If you’re interested in looking at what goes into the MySQL documentation, there’s a new and kind of cool gizmo we’ve just installed that makes browsing the docs sources a breeze. Fisheye lets you browse by project, directory, author, date, and other criteria. It also provides an easy way to get to the complete changelogs, and even provides a customisable changelog RSS feed — for example, this feed has commits for just the NDB API documentation, and this is a feed of (all) my commits to the mysqldoc repository.

The …

Some people might have lives, but I have a webserver.

I think I’ve now upgraded just about everything (software-wise) that’s upgradable on this machine:

• Apache 1.3.33 -> 1.3.37 (Thanks for hiding the win32 binaries under “Archives” when the *nix version is out in plain view, guys)
• PHP 5.0.3 -> 5.1.4 (This required ditching my old php.ini file and doing a new one from scratch)
• MySQL 5.1.8 -> 5.1.11 (Dead easy, even on Windows - yea, TEAM!)
• Perl 5.8.7 -> 5.8.8
• Python 2.3.2 -> 2.4.3
• Tcl 8.4.12 -> 8.5.0
• BlogCMS .3.4.6 -> WordPress 2.0.4 (The RSS feed was broken, I was getting tired of seeing my posts quoted elsewhere sans formatting, and every time I tried messing with the code, it just got worse)
• Singapore 0.9.11 -> 0.10.0 (The one part of BlogCMS that I still really liked after switching …

Just a quick note to say that the MySQL Forge Wiki looks like the rest of the Forge, and there’s now SpamBlacklist installed. If spam still persists (you know you’re popular when spam’s abound, right?), we might have to install captchas. From an accessibility perspective, I don’t quite like this idea, so lets hope the spam stays under control nonetheless.

Maybe inflammatory, but I don’t quite remember spam on the Fedora Project wiki. Do Python-based wikis suffer less spam (or no spam) than the PHP-based ones? (otherwise known as MoinMoin vs. MediaWiki)

The method I would like to describe is based on the webserver lighttpd.

Lighttpd is a single process webserver written for high traffic sites. It supports fast-cgi out of the box which makes it ideal for hosting PHP applications. There are lots of nice modules for the daily work like mod_access or mod_rewrite. For more infos see the internals

There are also some benchmarks there. Lighty´s home is always worth having a look at.

Continue reading "Methods to reduce the load of your webserver by caching content: using lighttpd, MySQL UDF, LUA and speed everything up."

As I am writing and publishing more and more blog entries, it becomes important that I have good and reliable backups. I know that if something happens and I cannot recover my entries and comments, I would be terribly upset. So I want to share my process here. Please feel free to share your backup methods by commenting. Hopefully somebody will find it useful.

Backup comprises two parts:

1. File backup

On a Linux machine with Apache, the default web files and directories reside in /var/www/html. Yours may be different. This include all php files and sub-directories like wp-content, wp-include, etc.

The easiest way to do it is to use tar command with -z to compress them. My post here gives you a pointer on tar.

These files are fairly static, so you do not need to back them up …

I thought it would be fun, and informative to conduct some interviews with web developers on my blog. I'm starting off with someone that most of my blog readers probably already know, and many have probably even had a beer with - Sean Corfield.

If you don't know Sean, he was the Director of IT Architecture at Macromedia. Sean has had a diverse career including eight years involved with the ISO C++ standardization committee.

More recently Sean has been deeply involved in the ColdFusion community as a speaker at conferences, contributor to mailing lists, and more. Sean lead the team that built macromedia.com using ColdFusion and Flash, it is one of the most trafficked web sites in the world.

You can read more about Sean on his website.

Let's get on to the interview

What …

VMWare recently released a freeware called VMWare Player that can play a pre-built virtual machine file. A virtual machine is an OS bundled with whatever the virtual machine creator put there. This is perfect for people to test-drive various operating systems and software, without going through the hassle of installing themselves. VMWare currently provides virtual machines preloaded with RedHat, Novell Suse, ubuntu, Oracle, MySql, and Bea, among others.

Memory used to be a bottleneck for virtualization software to take off. However, on the hardware side of things, both Intel and AMD are pushing 64-bit processors pretty aggressively now. With 64-bit architecture, the memory space the operating system can access increases exponentially (from 2^32 to 2^64). With the push towards 64-bit and the emergence of virtualization technology, I wonder what kind of impact this will have …

zip:

Of all the features that I've added to my homebrew blogging software tagging (or folksonomys) has been my favorite. Here's why:

Tag Clouds

I've designed the home page of my blog to make it easy for a first time visitor to know what my blog is about. Nothing does this better than the tag cloud of popular tags they are presented with:

With a quick glance you can see that this blog is mostly about ColdFusion/CFML, but I also talk about MySQL, Java, RSS, …