So, a while back, not sure when, I was listening to the P3 Podcast and Paul mentioned his dislike for Wordpress.  He said he wished there was a simple blogging application.  I am probably misquoting him horribly.  It was an idea that I had been tinkering with.  So, I started on Wordcraft in my spare time.  Like super spare time.  That time between the kids going to bed and me falling  asleep.  So, it took a while to get it to a usable state.

Up until now, I have used Wordpress.com for my blogging.  It works quite well.  You can get started quite quickly and it does what most people need.  My wife uses Blogger for our family blog.  It is, IMO, not as nice as Wordpress.com in some ways.  But, it does allow you to edit your styles (for free) and such which is nice.

So, why would I want to reinvent the …

IPC is over. My impression: The place was too big making it a little bit difficult to get in contact with others. Yet, from a technical and gastronomical point of view the Rheingoldhalle was a good choice. For the next IPC I would recommend to anker a hotel-ship near the hall (the Rheingoldhalle is situated at the bank of the river Rhine) to avoid a 30min shuttle bus ride from and to the hotel. ;-)

But back to my talk there.

The initial idea to this session was a performance consulting in spring this year: For a table with appr. 250 billion entries I found a way to store and read about 6,000 queries per second! I applied some very unusual ways to speed up a problem by factor 1,000 or 2,000 just by thinking about how I would do it, if I had to store the things in my home supposed they were real things such as cutlery.

I found out, that there are some patterns, which can …

Ever wondered what your PHP application and MySQL actually do? An experimental mysqlnd branch will give you full access to the network communication stream. Using a custom PHP stream filter you can then intercept the communication ... but let's start at the beginning:

When talking about mysqlnd - the mysql native driver for PHP - we always mention the fact it's native in a way that we're, when possible, using PHP infrastructure. The most common example here is the memory management. By directly using PHP's memory we can avoid unnecessary copies of data from the MySQL Client Library's memory into PHP memory.

<?php
$mysqli = mysqli_connect("localhost", "root", "", "test");
$stream = mysqli_conn_to_stream($mysqli);
…

Last week I attended the International PHP Conference 2008 in Mainz in Germany. The conference was well prepared and I would like to say thanks to organizers. There was just one thing, which could be better. It was raining for all my stay, but this nobody can influence:).

As I expected, almost nobody from the attendees knew the PHP support in NetBeans or NetBeans itself. PHP support in NetBeans is still new and the first version of the PHP support will be released with NetBeans 6.5, probably next week. Because our tool is still new for PHP developer, no surprise for me. I met probably less people than I have fingers, who knew NetBeans. Sun was one of the Gold sponsors and during opening ceremony the audience was asked whether there is someone who knows the PHP support in NetBeans. I think that there was  6 people who put up hand.

On Wednesday I had one session, where I did demonstration of features that are available in …

Note that I’m talking about using these tools in some kind of professional way, and more specifically, I’m talking about using Excel as a database, and using VPS hosting to host “professional” web sites. By “professional”, I mean something other than your personal blog, picture gallery, or other relatively inconsequential site.

Excel is not a database

Here’s the thing: Excel isn’t a database. Most people who don’t work in IT don’t seem to understand this, and they’re deathly afraid to actually communicate with anyone in IT, so they take matters into their own hands, and create problems so big that IT is forced to get involved, because at some point this spreadsheet becomes “critical” to some business function. Then IT gets even more bitter toward the non-IT folk, validating some of the reasons the non-IT folk went that route in the first place, and virtually guaranteeing that they won’t come to the IT …

End October - time for the traditional meeting of the German and International "PHP family" - end of October? - Yes, the International PHP Conference is a bit earlier this year. Additonally the organizers moved the conference away from the industrial area of Mörfelden to the center of Mainz which sounds quite promising. Although I'll spend only around 24hrs at Mainz I'm looking really forward to the conference next week.

On Thursday morning I'll give a presentation about PHP 5.3, which will be quite interesting as one of the biggest features, namespaces, is still undergoing heavy discussions and the final syntax probably won't be clear when presenting - fortunately PHP 5.3 is much more than namespaces!

Sun will also be present at the …

I have accepted invitation from David Van Couvering to attend his session and present the PHP features in NetBeans. The session will take place this Thursday, 23rd October and will start at 9:00 Pacific Time (18:00 CET, 17:00 BST). We will use DimDim presentation system so everybody can attend. But  the session has limited capacity of attendees. More info about the session you can find here.

If you are interested, attend the session.

Just got home finally from PHP Appalachia.  I enjoyed meeting all the great people.

I presented about what I learned and how we deal with importing large amounts of CSV data into MySQL.  I threw my idea onto the wiki at the last minute, made the slides while everyone ate breakfast and I had planned on researching it all (been a few years since I wrote it), but we had no reliable internet.  Some claims I made and their corrections.

1. 
   
2. I said our largest file is about 1.8 million lines.  WRONG.  Actually it is about 4.6 million.  I was correct however that it does finish importing and indexing in about 5 minutes.
3. 
   
4. I claimed I LOAD DATA INFILE to MyISAM first and then "insert into ... select from" into an InnoDB table for speed reasons.  WRONG.  In fact, I do that because I need to merge fields from the file sometimes …

I’ve created a set of Cacti templates for graphing stats about MySQL. While these were based on several other people’s work, there are many improvements. One of them in particular I want to bring up, and I’ll go so far as to say it ought to be a “best practice” for graphing. [...]

I started my first day at Lycos yesterday. I've met a lot of really nice and talented people already and am enjoying myself. The environment here is very well-organized and very conducive for communication and exchanging ideas. It'll be a big change coming from a startup with a few people where I was *the* database guy to being at a larger organization (around 80 or so people) where they have different groups to handle all the different parts of the organization. Having people who set up servers so I can focus on development will be a big change. I don't mind doing that kind of work, but when you have do develop applications as well as manage the entire database-- anything that blows up on the database or network, you have to fix which can make it hard to focus. They have entire OPs group here to take care of that! I keep feeling like I have to worry about the database... post-DBA trauma. I'm sure I'll still get to keep my head on DBA type tasks …