I just received notice a few minutes ago that I will be presenting “Painless fulltext searching with SOLR” at this summer’s upcoming OSCON.  More info on the convention can be found at http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2007/ and I’ll be posting more here about the presentation and what not as the time draws nearer.  I was taken aback just [...]

Posted in Conferences, Java, Software No Comments »

I’m posting a quick wrap up of the codemash conference I attended last week. This is mostly because I’ll forget things if I don’t, but also to let anyone reading know what they missed and they should look to attend next year.
The pros:
There was an enormous amount of talent in that one main ballroom. [...]

Posted in Codemash, Conferences, Development, Microsoft, Software, Web, linux, opensource No Comments »

I’m here listening to ThoughtWorks’ Neal Ford, who gave the keynote yesterday. He’s talking about being a productive programmer, and has already given me some interesting things to think about. One, ‘monad’ (powershell) is a new shell for Windows Vista and XP. I may look at installing that, as it looks to [...]

Posted in Conferences, Development, Microsoft, Software, Uncategorized No Comments »

Came to Eric Pugh’s session on selenium. While I know most of the basics of selenium, there will still a few interesting tricks he pointed out:

use grinder.sf.net as a proxy to record tests for load balancing
write out the tests with php/asp/jsp pages to programatically create tests

argh - I can’t remember the other two. [...]

Posted in Conferences, Software, Web No Comments »

I know I’m going to miss some people, but I wanted to take a moment to identify some interesting people I’ve met at codemash so far (in no particular order)

Joe Brinkman from dotnetnuke.com
Joe Craig from ideacore.com
Keith Elder from quickenloans.com (but I didn’t really *meet* him as I already knew him)
Cal Evans from Zend
Kevin Schroeder from [...]

Posted in Conferences, Software, Travel No Comments »

I’m attending the caffienated php session - this will demonstrate the java/php bridge. This is put on by Kevin Schroeder from Zend.
Kevin started off by giving a rundown of Zend - products, services, etc. No mention of ZendFramework project (yet?).
Why use PHP and Java together? PHP is easier for most tasks, and [...]

Posted in Conferences, Java, Language, PHP, Uncategorized No Comments »

Scott Guthrie is giving a keynote about LINQ - Language INtegrated Query, a new data processing approach from MS.
talked about migration from Dbase-era, to mid 90s, to OO mapping approach today (hibernate, active record, etc).
Still have issues:

how do you deal with non-relational data?
how do you interactive with ‘plain old objects’?
how to enable rich data shaping/transformations [...]

Posted in Conferences, Microsoft, Uncategorized No Comments »

Bruce Eckel is giving a keynote, starting with mindmapping. I was going to write about this, but it’s being recorded, and I assume it’ll be on the codemash.org website. Interesting:
Induction: proof through observation
Deduction: reasoning from exisiting principles
Adbuction: logic of possibility - “what might be”
Oddness - all sw/development is treated the same, but not with [...]

Posted in Conferences, Uncategorized No Comments »

I’ll detail how I got here later, but I’m now listening to Jay Pipes talk about mysql benchmarking and optimization techniques. Initial tools talked about include

sysbench - sysbench.sf.net
mysqlslap - throws in randomized data
apache bench
supersmack - www.vegan.net/tony/supersmack
mybench - jeremy.zawaodny.com/mysql/mybench

profiling

diagnose a running system
identify performance bottlenecks - memory/cpu/disk/network/os

show processlist / status / innodb status (http://dev.mysql.com/show)
NOTE: when ‘using [...]

Posted in Conferences, Uncategorized No Comments »