If you are in charge of a website (whether it’s yours or someone else’s) you probably know that the most important asset is the information contained in the website’s databases. And you also probably know that managing your website’s databases and ensuring their availability can be a challenging task, as databases can go offline for a lot of reasons, some trivial and some more complex, and they all require you to stay alert 24×7 to ensure everything goes on smoothly.

A few years ago, when I was still getting experience with databases loss, my local ISP suffered a disk crash that included the loss of data in dozens of my sites hosted in that particular disk. As a newbie in data backup – I didn’t have a local backup (daily backup was unheard of in that days), so the only option I had was to restore the websites’ information from the previous week’s backup and manually reload the rest of the information. It took me nearly 4 weeks to bring the sites back to their normal state. After that, daily backups were the norm.

Still, some of my clients’ websites have literally millions of database transactions in any given day and a daily backups is simply not enough to solve a database going out of service. Availability must be ensured at all cost.

Before the advent of Cloud-based Services, the only plausible solution for cases like these were renting a dedicated server and using a RAID-based disk scheme, so that when a disk crashed, the other disks would be able to continue working. This was simply too expensive but in most cases there was no other realistic solution to the 24×7 dilemma if you were to implement a website using a hosting company instead of a private datacenter.

Cloud services allow much more control over the resources you pay for. You pay what you use. This is especially true in new services such as Xeround’s Database as a Service (DBaaS) architecture, which provides optimized MySQL databases running inside three of the most used cloud database environments: Amazon EC2, Rackspace-MySQL and Heroku-MySQL, making it a very attractive and portable option for those who require availability, power and flexibility.

The DBaaS offered by Xeround brings in all the advantages of the cloud approach to your applications: It’s scalable, simple to deploy and always-available.

• Scalability – Xeround DBaaS automatically scales up and out when your need more resources, and scales down and in when you don’t need plenty of resources, so you save money. So you don’t lose money and your apps keep running smoothly.
• Simplicity – Xeround works out of the box; 1-click deployment, no code changes, zero maintenance. Nice and easy. Unlike Amazon’s ECS or RDS, all operations are either performed automatically or through a user-friendly GUI.
• Availability – Xeround comes with no downtime guarantee; your database is always available 24/7. If you need or want to move your database to a different cloud provider, Xeround will move your database to the new provider and close the old one for you, with your application unaware of the change.

These advantages, plus blazing performance (especially when it comes to high-concurrency applications, where the service really shines), made me move many of my large projects to a cloud-based environment.

Today I bring a new online tool to manage images and create funny pictures. In spite of its seemingly whimsical name, Pickjoke turns out to be a very interesting and probably useful image manipulation online tool. What it does is ask to pick an “effect” (a canvas), then upload a picture and then it mixes them up in funny and very professional ways.

Apart from making funny pictures, the tool allows you to place your banner or logo in many different pictures, with professional results so it’s really worth a look, as it can bring simple and quality effects to your images, without the effort of creating complex masks or photoshop layering. Take a look at some of the designs I played with. Think of it as an online photoshop tool, without the hassle and the cost.

It’s really simple to get it going and the image manipulation takes only a few seconds. They work really hard to provide new effects every days (they offer over 100 effects now and growing), all of them with really professional results. After you see the preview on the page, you can click on the Save button to download the picture and share all your funny photos with your friends.

If you have been following this blog, you know that I’m a fan of anime and manga and I love websites related to Japanese shows. And Naruto holds a pinnacle stop among them. I love the story, the drawing style and of course, the fights!!!! Another thing I love about this anime is, of course, the weapons characters use.

For instance, Zabuza Momochi is one of the first strong adversaries appearing at the beginning chapters of Naruto. Zabuza was once a member of the Kirigakure’s Seven Swordsmen of the Mist, a group of shinobi who wielded exceptionally large swords. The swords are passed down from one generation to another.

Zabuza’s sword is called Kubikiri Hocho which translates to something like “Decapitating Knife”. Who wouldn’t want to have this bone-crushing, flesh-ripping weapon in his hands? Ahhhh… if it only existed in real life!!!

But wait! it dos exist! Googling about the weapons found in Naruto, I found a website called HeavenlySwords.com, a website fully devoted to manufacturing and selling replica swords, not only from Naruto but from many other manga and anime series.

The 42-inch zabuza sword blade is made of 440 Stainless Steel with a width as wide as the guard. It features a hollow circle near the blade tip and partial hollow at the blade edge near the guard, similar to the design in the anime. The handle is made of metal and wrapped with leather. There are four exposed metal rings at the handle making the Zabuza Momochi Sword really eye-catching. A genuine leather sheath is also included with the sword replica. So what are you waiting for? Feel like a shinobi and hold the power of Kubikiri Hocho in your hands!

The advent of the Internet has changed the way people do many things. The most obvious changes are, of course, in the way they communicate and relate to each other (Instant Messaging, Facebook and the like, and many others). There are also changes in the way people do business, as they can now reach a global market without having to place offices in every country.

Other changes, perhaps less noticed by people, have to do with the way people look for information and answers to their problems or needs. For instance, many people use Google to search for just about any kind of information on the Web, including images, videos and blog entries like this one.

There are even specialized sites such as Download Software Here that allow you to Quickly find and download software you want, without having to browse through many unrelated pages. This particular site, actually, is offers a wide range of the latest and popular software and programs, with a clear objective: provide not only the largest software collection on the Web but also provide its visitors (customers?) with a simple, safe and fast download experience.

The two things I found really useful about this are the way software searches are performed (with results presented according to a matching score, with closer results first, and the site’s design, which allows for a really fast access and browsing experience.

Search results are displayed according to their similarity to keywords entered in the search box, with an option to search for phrases such as “PDF conversion” software by adding double quotes, much in the way Google does.

To sum up, searching for software has been very easy thanks to sites like Download Software Here,that makes searching and downloading applications a breeze.