I always disliked the way PHP handles Objects. There is no way to assign a type to properties. Validators have to be glued against the fields externally and you can't just generate a Object-Description (like WSDL) from a object either.

Usually you have DataObjects like:

/* a plain-old-php-object */

class Employee {
    var $employee_id;

    var $name;
    var $surname;

    var $since;
}

and as a human you immediatly how to use it:

$e = new Employee();

$e->name       = "Jan";
$e->surname    = "Kneschke";
$e->employeenr = 123;
$e->since      = mktime(0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2005);

But you can also have a bad day and write something like:

$e->unknown = "value";
$e->since = "Monday";

The property unknown gets created automaticly in the object and since gets a invalid value. If you take a look at ActiveRecord in Rails you see how proper types …

I did some comparison of ZFS vs XFS last week to review the current state of the art in filesystems.

Long story short. XFS is still the reigning champion (at least on Linux). XFS beats out most filesystem benchmarks across the board. Reiser does well on directories with lots of small files but not enough to justify not using XFS.

Reiser FS is out of the picture honestly. First, it just doesn't perform very well. Second, Hans Reiser is probably going to prison for murdering his wife and is selling the company to pay off his legal costs.

ZFS would have a shot on …

I did some comparison of ZFS vs XFS last week to review the current state of the art in filesystems.

Long story short. XFS is still the reigning champion (at least on Linux). XFS beats out most filesystem benchmarks across the board. Reiser does well on directories with lots of small files but not enough to justify not using XFS.

Reiser FS is out of the picture honestly. First, it just doesn’t perform very well. Second, Hans Reiser is probably going to prison for murdering his wife and is selling the company to pay off his legal costs.

ZFS would have a shot on …

I finally got a picture and the recipe online which I use to make brownies. These dark, brown calorie-bombs are so tasty.. As I'm writing this, I'm baking some at my parents home. My sister helped me a bit making sure she didn't melt away with the smell. Well, she got to wait some more half an hour!

The recipe has been stolen from the BBC website. The brownies pictured are from late January 2007.

Funny story! I had a christmas party (which was not much about christmas at all) with my friends in Aschaffenburg (Germany). My duty was to come up with a dessert and I proposed brownies. Well, I never actually made them!
So what I did a …

Don’t know how many of you actually have heard of, or use, Mugshot, but I just started playing with it after a long hiatus, and decided that it’s pretty cool. Something the MySQL community will probably enjoy being part of (currently, to take full advantage, you want to be a Linux or Windows XP user).

By virtue of looking for the next new community hangouts, I figure we create a MySQL Mugshot Group. And before folk wonder what Mugshot’s all about, I suggest reading the feature list. Keep in mind that Mugshot is completely open source, and its a very live social experience, in this “notification era”. Its a whole lot of fun, and from what I can tell, the signups are now open to the public so what’s keeping you?

The site has i386 …

mysql> select * from zeroconf;
+------------------+-----------+------+
| NAME | HOSTNAME | PORT |
+------------------+-----------+------+
| crawler | purgatory.local | 3308 |
| slave | zim.local | 3306 |
| master | hell.local | 3306 |
+------------------+-----------+------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)


Not really fit yet for use... probably a bunch of memory leaks. I need to rework it, but the basics work.

And what is it?

It is a plugin for MySQL that has two pieces, one an information schema, and another which sets up a daemon thread to publish the server via zeroconf (via the Avahi library). The information schema just allows one server to see what others are available on the network.

What does this mean?

A few ideas:
All tools now can just "find" the local available servers.
Foundation for slaves …

From the keynote presentation this past Tuesday:
http://krow.net/talks/ScalingVancouver2007.pdf

I have an audio recording of the talk as well but it is in poor shape. If I can clean it up I will post it as well.

It's a tiny company. I think the revenues from MySQL are between $30 million and $40 million. Oracle's revenue next year is $15 billion --Larry Ellison, 2006

When Larry Ellison starts disparaging MySQL, you know that it is now a serious contender.

The data warehouse processes, whether transforming data, loading data into the DW, or querying data from the DW, operate on large sets of data. A large set of data, for example, is all the sales transactions for a particular product that happen in a store in a day. Compare this to a sales transaction that represents the checkout basket of one customer, a relatively small set of data. Now, SQL is a language that deals very efficiently with sets of data, at least conceptually, whether large or small. Some data warehouses are indeed constructed primarily with SQL along with some scripting language, such as Perl.

MySQL is …

When I heard the JavaPosse interview about Groovy I became really interested in it. The fact that it offers a scripting language based on the JVM and that it can be seamlessly integrated with Java fascinated me.

So I decided to buy the Groovy in Action book and try it out.

This is my first attempt at something that might become useful later:

def foundtypes = [:]
def sum = 0              
def stats = ""

bugs = new XmlSlurper().parse(new File("/home/ds/findbugs.xml"));

bugs.BugInstance.findAll { instance -> 
    instance.-AT-category =~ 'CORRECTNESS|BAD_PRACTICE|MT_CORRECTNESS'
}.each { instance ->
 type = instance.@type-DOT-toString()
 foundtypes[type] = foundtypes.get(type,0) + 1
}
foundtypes.each { sum += it.value }

println "Found ${foundtypes.size()} …

When I heard the JavaPosse interview about Groovy I became really interested in it. The fact that it offers a scripting language based on the JVM and that it can be seamlessly integrated with Java fascinated me.

So I decided to buy the Groovy in Action book and try it out.

This is my first attempt at something that might become useful later:

def foundtypes = [:]
def sum = 0              
def stats = ""

bugs = new XmlSlurper().parse(new File("/home/ds/findbugs.xml"));

bugs.BugInstance.findAll { instance -> 
    instance.-AT-category =~ 'CORRECTNESS|BAD_PRACTICE|MT_CORRECTNESS'
}.each { instance ->
 type = instance.@type-DOT-toString()
 foundtypes[type] = foundtypes.get(type,0) + 1
}
foundtypes.each { sum += it.value }

println "Found ${foundtypes.size()} …