I can not picture what $31 billion dollars means for one individual to have. I've done enough budgets in my life to understand millions of dollars, and I can grasp how entire companies run on billions of dollars, but $31 billion dollars resting with one individual is not something I can easily wrap my brain around. One decision with that much money, spend here, invest there, pull money from this account... can cause thousands of people to shuffle about.

Adding that sort of wealth to one foundation will influence our society in ways that today we can not comprehend. When I look at libraries, I look for the touch of Carnegie. His wealth long endures past his death and the death of the other industrialists of his time, but I believe the Gates Foundation will surpass them all. The social and economic power that this foundation wields is amazing.

I do not have anything in particular to say about the future of the …

The launch of Microsoft's Codeplex "shared source" site is merely the latest attempt to undermine and usurp the open source community via clever marketing.

There are two main reasons proprietary vendors are threatened by open source alternatives: price compression and loss of market share.

Open source companies have a pricing umbrella in relation to proprietary vendors license fees. Proprietary vendors argue that open source alternatives lack features, are less secure, socialist and so on, but fundamentally the difference in features is likely no more than 20%. Open source products are generally 10-30% of the cost of the proprietary competitor. This means you can pay roughly 20% of the cost and receive roughly 80% of the features. This is a very appealing proposition. And the more companies who take advantage of …

When setting up MySQL replication there are some things to remember. Although the setup is quite easy if you thoroughly read the documentation on MySQL's developer site you might still hit some issues.

We have quite a large scale replication setup (MySQL 4.1.12) with several hundred slaves. Today we saw a very strange situation: All of the slaves stopped replicating and claimed that a statement had been partially executed on the master side. The exact message was

Query partially completed on the master (error on master: 1053) and was aborted. There is a chance that your master is inconsistent at this point. If you are sure that your master is ok, run this query manually on the slave and then restart the slave with SET GLOBAL SQL_SLAVE_SKIP_COUNTER=1; START SLAVE;

The error code 1053 which means as much as "server shutdown".

We checked the master and could not …

Here’s an announcement from the Docs team:

MySQL has provided support for CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) for a long time. There’s a chapter in the MySQL Reference Manual that extensively covers MySQL character set support. Managing CJK data can be particularly tricky, though. Therefore we’ve just added a FAQ section that answers the most common questions about handling CJK contents and provides hands-on solutions to common problems. This Frequently-Asked-Questions section comes from the experiences of MySQL’s Support and Development groups, after handling many enquiries about CJK issues. The FAQ is available for the MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 manuals:
- http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/cjk-faq.html
- …

Omniture, one of the hottest companies not located in Silicon Valley, is expected to go public later this week, raising close to $100 million in proceeds.  Omniture provides online web and business analytic software to companies like AOL, Apple, eBay and Ford.  Omniture runs thousands of MySQL servers in order to scale out their business.

• Red Herring: IPO Watch Hot & Heavy

“There?s no shortage of smart, employable IT workers. There is a shortage of flexible employers who are willing to hire people who don?t match an exact, niche profile or have a very specific skill or type of experience.”

I’m not sure I agree with her, just like there really is no shortage for skilled workers, there are a lot of companies that are willing to train and mentor. What’s happening is that the people who need to be trained/mentored are asking for salaries that would say they don’t need to be trained and mentored. The companies that are crying about the shortage, usually don’t pay well enough, or are in not so prime locations anymore. A company wants to pay 2001 prices for someone with 10 yrs of experience, in an area that is over priced real estate wise, or the commute to the office is horrible, this prevents the qualified, highly skilled people to not want to work.

When I lived in …

What a nice event the PHP Vikinger has been! Go Vikingers, conquer the world and carry the idea of an unconference into the PHP world. Infect user groups and other community members. Make them feel the power of Thor - as Zak puts it.

You all know what a conference can be like. It can be somewhat like watching TV. At some point of the day, you sit down in an armchair, have a beer or a granita and consume the show from the different channels that you like best. You know which show to watch from the program of the day that you can find in the program guide which has been published weeks ago. Once the show is over, you flip to a different channel and continue starring at the TV box. After some time you usually end up complaining about the crappy program. You ask yourself why it is so difficult to create a good …

What a nice event the PHP Vikinger has been! Go Vikingers, conquer the world and carry the idea of an unconference into the PHP world. Infect user groups and other community members. Make them feel the power of Thor - as Zak puts it.

You all know what a conference can be like. It can be somewhat like watching TV. At some point of the day, you sit down in an armchair, have a beer or a granita and consume the show from the different channels that you like best. You know which show to watch from the program of the day that you can find in the program guide which has been published weeks ago. Once the show is over, you flip to a different channel and continue starring at the TV box. After some time you usually end up complaining about the crappy program. You ask yourself why it is so difficult to create a good …

Watching the World Cup this year (and yes, I've watched many of the matches - last night's Switzerland vs. Ukraine match took years from my life - it was the essence of boredom), I've been reminded at how differently teams can play the same game. England with its obnoxious long balls into Peter Crouch. France with...well, so far, with nothing. Argentina with its flair and momentum.

Italy, however, takes "difference" to a new level. From today's The Times:

Italy’s method is rooted in pessimism. Ask an Italian whether the glass is half-full or half-empty and he is liable to reply that it is poisoned. Ask an Australian and he will ask if it is a free bar.The Italian I know best - Fabrizio - is no pessimist (He's taking on one of the most interesting and sexy markets on the planet), but the football/soccer he watches certainly is: …

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."