Do I love you because you’re beautiful or are you beautiful because I love you?

Since I started to build YouAre.com I knew that the scalability was an important matter to solve. Sometimes the scalability is more important for your pocket and for the success of your startup than originally thought. According to Google, a slow performance could cost you 20% of your revenue. If you are starting a new company, you ought to know that any savings in servers can accelerate the growth of your company. These costs include hardware, software, human resources and time (for many people the most appreciated resource). Apart from the monetary costs, it’s proved that half a second delay in page load time can kill a user’s satisfaction.

The scalability is a relative problem which depends on many things: the technology used, the fault tolerance and the availability of programming staff. Many people think that scalability=performance, and they are wrong as there are more aspects to be considered. For me, the scalability is to maintain the balance between the resources and the number of users, when the size of the problem increases. The size of the problem is the growth of the number of users and the resources. A graphic which represents a good scalability could be the following:

We can appreciate how well the growth of users (n) have been solved. The amount of required resources grows logarithmically.

Some good points for scalability that should be considered:

• Good database design: Normalize the database, select a suitable DBMS, consider the users’ necessities, …
• Search engines: Use a search engine for your application. Lucene is a very high-performance text search engine library. You can also consider Nutch or Solr, both based in Lucene but oriented to web applications. If you are finding some engine more basic take a look at Sphinx.
• The Keepalive problem: Enabling Keepalive for images and external files (such as CSS) is very good for clients, but bad for servers. Keeping Keepalive off we reduce a lot of the memory of the server. A good solution is to have separate images in a different server, getting the added benefit of higher browser concurrency with multiple hostnames (it will let you to load images in parallel). In YouAre, we are using Amazon Simple Storage Service to store our images.
• Cache: Cache as much of your dynamic content as possible Memcache could be a great option.
• Take care of your code: Take care of your code and it will take care of you
• Use GNU/Linux: GNU/Linux uses spare memory to cache files on disk. This means much faster I/O.

More information | Rico Mariani
More information | Shiflett
More information | No VC required

One reason I lost interest in Facebook was having hundreds of Facebook application invitations on my board. Although I must admit that at first I received invitations for interesting applications, but now it just pisses me off. Eventually my homepage was being flooded of useless, boring and repeated applications. I sincerely prefered Facebook when these types of applications were not present. Even though it was a great idea, but now Facebook probably has an interface problem that they don’t know how to solve. Today surfing the web, I have found a solution - a simple ignore all bookmark for Facebook.

Really it’s just a simple Javascript code, and when running it, it selects the ignore options on every request, apart from friend requests, group invites and event notifications. You can access this at http://www.ignoreall.com/.

For the first time since 1885, Britan is richer than the USA (by per capita gross domestic product). Dividing the GDP of the UK we obtains $46,088 this year, compared with $45,598 in the USA. We are to thank the pound’s strength against the dollar for about 75% of Britain’s advances.

Source | BusinessWeek

We will be able to listen La Banda del Capitán Veneno by Juan Carlos Aragón tonight. They’ll play at around 00:45 (UK time). Enjoy them.

The XSL Cache extension is a mod of PHP’s XSL extension developed by the NYTimes. This extension caches the parsed XSL stylesheet representation in sites that constantly the same transform is applied. The code is already working with a few applications on the New York Times’ website.

The installation is very easy. Just run the following commands:

phpize
./configure --with-xslcache=
 –with-xsl-exsl-dir=</path><path to libexslt>
make
sudo make install
</path>

Then you have only to add the line extension=xslcache.so to php.ini file and restart the web server. I’ve been doing some tests with XSL Cache and I got good results. The following code shows how to load a stylesheet and then use it to transform a parsed XML document:

<?php
$xsltpath = '/home/harrisj/example.xsl';

$xslt = new xsltCache;
$xslt->importStyleSheet($xsltpath);
$xml = DOMDocument::loadXML($source_doc);
print $xslt->transformToXML($xml);
?>

Link | XSL Cache Project

The Spanish Ministery of Health and the Andalusian School of Public Health have developed a robot called Robin who is able to answer your questions about sexuality (diseases, information for children, …) and alcohol (risks, effects, suggests, …) through MSN Messenger. His answers can include graphics and other resources. You can add Robin at robin@msc.es. Robin’s main goal is providing information to young people about sex and alcohol. It’s a curious way of giving health information to young people. Robin uses a familiar language for boys and girls between 12 and 17 years old.

Link | El País

I can’t believe it. A 28-year-old french guy called Arash Derambarsh has been elected for President of Facebook by a non-official third party application. The story started when Derambarsh ran the application and started to invite his friends creating an official program for his campaign. When the elections were finished, Derambarsh received more than 9,000 votes and it converted him in the “first president of Facebook”. At the beginning, using this information Derambarsh got coverage with some French media. But the story raised up when it was covered by big TV channels and traditionnal media like TF1, Le Point, L’express, …
Derambarsh has become a star in France, being invited to talk about his presidency in some programs and gettings his own page in Wikipedia. We can check out his electoral program in FacebookPresident. He pledges to promote goodwill and tolerance among the three world monotheistic Faiths (Christian, Jewish and Muslim), to fight against illiteracy and analphabetism and to promote the French culture around the world.

Link | Techcrunch

I can understand Wikia would have errors. I can understand that it’s only an alpha version. I can understand I cannot search words in Spanish (with accents and ñ). But I can’t understand how they can make something like this public.

We are just at the beginning of the countdown for the new Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron release. We will be able to enjoy the final version in 4 months. I’ve read at UbuntuLand a list of some new features of Hardy Heron. The following features are noteworthy:

• Auto Detection of Monitor Frequency
• Xorg 7.3 (This feature missed the Gutsy Gibbon deadline)
• Install on an existing filesystem without overwriting /home
• Better and more robust detection of hardware
• New default theme for Gnome (style, wallpapers, colours, …)
• Handling Full Disks
• Dual/Multi Monitor Support (Currently you have to manually tweak Ubuntu if you want to use more than one monitor)
• Apparmor Integration
• GDM Face Browser
• Deleting duplicate libraries