On Tuesday our CIO, Johann-Peter Hartmann, gave a Web-seminar about security issues in the Web 2.0 era. We had about 140 participants and some very good questions in the following Q&A Session. We would like to thank you for the response and also we´d like to thank Jürgen from MySQL, our webinar-host.

We uploaded our slides as promised. To download them, click here.

If you missed the Web-Seminar you get a chance to see the recording of it here.
But be aware: It´s in german!!!

For english readers/speakers: Johann held an english security talk some time ago. Find it here

We already heard that …

OK, so a number of you may have noticed some major gumming up of PlanetMySQL over the last week or so. Some feeds were not appearing at all, and yet other feeds were inserting entries that had nothing to do with MySQL — entries that previously never made it into the PlanetMySQL database. Here's the story on what happened, how I screwed everything up, and how I figured out what was going on...

The Backstory

All of the problems stemmed from a well-intentioned effort on my part to figure out why certain feeds weren't being properly aggregated by the PlanetMySQL feed reader. Arjen wrote the PlanetMySQL feed reader originally, back in 2005, and it has performed admirably up until this point. The feed reader uses the Magpie RSS library for its grunt work, and has a filtering system that allows the Planet administrators to assign a regular expression filter to a specific feed so that entries not related to MySQL don't get inserted into …

Note: Part I is located at the page that describes part one

Disclaimer
Just a minor clarification to anyone that was confused: I am currently experiencing Sphinx for the first time. Everything I’m writing about is new to me as well, for the most part. So far, I’m drooling over some of it’s capabilities; I may come back in a month and rip it a new ass hole.

Back to Configuration… (not really, this is the bitching section)

In preparation for my previous post about Sphinx, I had originally played with a number of configuration options, and even encountered a couple of issues that caused my confused butt to have to debug a number of things, and even recompile --with-debug and gdb the thing …

I’ve been looking for a good solution to manage full text search for large data chunks (2GB - 100GB). I’ve written a couple of solutions using Xapian with limited success, but unfortunately I haven’t been satisfied with it overall. Performance was good, but there were a number of issues with flexibility that have me ultimately looking for another solution.

At my usual day job, the topic was brought up and I mentioned Xapian and Lucene as solutions, however we’re looking to stay away from Java as it’s not currently in our architecture, and as I stated before: Xapian doesn’t quite have the capabilities I’m looking for to handle even my own systems. Someone brought up Sphinx as something that was being looked into, and I jumped into the typical research process.

One of the key elements that Sphinx seems to offer …

I received an email the other day from someone at MySQL AB. They are offering free Phorum booth space in the .org Pavilion at the 2007 MySQL Conference. The .org Pavilion is for Open Source projects that are somehow related to MySQL. Not only does Phorum use MySQL as its primary database (our PostgreSQL layer stays 99% done it seems) but MySQL.com also uses it for their support forums.

So, we had a problem. The Phorum team is not by any means wealthy. We all have jobs and work on Phorum in our spare time. So, getting everyone there is going to be problem number one. There are 3 primary team members. I am in the US. Thomas Seifert is in Germany and Maurcie Makaay is in the Netherlands. We decided to turn to our users for help.

I made a …

The second edition of the annual Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) will take place on August 25-26 2007 at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin, Germany near the cities of Bonn and Cologne.

FrOSCon is a two day conference that revolves around a rich schedule of talks, highlighting current topics in Free Software and Open Source. Moreover, developers will be offered space to organize their own meetings or subconferences.

If you are interested in sponsoring this great event, do not hesitate to …

Sorry for the short outage, due to a small coding glitch the script that updates the planet feeds got stuck and it took us a bit to find the problem... But thanks to Jay we now spotted the bug and it was fixed quickly!

Hi Folks,

This is an announcement for a webinar in German. Therefore only written in German. If you are interested in the security topic be sure to see the english webinar, which is stored here.

Web-2.0-Anwendungen absichern

Die verbesserte Einsatztauglichkeit der Web-2.0-Anwendungen wird auf Kosten von neuen Sicherheitsproblemen erworben. Sowohl die mächtige Logik im JavaScript als auch der permanente Login auf vielen Sites bergen Risiken, die anders und gezielt beantwortet werden müssen. Dieses Webseminar gibt einen Überblick, bewertet die Probleme und stellt Lösungswege vor.

Wenn Sie Web 2.0- und AJAX-Anwendungen entwickeln, ist dieser Vortrag genau das Richtige für Sie! Hier erfahren …

Mit MAYFLOWER unterwegs zu neuen Ufern PHP/JavaScript Entwickler

Einsatzort:

München oder Würzburg
Deutschland

Angebot von:

ThinkPHP / Mayflower GmbH

Das Unternehmen:

Wir sind ein auf Web Application Development spezialisiertes Softwarehaus. Wir bieten mit der Enterprise-Portal-Suite Chairman, der GPL-Groupware PHProjekt und dem Webanwendungsscanner Chorizo Produkte an sowie die Entwicklung von Inter- und Intranetlösungen.

Mit der Marke ThinkPHP hat sich Mayflower als Premiumdienstleister im Bereich der webbasierten Anwendungen etabliert und ist in der OpenSource-Community aktiv mit Vorträgen, Artikeln und auf Messen involviert.

Stellenbeschreibung:

Wir bieten aktive Mitarbeit in der Entwicklung von unseren Produkten und großen Projekten. Sie entwickeln bei uns im Team in München, Würzburg oder vor Ort beim Kunden und arbeiten …

BÃ¥rd published a short note on his blog that the call for papers for the 5th annual eZ Conference is now open. Deadline for submissions is February 1st.

The conference is worth attending not only for eZ Publish or eZ Components users and geeks, it is also interesting if you’re interested in content and knowledge management or PHP/LAMP in general. Last year, I enjoyed talking to guests such as Martin White and Anne Jubert, Rasmus Lerdorf and David Axmark …