Walden University Presidential Youth Debate goes live
By Jon Jensen
October 22, 2008
This afternoon was the launch of Walden University’s Presidential Youth Debate website, which features 14 questions and video responses from Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain. The video responses are about 44 minutes long overall.
The site has a fairly simple feature set but is technologically interesting for us. It was developed by Dan Collis-Puro and Ethan Rowe using Radiant, PostgreSQL, CentOS Linux, Ruby on Rails, Phusion Passenger, Apache, Varnish, and Amazon S3.
Nice work, guys!
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WhereCampPDX Conference Report
By Selena Deckelmann
October 20, 2008
Over the weekend, geo-location hacking geeks converged in Portland, OR for the first WhereCampPDX. Topics of discussion ranged from where to find fruit in urban areas and the creepiness of location-aware dating software, to disaster management and using personal location data in times of crisis. I was part of the planning team, and was happy and proud that we brought together nearly 100 people over the course of three days.
WhereCampPDX is an unconference—no sessions were planned in advance and all the participants were charged with responsibility for their own experience. This is an Open Spaces model for managing large group meetings. Photos of all the session topics are available here.
Many conversations were documented at the drop.io site. Some groups have decided to continue to meet, in particular the What Now, Portland? group had an intense few hours. One participant thought she was going to spend the morning playing Cruel2BKind out in the Saturday Market pavillion on Sunday, but ended up so engaged and deep in discussion that she never left her chair. I came away inspired that people were able talk about their passions and totally lose track of time.
One topic that came up …
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PostgreSQL Conference West 2008 Report
By Daniel Browning
October 13, 2008
I attended the PostgreSQL Conference West and had a great time again this year. My photos of the event are up here.
In addition, I shot some footage of the event in an attempt to highlight the benefits of the conference, Postgres itself, and the community strengths. I’m looking for a talented Editor willing to donate time; if none volunteer then I’ll probably do it in January. My guess is that there will be several web sites willing to host it for free when it’s done.
The Code Sprint was really interesting. Selena Deckelmann gave everyone a lot of ideas to get the most out of the time available for hacking code. At regular intervals, each team shared the progress they made and recieved candy as a reward. It was neat to see other people hacking on and committing changes to the Postgres source tree in meatspace.
Bruce Momjian’s Postgres training covered a wide gamut of information about Postgres. He polled everyone in the room for their particular needs, which varied from administration to performance, then tailored the training to cover information relating to those needs in particular detail. Those who attended reported that they learned a great deal of new information from the …
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Spree 0.4.0 Released
By Sean Schofield
October 10, 2008
Spree 0.4.0 was officially released today. Spree is a complete open source ecommerce platform written for Ruby on Rails. While Spree technically works “out of the box” as a fully functional store, it is really intended to serve as a strong foundation for a custom commerce solution. Like Rails, Spree is considered to be “opinionated software”, and it does not seek to solve 100% of the commerce needs of all possible clients. Developers are able to provide the missing functionality by using the powerful extension system.
The current release of Spree contains many signficant improvements from the previous 0.2.0 release. Some of the highlights include:
- Rails 2.1 support
- SEO improvements
- Security enhancements
- Public assets for extensions
- Mailer templates for extensions
- VAT inclusive pricing
- Taxonomy
Most open source projects in the Rails space are maintained by a single individual and tend to be limited in scope. For Spree we seek to create a large and healthy open source community similar to the ones found in more mature languages and frameworks. The Spree project has received contributions from over twenty different developers and has been translated into five additional languages.
I …
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64-bit Windows naming fun
By Jon Jensen
September 30, 2008
At OSNews.com the article Windows x64 Watch List describes some of the key differences between 64-bit and 32-bit Windows. It’s pretty interesting, and mostly pretty reasonable. But this one caught my eye:
There are now separate system file sections for both 32-bit and 64-bit code
Windows x64’s architecture keeps all 32-bit system files in a directory named “C:\WINDOWS\SysWOW64”, and 64-bit system files are place in the the oddly-named “C:\WINDOWS\system32” directory. For most applications, this doesn’t matter, as Windows will re-direct all 32-bit files to use “SysWOW64” automatically to avoid conflicts.
However, anyone (like us system admins) who depend on VBScripts to accomplish tasks, may have to directly reference “SysWOW64” files if needed, since re-direction doesn’t apply as smoothly.
I’ve been using 64-bit Linux since 2005 and found there to be some learning curve there, with distributors taking different approaches to supporting 32-bit libraries and applications on a 64-bit operating system.
The Debian Etch approach is to treat the 64-bit architecture as “normal”, for lack of a better word, with 64-bit libraries residing in /lib and /usr/lib as always. It’s recommended to …
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Filesystem I/O: what we presented
By Selena Deckelmann
September 19, 2008
As mentioned last week, Gabrielle Roth and I presented results from tests run in the new Postgres Performance Lab. Our slides are available on Slideshare.
We tested eight core assumptions about filesystem I/O performance and presented the results to a room of filesystem hackers and a few database specialists. Some important things to remember about our tests: we were testing I/O only—no tuning had been done on the hardware, filesystem defaults or for Postgres—and we did not take reliability into account at all. Tuning the database and filesystem defaults will be done for our next round of tests.
Filesystems we tested were ext2, ext3 (with or without data journaling), xfs, jfs, and reiserfs.
Briefly, here are our assumptions, and the results we presented:
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RAID5 is the worst choice for a database. Our tests confirmed this, as expected.
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LVM incurs too much overhead to use. Our test showed that for sequential or random reads on RAID0, LVM doesn’t incur much more overhead than hardware or software RAID.
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Software RAID is slower. Same result as LVM for sequential or random reads.
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Turning off ‘atime’ is a big performance gain. We didn’t see a big improvement, but you do …
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Postfix, ~/.forward, and SELinux on RHEL 5
By Jon Jensen
September 18, 2008
For the record, and maybe to save confusion for someone else who runs into this:
On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with SELinux in enforcing mode, Postfix cannot read ~/.forward files by default. It’s probably not hard to fix – perhaps the .forward files just need to have the right SELinux context set – but we decided to just use /etc/aliases in this case.
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Competence, Change Agents, Software, and Music
By Ethan Rowe
September 17, 2008
Seth Godin wrote an interesting article on the subject of competence; it resonated with me personally for a variety of reasons.
The article uses musicians, and Bob Dylan in particular, as an example of how “competence” can pale in comparison to “incompetence” in terms of the quality of the results. In particular, it asserts that competent musicians consistently play the music in question the same way, and suggests that the lack of such consistency could be thought of as incompetence. Bob Dylan thus becomes an incompetent musician who is nevertheless really great due to the emotional content of his performances; beyond that, he is a “change agent” because of his brilliance. And that’s the crux of the article: the “incompetent” people are the change agents who advance the state of the art, while the “competent” people resist change and thus hold things back.
As a fairly serious practicing musician myself, I’ll assert in response: this is not an accurate representation of musicianship, and the issue extends to the core of the article’s argument.
Playing music the same way every time is not an indication of competence. It’s an indicator of insufficient imagination and demonstrates a …
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