySQL service. It is being used in large-scale, mission-critical applications such as Samsung SmartTV, Flipboard, Pinterest, AirBNB, NASA JPL and many-many more. We have been using Amazon RDS in Multi-AZ deployment (db.m1.large) for more than a year for our CMS PaaS, and can say only good about it. The only big downtime that we encountered was year ago, when there was major downtime in one of US-East regions which largely affected for example Netflix. Again, thanks to a cloud, we were able to relocate our databases to...

This morning, very popular e-Commerce SaaS platform Magento Go was experiencing major technical problems - customers' storefronts were not opening, or were constantly timing out. Their support was unable to handle overwhelming amounts of messages for quite some time, and while usually their live chat is great, this time - no help. They posted on their Support page following message: June 2, 2013 7:44:12 AM PDT  —   Some Magento Go stores are currently experiencing issues that are affecting their site. We've identified the root cause of the issue and are currently working to get all stores back up and running.  Thank you for your patience. Please check back every 30 minutes for updates. Still have questions? Please contact Tech Support (support@magento.com) Well, that was few hours after initial problem started. Now, after 6+ hours there is no change. What's most frustrating is that there is no official announcement in their Twitter account  - would be...