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There’s been a lot of talk about WURFL lately and with good reason. On June 6, 2011 I launched ScientiaMobile along with my business partners, Luca Passani and Krishna Guda. If you’re reading my blog you probably know that I am the author of the popular mobile device detection library Tera-WURFL. I wrote Tera-WURFL back in 2006, when the world of mobile devices was completely scattered in every direction. At the time, the vast majority of mobile devices did not support a common set of capabilities, like MP3, MMS or HTML. »

If you’re not familiar with HAProxy, you’re missing out! HAProxy is a very intelligent high-availability reverse proxy that operates all the way up to Layer 7. Unlike Nginx (another good choice), HAProxy is not a webserver, it is designed with only high availability and load balancing in mind. Another great feature is that it’s a lot cheaper than your typical Layer 7 Load Balancer, free :). There are plenty of good articles out there on HAProxy, but I couldn’t find any Debian/Ubuntu packages for the latest version (1. »

Recently the battery in my aging laptop (Sony Vaio VGN-NR498E) took a nose dive. This is to be expected after 4 years or so, so I was not too upset about it. What I am upset about, is the fact that Sony doesn’t seem to sell a genuine replacement for the battery. The original is a VGP-BPS9/B and the only “Sony” batteries I found online were from disreputable sources and cost around $150. »

After a lot of development and tons of regression testing, Tera-WURFL 2.1.4 is finally ready for release. There has finally been a break in commits on the GitHub repo for more that a week, and no bug reports on the development branch. Changes from Tera-WURFL 2.1.3 Switched to better XML Parser (old parser, SimpleXML will still be used if XMLReader is missing) Improved matching for Apple, Android, Nokia, BlackBerry / RIM, DoCoMo, KDDI, LG and OperaMini Allowed preloading a custom TeraWurflConfig so the default is ignored Updated source documentation Updated instructions Greatly improved cmd_line_admin. »

Even though RAM is cheap these days, there are some conditions in which your Linux server could run out of it completely. Just the other day, I noticed my main hosting server went down - I could still ping it, but DNS, SSH and Apache2 were not responding, so I had to call the datacenter to have them reboot my system. After analyzing the system, I realized that some unknown process ate up all the memory and all the swap space! »