Google has just announced their alternative to Amazon’s s3 called ‘App Engine’. 

I think that if this is successful it will provide a shift in some of the basic web development economics and practices, even more than Amazon’s s3 has.

why?
- Small hosting providers (ones that offer a shell account for $12/month) will be marginalized. why pay for something when you get it for free?

- M&A. It will create a 3rd platform to develop on. you currently have LAMP and Windows. The google app engine provides a 3rd. The major difference is you can’t buy it. If we acquire a company who runs on this platform we have 2 choices. continue paying google for the infrastructure, or redevelop it onto LAMP. of course this suits google as their integration costs are lessened. Google might provide a ‘open source’ version of their infrastructure.. but I doubt it.

- …

While recently migrating Tschitschereengreen.com from Symfony to Django plus changing the database backend from MySQL to PostgreSQL, there were mainly two tasks more time-consuming than I’ve had thought beforehand:

SQL dump

The old database used a latin1 encoding for the database fields and utf-8 as the server and client connection encoding. With these settings, even trying to get a correctly encoded database dump from phpMyAdmin is a bad idea.

Using mysqldump with an explicitly specified character-set is much better:

mysqldump ? ?default-character-set=latin1 …

What they need the most in the short term is someone who could do customer support between 3am and 11am, London time, so someone in Australia would be perfect

Do you happen to know anyone who might be interested in the job?

Ideally it would be someone who’s familiar with web technologies (web, DNS, e-mail servers), linux and maybe some web frameworks (Django, Rails,. ..).

The candidate would be doing customer support (answering tickets) but if they’re interested they could also do sysadmin work or even development work.

see the webfaction job page for more details

The titles of the videos look very much like “must watch”. Found via ThinkPHP, thanks.

I have to deal with it now and a lot of other people too, judging by the utf8/unicode/encoding topics on the django mailing list. I have found this one thread quite interesting and looks like the problem solver, but may be I also just need to learn a bit more about the bits and pieces that make this whole thing work. This message obviously tells how to make mysql completely aware and well-handling utf8.
Next thing on the list the django setting parameter DEFAULT_CHARSET.

Read here how to change all your DB to utf8, pretty simple, but you gotta know it. Even when your app runs in latin1 only, it reduces a couple problems in case you forgot some check and utf8 is slipping through. I will let you know if I can prove that right. But since Django is trying to be unicode compliant, it’s easier to use it than to work around it.
It does at least already eliminate the problem of getting this error:

Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE)

this was discussed here.
In short:

ALTER TABLE tbl_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET …

I was fighting four days now, with a threading problem, which are known to be hard to track. But I finally found it and learned that I actually had made a beginner’s mistake.

What happened?
From the front end I trigger via AJAX a view that again starts a thread that does some import work, that might take quite a while. This enables the user to keep going and have the import run without interrupting him/her. Every once in a while an asynchronous call checks on the state of the import.
And here lies the problem: while the thread is running and busy like a bee adding data in the DB the asynchronous call to check on the state also tries to run a query and that causes the following exception:

...
 File "/Users/cain/programming/django/trunk/django/db/backends/mysql/base.py",
line 42, in execute
   return self.cursor.execute(sql, params)
 File …

Brian Aker starts work on a memcache engine for mysql. so your memcache cache acts just like a table.

the big thing here which I’ve seen asked for a couple of times on the memcached list is the ability to see a list of keys.

mysql > select * from foo1 WHERE k=”mine”;

freaking amazing.. I love these kind of mashups.

and the 2nd important event.

Django is starting a branch to integrate SQLAlchemy

two interesting posts arrived on the memcached list which might be interesting to performance people.

The first was a comparison of The fastest lanugage binding on which ‘P’ language performed better. To make a note the PHP version actually uses libmemcache a ‘C’ library which goes a bit of the way to explain the wild disparity in speeds.

The 2nd more interesting one (to me) was the discussion of how Digg switched from using mysql to memcached with v3 of their new interface to handle storing sessions, due to a hardware crash on their mysql server.

others mentioned using InnoDB for this instead of MyISAM, with the biggest issue …

are you a committer or a member of a large OSS project?

do you participate in any other large open source project?

I’m trying to get a understanding of how all the different major oss projects are being cross pollinated by having people participating in different projects.

feel free to comment, or mail me directly at ian at holsman.net

Thanks!