YouTube yearly costs for storage/networking – estimate

I was wondering how much it costs Google every year to be running Youtube, and I decided to do some quick cost analysis.

Luckily, Google does give some Youtube press statistics and we can calculate some metrics using a Youtube reference video. I also used the excellent youtube-dl tool for analyzing file sizes.

MySQL Bulk Inserts – Performance Measurement

I had always wanted to test the performance of MySQL’s bulk inserts and finally got a chance to do so – I was pretty surprised at the results.

XPath for accessing Flickr’s popular tags

I was finally able my parsing of my Flickr-based project to use XPath instead of iterating through nests of XML elements to get at the daily, weekly and all-time popular tags on Flickr’s most popular tags page.