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The Blog

Welcome to the blog. We talk about everything we do here, upcoming events, and a million other things.

Drupal User: Penn State
POSTED 6/2/2007 by Jonathan Lambert

Apple has a big writeup today on Drupal at Penn State, or more specifically Pennsylvania Governor's School for Information Technology (PGSIT).

To quote the article on Penn State's needs:

MySQL Performance Tuning, In the Shell of Some Nut
POSTED 6/1/2007 by Gary Gogick
You can't run Drupal without dealing with MySQL. Unless you run it with PostgreSQL. But that's another topic entirely.
FTP is Evil?
POSTED 6/1/2007 by Gary Gogick

We've all heard that before. "FTP is bad! Use SCP/SFTP!" "FTP is a security risk!" "FTP eats babies!"

Now & XEN: How to run XEN with two bridges
POSTED 5/25/2007 by Aaron Stewart

Recently we had to figure out how to run XEN with bridged networking for our Now & XEN project. This is how to do it:

Edit /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp:

Downgrading From PHP5/MySQL5 on CentOS 4.X
POSTED 5/25/2007 by Gary Gogick
Lately, we've had clients who have upgraded from PHP4/MySQL4 to PHP5/MySQL5, only to find that they have problems with custom PHP scripts and/or Drupal modules not working any more. When that happens, there's two choices - fix the broken code/modules, or downgrade back to PHP4.
Database Scalability and Drupal
POSTED 5/24/2007 by Aaron Stewart
Recently we've been working with a couple of vendors to identify some potential solutions for scaling backend databases horizontally. This problem has been plagueing drupal.org, as well as many other large scale Drupal sites.
FormCorral for Drupal 5.1.. not your mama's form handler
POSTED 5/23/2007 by Aaron Stewart
After finding myself writing the same form handling code over and over and over (and over) again, I finally decided to do something about it. And then FormCorral was born.
Help Fund Watchdog Backport
POSTED 5/23/2007 by Jonathan Lambert
Watchdog is a source of a lot of the database corruption and problems with Drupal and MySQL.

Khalid has a patch for Drupal 6, but in order for him to be able to find the time to backport the patch to Drupal 5, we need to sponsor it.

Mock Datasource Testing in Drupal: An Approach
POSTED 5/22/2007 by Aaron Stewart
So one of the biggest things I've run into in drupal-land is that it's virtually impossible to test database interactivity without actually touching the data on a live site.
The top seven things that drive technology investors
POSTED 5/22/2007 by Jonathan Lambert
The seven + one things that determine the value of a technology startup and the problem with Defensive patents
Off the shelf social networking VS building it yourself
POSTED 4/25/2007 by Jonathan Lambert
One of the least considered aspects of Social Networking sites around the build VS buy decision.

High availability, performance and scalability
POSTED 4/25/2007 by Jonathan Lambert
There seems to be a hell of a lot of confusion about the differences between performance, scalability and high availability. They're often mixed but they're never the same. So what are the differences?

What are the top 15 concerns for Drupal corporate customers?
POSTED 4/24/2007 by Jonathan Lambert
At the OSCMS conference, I stood up in a room full of people and went down through the list of concerns I've collected from corporate Drupal customers. Many people came up afterwards and told me to post it. This is that list.
MySQL CHARSET: latin1 to utf8 and back again: seeking XEN with character encoding
POSTED 3/6/2007 by Jonathan Lambert
A source of an amazing amount of misery for our website customers comes from MySQL CHARSET encoding. Many times, a customer will export their database from their previous deployment, install it on their new server, and discover strange characters embedded in their database.
Testing services
POSTED 2/1/2007 by Jonathan Lambert

Drupal: Network World
POSTED 11/28/2006 by Jonathan Lambert

As if the litany of Fortune 500 customers we’ve been talking to lately that are starting to use Drupal for high profile stuff isn’t enough, I discovered tonight that Network World actually uses Drupal to manage the content and community platform (essentially, their “product”).

Update to multisite drupal cron problem
POSTED 11/12/2006 by
So, after examining the problem, here is a solution to the Drupal cron multisite problem: HTTP_HOST=”www.foo.com” php -q /path/to/cron.php
Spring, Hibernate, and XFire
POSTED 10/14/2006 by
Spring, Hibernate, and XFire

(Reposted from my original article on http://www.yawf.com)

Spring, Hibernate, and XFire Introduction Configuring XFire Adding XFireServlet to web.xml Configuring spring-service.xml to include basic XFire properties Configuring service beans. Java code for EchoDatabaseTestServiceImpl What's happening in java code? Configuring the Interface for EchoDatabaseTestServiceImpl Setting up Hibernate Setting up spring-config.xml hibernate entries The DAO pattern The Identifiable interface. Wrapping up Coming soon Introduction

A bit of back story:

I had to tie in web services to a hibernate-based backend for the upcoming release of FireBright's SaaS on Demand platform.

The problem: Doing it in such a way that:

doesn't tie me down to a particular platform. Offers me maximum flexibility in terms of features Doesn't bog down performance.
Problems with CRON and drupal multisite
POSTED 9/14/2006 by
After working with some multisite customers, we have come across a serious bug in the implementation of the current cron and best practices for Drupal implementations. A typical cron implementation in crontab looks like this: 00 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -O - -q http://foo.com/cron.php
dag releases dstat
POSTED 9/11/2006 by

What do you get when you combine vmstat, iostat, ifstat, netstat, and a bunny with a pancake on it’s head?