A couple of years ago I was asked to build a piece of software implementing the concepts of the LinguaFolio “formative assessment tool”. That’s education-speak for something that helps students and teachers understand how a student is doing. 
I was asked to build this by the state of North Carolina, and for the past two years they’ve been rolling this out to more students and teachers around the state.
The LinguaFolio tool is free for all students and teachers in NC, and is essentially free for others to use because it’s an open source software project. The main code is available to download and run anywhere. It’s a Java/Grails/MySQL web app which, while not as simple to set up and host as a PHP app, is still pretty basic. We’ve still got a lot of functionality to implement, and I’m slowly adding some new features over the next few months, but I thought I’d mention this here so people would know it’s available. As far as I know there’s only one other ‘online’ version of LinguaFolio, but it’s not open source or free or even available to test out. As more people become interested in using LinguaFolio, there may be more options, but right now, our elinguafolio project is picking up steam.
Now you may be thinking “hey, that’s great it’s open source, but I don’t know how to run any software like that!”. And you may be right. Just because something is open source doesn’t necessarily make it 100% useful to anyone out of the box – it’s more a case of giving you freedom to find the right vendor to work with (or change vendors if you’re not happy). If you’re interested in using LinguaFolio in your district or state, tell your vendor to grab the software and run it. They can reach out to me with questions (there’s an issue tracker on that site above) and, within reason, I can assist them in setting it up.
Or… you can simply hire me to do it for you. I can set it up and host it on servers I manage (and can give you access to as well) for a standard monthly price. You’ll have a version that is kept up to date, and you’ll be helping to fund the open source LinguaFolio which will continue to help more teachers and students over the coming years. If you’re interested, give me a call at 919 827 4724 to discuss how I can help.
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
New PDF database magazine
No, it’s not from me or WebDevPub, but it looks good all the same. It’s actually a continuation of the earlier MySQL Magazine, but with a larger focus, and is now a pay-for PDF, similar to JSMag and GroovyMag.
OSDBZine.net is put out bi-monthly from Keith Murphey, who had started the MySQL Magazine two years ago (and recently interviewed on webdevradio). I just picked up the first issue, with a whopping 61 pages of database goodness. With pieces on Drizzle, Firebird, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, LucidDB and more, it’s got something for just about everyone.
Only drawback so far is the current signup process – it’s a little barebones (I spoke with Keith, and he’ll be updating it soon). Visit http://www.osdbzine.net/signup.html to register an account, then login to purchase via paypal.
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
Oracle buying Sun – what does this mean for MySQL?
Just woke up this morning to news that Oracle is buying Sun. After cursing myself for not having bought some JAVA last week when it was in the 6 range (pre-market now at 9.10), I started thinking about what this might mean for MySQL.
About a year ago, Sun purchased MySQL. Although a lot of hooha was made about what might happen to MySQL at that time, Sun made it pretty clear that they wouldn’t be changing too much of the company they were purchasing. They’d wanted to have a good story on the low-end of computing (from what I remember) and the LAMP stack (where M was for MySQL) dominated much of the low-end of web development. While it was never on the same level as Ebay buying Skype, I think a lot of people were confused by how Sun would be able to get back the billion dollars they expended on the MySQL deal.
Fast forward a year. Some of the key MySQL core team have left, forking the MySQL product in the process (drizzle). Is the MySQL branch of Sun very attractive? I imagine Oracle was looking more at the hardware and consulting side of the Sun acquisition, not the database side, but this won’t site well with many in the MySQL world.
The MySQL community has always been a bit suspicious of Oracle. Many were quite alarmed when Oracle purchased InnoDB, the company that made the innodb MySQL table engine, and that was something that spurred on work on other transaction engines in the MySQL world. Nothing has yet come to be adopted as widely as innodb yet, and Oracle’s control of InnoDB has continued to be a bit of concern for some in the community.
Is Oracle getting much on the database front when they purchase Sun? There’s probably not enough of a marketshare between the two to claim that there’s some sort of monopoly anti-trust considerations to take in to account (MSSQL, DB2 and PostgreSQL – what is their combined marketshare?)
Is there a danger that “MySQL” as a product will be a name brand, but that many people will just start using community forks? I can see that “MySQL” as a database engine might end up being a generic term, somewhat like “Linux”, in that there are many distros out there serving different needs. Not sure if the MySQL licensing would ever allow for that degree of diversity, but maybe we’ll see something like this in reaction to the Oracle purchase.
Side question – what will this do to Java and OpenOffice? Hopefully Oracle will leave these (and MySQL) intact, and just focus on integrating these technologies in to their sales and consulting process, but leave the tech direction alone.
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
Running .Net code on a JVM?
