Facebook is bigger than Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Turkey combined

January 8th, 2009 3 Comments »

facebook

Yes you are reading that right, Facebook is bigger than Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Turkey combined in terms of population. Facebook has a staggering count of 150 million users according to Mark Zuckerberg (Founder, Facebook).

Country population breakdown:

Turkey – 71,892,808
Canada – 33,515,000
Australia – 21,468,700
New Zealand – 4,280,000
———————-
Total 131,246,508*

That, my friend, is really impressive! It makes you wonder how they keep their systems running smoothly, how they scale up rapidly.

Facebook has more than 10,000 servers and leverages mostly open-source software across a distributed architecture, with thousands of MySQL instances. “It’s almost a new challenge every day,”

Jonathan Heiliger (Vice President of Technical Operations, Facebook)
CNET interview

That’s not the only thing, Facebook has more than 10 billion photos! Some additional stats:

  • 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site daily
  • Over one petabyte of photo storage
  • Serving over 15 billion photo images per day
  • Photo traffic peaks at over 300,000 images served per second

Truth is, impressive is an understatement.

 

*Source: Wikipedia

SURF JACK: Even HTTPS will not save you

August 11th, 2008 Comments Off

There’s a new security tool that Surf Jack that allows one to hijack HTTP connections to steal cookies – even ones on HTTPS sites. Works on both Wifi (monitor mode) and Ethernet.

Here’s a proof of concept to steal session cookies on HTTP and HTTPS sites that do not set the Cookie secure flag.

It’s really a scary to see that even Gmail was vulnerable before to these types of attack. So, how about Yahoo Mail? And what more if you use Hotmail Live? Makes you really think if there is such thing as 100% security nowadays.

Woopra is a breath of fresh air for web analytics

June 11th, 2008 5 Comments »

I’m probably one of the first early users to get access to Woopra‘s beta couple of months ago. Quite frankly, I didn’t use it. I felt Woopra wasn’t going to be as good as what we currently use (Google Analytics). I even said to myself, “it’s just gonna be another Google Analytics with the same sets of data. What can they probably offer? What else is new?”

woopra

But as soon as I read about Woopra on CenterNetworks this morning, I gave it a whirl. I logged in to my Woopra account, copy/pasted the JS snippet on Mployd. I thought it would take some time for the data to funnel to my dashboard.

And so I tried to download and install the Woopra desktop application. To my surprise, data from the site is already crunching in!

Here’s a screenshot of the Woopra desktop application on my machine after I installed it.

woopra1

woopra2

See that? After 10 mins I’m already getting what I need to know from our visitors. That’s really neat!

And one cool thing about it is that it sits on my desktop/system tray for quick access. Woopra integrated a lot of awesome features into the app aside from analytics. There’s just too much to list them down here.

The Woopra desktop application is currently available in beta to Windows, MacOS, and Linux (note that Java is required to run the app).

We know that Google Analytics dominates the free web analytics space. I’d say Woopra can quickly become #2 with the added innovations to the app.

I’ve tried almost every single free web analytics app out there and Woopra is a breath of fresh air. I simply love it.

–aj

PHP Everywhere Conference Programme

November 30th, 2007 1 Comment »
  7:30 8:00 Registration  
  8:30 8:40 Welcome and Opening Remarks Host / Emcee
  8:40 9:00 PHP User Group Introduction Pres / VP all officers
  9:00 9:20 Keynote Speaker Dr. Alvin Marcelo
  9:20 9:40 Break / Sponsor Speech Raffle / UNDP-IOSN Asean +3
  9:40 10:20 Accessing MySQL from within PHP: Step by Step + Sponsor Speech Gavin Lim
  10:20 11:00 IT Trends (Business) JR Yap
  11:00 11:40 Drupal and Zend Studio: Build any web application from scratch in 10 minutes Roger Filomeno
  11:40 12:30 Lunch / Sponsor Speech Mobius Games, Raffle, Tipid PC, Raffle, Offshoring
  12:30 1:10 Google Analytics and Other Developer Product Aileen Apollo
  1:10 1:50 Mambo Management Basics for Educational/Governenment/Enterprise Sector Applications Richard Peter Ong
  1:50 2:30 CakePHP Revisited” – challenging the claims of Rapid Application Development (RAD) Reuben Ravago
  2:30 2:40 Break / Sponsor Speech Sulit.com.ph
  2:40 3:30 Test Driven Development in PHP: Recap (PHP) [1] Andre John Cruz
  3:30 4:10 Using AJAX with PHP (PHP) Reynold Lariza
  4:10 4:50 Website Growing Pains (When you outgrow your website) Jay De Jesus (Founder Titik Pilipino)
  4:50 5:30 Web Application Security Eduardo Tongson
  5:30 6:10 LAMP for Life: The Beginning to Infinity (PHP/MYSQL/APACHE/LINUX) Edison Tan
  6:10 6:40 Symfony Framework 101 Bobby Reyes

 

More information here

Friday Madness: Early adopters roundup

October 19th, 2007 Comments Off

Microsoft Aquisition Plans: 20 Companies Per Year

“Not to be outdone by Murdoch and his slew of MySpace announcements, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has made some pretty big announcements today at the Web 2.0 Conference, speaking on Microsoft’s plans to acquire 20 companies per year for the next five years, ranging from $50 million to $1 billion, reports Venturebeat.”

ms.jpg

Are you one of those companies?

Source

Windows Live SkyDrive: Upgraded to 1GB

“These past couple of months since our last release, we asked ourselves, “What can we do to make SkyDrive even better?” The most obvious answer is something that our users have asked us to do: give out more storage. We’re excited to announce that we’re doubling everyone’s storage to 1 GB!”

skydrive.jpg

MozyHome Free has 2 GB of free backup space.

Source

Microsoft Live Search 411

“Live Search 411 enables you to do this for free, from any phone in the US. Just call 1-800-CALL-411 (1-800-225-5411) and say where you are and what you’re looking for. You can also get text messages, maps, traffic maps, and text-based driving directions sent to your mobile phone (with a service plan that supports text messages or data access, of course!).”

411.jpg

Source

Don’t be a iPirate arrr else…

“In a bold move, the UMass Office of Information Technologies makes a stand against violating intellectual property rights by….violating intellectual property rights?”

pirate.jpg

Source

Rich? Got some US$ 100,000 lying around? Get a Media Wall for your room.

perceptive_pixels.jpg
Source

GPhone is coming

“Although rumors of a possible Google Phone have been making the rounds really hard lately, any such phone will have to be amazing to grab enough end-user and media attention. Expectations are high, but since we’re dreaming, here’s Gizmodo’s wishlist.”

gphone.jpg

Marissa Mayer didn’t comment nor deny on the question “Have you seen the GPhone?” by Om Malik .

Source

High resolution image hints at ‘Mona Lisa’s’ eyebrows

“One day I say, if I can find only one hair, only one hair of the eyebrow, I will have definitively the proof that originally Leonardo da Vinci had painted eyelash and eyebrow,” said Cotte.

mona_lisa.jpg

Source

Robot Cannon Kills, Software/Hardware to blame?

“We’re not used to thinking of them this way. But many advanced military weapons are essentially robotic — picking targets out automatically, slewing into position, and waiting only for a human to pull the trigger. Most of the time. Once in a while, though, these machines start firing mysteriously on their own.”

Remember iRobot?

robot.jpg
Sources here and here

Other shorts

–aj