In this program, featured experts from Gartner and Sun Microsystems discuss the adoption and best practices of open source databases in the enterprise. You'll also learn how Zappos.com, a highly successful e-commerce site, saves over one million dollars a year and stays on top of its explosive growth by subscribing to Sun's MySQL Enterprise database subscription service.

During the last few months, we've continue to improve the technical foundation of opentaps in two important directions. In the backend, we've migrated key portions of our customer, order, inventory, and general ledger code to the new domain driven architecture. In the process, we've been able to make the underlying code more flexible and easier to maintain and improve its performance. (See this example.)

In the front end, we have started to integrate the Google Web Toolkit into opentaps to build more friendly user interfaces. This toolkit will allow us to turn our web forms into interactive widgets that look and feel like a more responsive desktop application. For example, take a look at this …

I took part in a webinar on cloud computing today, including some of the top names in cloud computing services. As Pythian has some MySQL clients using cloud computing, I was particularly interested…

I was interested by the many levels of what cloud computing means, including such categorizations as Facebook apps being a part of the cloud. I think many of us consider cloud computing to mean “virtual infrastructure as a service” and overlook some pretty robust cloud computing that’s already out there, such as “application components as a service” and “software [platform] as a service”.

Following are my notes:

“Our objective today is to cut through some of the noise associated with ‘cloud’ and get to a real world approach for getting some serious value from the cloud.”
…

Every so often we have a client worrying about unauthenticated users. For example, as part of the output of SHOW PROCESSLIST they will see:

+-----+----------------------+--------------------+------+---------+------+-------+------------------+
| Id  | User                 | Host               | db   | Command | Time | State | Info             |
+-----+----------------------+--------------------+------+---------+------+-------+------------------+
| 235 | unauthenticated user | 10.10.2.74:53216   | NULL | Connect | NULL | login | NULL             |
| 236 | unauthenticated user | 10.120.61.10:51721 | NULL | Connect | NULL | login | NULL             |
| 237 | user                 | localhost          | NULL | Query   | 0    | NULL  | show processlist |
+-----+----------------------+--------------------+------+---------+------+-------+------------------+

Who are these unauthenticated users, how do they get there, and why aren’t they …

I did a webcast on open source for TDWI and Pentaho last week (reg required). The topic was open source BI adoption, which I believe has gathered speed this year. If you go through the registration link you can download a PDF of the slides from the webcast page.

If you're already familiar with open source BI, there were probably not a lot of surprises in my part of the presentation. The general outline was a little about open source and the market to answer the "why now?" question, followed by some information about categories of organizations adopting it and why they are adopting, and a few notes about challenges people run into when adopting. It was only 35 minutes so there's not as much depth as I would have liked.

I think one fundamental point should be made about open source: it's just software. When …

Background Knowledge

For some reason or another the priority menu in the edit task panel is not wide enough and therefore it cuts off the priority names. This can be easily fixed by modifying some inline CSS. Yes I agree this should be done within the skin’s CSS file, however there is nothing present in the CSS file to alter that I could find.

Solution

Edit /taskfreak/include/html/xajax_panel_edit.php at line #18 by changing the width value of “40px” to “125px” or to what you desired width.

Code Before

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<td>< ?php
$objTemp = new ItemPriority();
$objTemp->qSelect('priority',($objTask->priority)?$objTask->priority:3,'','','style="width:40px"');
?></td>

Code After

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<td>< …

Background Knowledge

TaskFreak! presently does not have a means via the web interface to present a complete list of tasks for which the current user is the project leader. I will show you how to add “My Projects” list based on bpiper’s solution with a slight difference. My solution is almost identical to bpiper’s but with a different approach to continue support of the supported interface languages. To do this each supported language file will require to be edited.

Thanks to bpiper for posting your solution.

Solution

1. Edit /taskfreak/include/language/en/freak.php starting at line #15. Add in a new array key/value at any point you desire like so “‘my_projects’ => ‘My Projects’,” (without double quotes), see below for example.

   Note: Each interface language file will be …

I spoke at Montreal on Rails on Tuesday night. I think I had 5 slides, but spoke for about 45 minutes (so there's no point in uploading them). For those that missed it (or couldn't take notes fast enough), here's a transcript of the examples I showed with the world database:

# take a look at this query.  To start with, we have no indexes used:
EXPLAIN SELECT Name FROM Country WHERE Continent = 'Asia' AND population > 5000000 ORDER BY Name;

# First let's look at an index on population
ALTER TABLE Country ADD INDEX p (Population);

# is that index effective?
EXPLAIN SELECT Name FROM Country WHERE Continent = 'Asia' AND population > 5000000 ORDER BY Name;

# no it wasn't.  what happens if we modify the query just slightly:
EXPLAIN SELECT Name FROM Country WHERE Continent = 'Asia' AND population > 50000000 ORDER BY Name;

# time for the next index:
ALTER TABLE Country ADD INDEX c …

I spoke at Montreal on Rails on Tuesday night. I think I had 5 slides, but spoke for about 45 minutes (so there's no point in uploading them). For those that missed it (or couldn't take notes fast enough), here's a transcript of the examples I showed with the world database:

# take a look at this query.  To start with, we have no indexes used:
EXPLAIN SELECT Name FROM Country WHERE Continent = 'Asia' AND population > 5000000 ORDER BY Name;

# First let's look at an index on population
ALTER TABLE Country ADD INDEX p (Population);

# is that index effective?
EXPLAIN SELECT Name FROM Country WHERE Continent = 'Asia' AND population > 5000000 ORDER BY Name;

# no it wasn't.  what happens if we modify the query just slightly:
EXPLAIN SELECT Name FROM Country WHERE Continent = 'Asia' AND population > 50000000 ORDER BY Name;

# time for the next index:
ALTER TABLE Country ADD INDEX c …