I would’ve written sooner about Joomla! Day Malaysia 2008, but I spent most of Sunday cringed in between the bed and the toilet. Here are a bunch of quick notes I took at the event, with some thoughts tacked on to it.

Overall impressions? It was good for a Joomla! beginner. While I would consider myself a Joomla! beginner, I’ve seen many a CMS and maybe am a tad bit jaded. There is a great amount of interest in Joomla! - about 200 people registered for a paid for event (not cheap either - RM70 for a Joomla! forum member, and RM150 for regular visitors). So there’s definitely money to be made in Joomla! and CMSes in general.

Location? This is the first time I’ve been to the rather infamous Cititel hotel, tacked to MidValley. Held at the 5th floor, I noticed that people were allowed to smoke within the corridors. I consider this a …

Today, the root file system on our public svn server nearly ran out of disk space. The reason? The /tmp directory was quickly filling up with temporary files created by websvn, which I set up parallel to the FishEye repository browser for testing purposes. A quick investigation of the apache log files revealed the culprit - a crawler from Microsoft was running haywire and decided to ignore the rules in the robots.txt file, even though it did actually looked at the file before!

Here is how robots.txt looked like (I now changed it to disallow everything):

User-agent: *
Disallow: /fisheye/
Disallow: /websvn/

If I am not mistaken, no crawler should actually consider going into the SVN browser directories. Some snippets from the apache log:

I was with a customer last week, who leads technology and operations for one of the world's largest companies. We were talking through his priorities for the upcoming year, and on a page filled with various traditional priorities (consolidation, energy management, disaster recovery, regulatory compliance) were two interesting words.

"Open Source."

I asked what that meant, why it was there. He said they'd done an audit of the firm's development activities, and found an overwhelming number ("hundreds") of open source

projects that had been completed behind the scenes, beyond management's oversight. The projects were designed to solve problems deemed too expensive or difficult to solve with proprietary technologies - from meeting a tough budget, to automating a new process. And rather than fight the trend, they figured it was …

At OSCON, Brian and Dormando gave their ever famous talk, Memcached and MySQL: Everything You Need To Know. I didn’t attend the tutorial, but they assured me it was similar to what was given at the MySQL Conference 2008 (everything, but the very nice buttons dormando was giving out with the memcached logo!). Great, because not only is memcached hot, but I have notes from their talk: Memcached and MySQL tutorial.

Interestingly enough (and this didn’t happen at OSCON), …

I will be speaking on July 29th in New York at an Entrepreneurs Forum on A Free Panel on Cloud Computing. With a number of experts including Hank Williams of KloudShare, Mike Nolet of AppNexus, and Hans Zaunere of New York PHP fame is should be a great event.

The focus of my presentation will be on “Extending existing applications to leverage the cloud” where I will be discussing both the advantages of the cloud, and the complexities and issues that you will encounter such as data management, data consistency, loss of control, security and latency for example.

Using traditional MySQL based applications I’ll be providing an approach that can lead to your application gaining greater power of cloud computing.

About the Author

Ronald Bradford provides …

Did you know that many parts of the MySQL web sites provide news and updates via RSS Feeds? Markus Popp from our web team did a great job on making some of these more visible by adding RSS icons to the respective pages. If you want to keep up with what's happing at MySQL, consider adding the following feeds to your feed reader:

• New downloads on dev.mysql.com
  
• New DevZone articles
• PlanetMySQL (You probably knew that one already)
• MySQL Forge - All New Items
• …

I caught Facebook - Needle in a Haystack: Efficient Storage of Billions of Photos on Flowgram. First up, I’m not a big fan of Flowgrams - the format is sensible, slide and voice, is excellent, but the delivery in a web browser isn’t optimal… make downloadable videos!

The talk however, was excellent. Do watch it, and learn a bit more about Facebook’s infrastructure. Anyway, some notes I took from the talk:

• “We’re one of the largest MySQL installations in the world”
• Use memcache - “We have memcache because databases aren’t fast” (later on in the questions)
• Separate team focusing on APE (Apache, PHP and Extensions that they work on)
• 6.5 billion total images, 4-5 sizes stored for each, so 30 billion files, of about 540TB total… During peak? 475,000 images served per second, and growing by …

Eli White from Digg presented. It was an interesting talk… He covered:

You are going to get hacked…
- SQL injection
- XSS
- CSRF (cross site request forgery)
- Session Hijacking

Slides (PDF, ODP) have SQL injection/XSS example, with the hole, the attack, and the prevention.

Technorati Tags: mysqlconf, mysql, mysqluc08, mysqluc2008, eli white, …

FYI, I changed two parameters on Planet MySQL to accomodate the current flood of postings coming from the MySQL Conference attendees: we now display the last 25 posts (instead of 10) on the front page, the RSS feed now includes the latest 100 posts (instead of 50). This should make sure that posts actually make it to the front page for at least some time, before they fall off again.

Please keep up the good blogging!

Joe Stump, Lead Architect, Digg. Slides should make its way at Joe’s website soon enough.

Mainly works on the backend, makes sure its scalable, can all the Digg buttons be served, et al.

Application layer is loosely coupled from your data. Whole point of SOA? You can put a service in front of the DB, and move between DB’s if required.

They do use MySQL, but its pretty vanilla.

Old habits die hard
- Data requests are sequential (I need foo, bar, bleh, ecky)
- Data requests are blocking (When you need foo, nothing else is happening)
- Tightly coupled (mysql_query, and if you’re using DB abstraction layer even, you’re still using SQL… you then can’t use CouchDB for instance)
- Scaling is not abstracted (a lot of caching are in the front end code. Its a problem when you start scaling your teams out). They …