I just stumbled on this article Sunday morning. This snippet sums up the product:
There is a way of marrying the advantages of .NET development with Java deployment. Using Mainsoft for Enterprise Edition (EE), Visual Studio developers can write code in .NET and cross-compile it to Java. Not only code, but pieces of the Framework; Mainsoft has worked with Miguel de Icaza and Novell to port pieces of the Mono project to Java. Your limits in calling Framework classes, especially for Web apps, are almost nonexistent.
Sounds very intriguing. But, is it just a solution in search of a problem? Would many .Net shops embrace a Java app server for deployment? Is this too niche of a product to take off beyond a few edge cases? Or is this sort of thing the future?
What would, I think, be more useful for many shops is to take Java code and compile it in to something that targetted the .Net CLR. Are there any projects that do this/
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
WebDevRadio podcast – Symfony Project at MySQL User Conference
I had a chance to catch up with the Symfony guys at the MySQL User Conference a few days ago. We get some background on the Symfony project, and a glimpse as to where things are going in the near future.
This was my first ‘from the floor’ recording – I think the levels are *OK*, but please bear with me – Fabien sounded better in person I think I got a small ‘exclusive/breaking news’ at the time, but I wasn’t able to get the podcast up until now.
Have a listen at http://webdevradio.com
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
Blob Streaming with MySQL
I’m sitting in on the Blob Streaming with MySQL session. The project is at http://blobstreaming.org. Coincidentally, my brother had put together a proof of concept for streaming blobs from MySQL a few months ago before either of us heard about this project.
Why to put blobs in a database? The biggest pro seems to be for transactional reasons. File systems directly aren’t always transactional. Also replication and HA solutions then get applied right to that data as well as the rest of your data.
Are there reasons to not put blobs in a database? They can make the table slow, the database can become too big to snapshot or backup (practically, if not in theory), and replication can be too slow. The blobstreaming.org project seems to alleviate the replication slowness problem. How? The blobstreaming project stores the blob data in the database, but not in the rowdata itself (which just holds a reference). The goodness of the database functionality is there, but the replications aren’t slowed down by the blob data. I think I’m getting this right…
Basically the BlobStreamer is another engine type, but it’s not a table type you can create directly – it has to hook in to another table type. The only one demoed is PBXT (blobstreaming was put together by PrimeBase as well, so this makes sense). Perhaps this would work with innodb as well…? The BS engine type exposes an HTTP interface as well for basic reading and writing of blob data.
An interesting project which may come in handy for some large file/video projects.
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
Generational developers
I’m seeing a large cross section of age groups represented at the MySQL conference. The typical late teens through mid twenties are here, as expected, but I’m seeing a high number of people who are clearly older than that – many likely mid 40s or higher. It could just be that database work is typically suited for older workers looking for more stability (‘keep the systems running day in day out’), but it might also represent an uptake of MySQL at more established companies as well.
Anyway, that’s not quite what I was writing about. What crossed my mind was the children of many of these older people. Will they grow up in to software people as well? Will we perhaps see consultancies handed down from generation to generation over the next several decades? Software as an industry has barely been around 30 years, so I’m not sure it’s been on too many peoples’ minds, but I still wonder. My dad is an accountant, but didn’t bring me up to be one, and I had little interest. Some of that may have been because I had no way of having visibility in to his profession. Beyond ‘take you child to work’ days, there’s not too many professions where children can get hands-on experience of what their parents do. With many types of software, that’s not the case. Anyone can get started with most tools, especially with Open Source. Put another way, will Linus’ kids take over the kernel in another 20 years?
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
SOLR search adoption – the power of sane defaults?
Tonight I met someone from a (largish) local company and learned they’re migrating their search functionality to SOLR. This is the second largish company in the area I know that’s migrating to SOLR. I’m not naming names only because I’m not sure they’d want me to do so. Suffice it to say these are names fairly well known in the marketing and communications industries.
I’m not surprised at all by the adoption, as SOLR makes it pretty easy to get started using the power of Lucene without requiring you to do a lot of setup or administration up front. These ‘sane defaults’, as I believe Erik Hatcher put it to me, are what give projects like SOLR a competitive advantage against even commercial offerings. Whether technology is good or bad is often secondary to whether it’s easy to get it to a testing stage.
If you’re using SOLR, what was the deciding factor? Ease of setup? Flexibility? Compatibility with existing Lucene data?
If you’re not using SOLR for your data search needs, what are you using? Raw Lucene? Xapian? Sphinx? A commercial product? If so, which one?
P.S If you’re not sure how to go about implementing search for your site and have some questions, email me – mgkimsal@gmail.com.
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
FriendFeed prediction – clustered feed data
Robert Scoble just switched his home pages from TechMeme to FriendFeed.
“So what?” is likely what you’re thinking. Yeah, big deal, right? Well, TechMeme had a clustering algorithm which would group together news articles of related content, and give you a good idea of the ‘hot topics’ of the day. It did this in a completely automated way.
I predict that FriendFeed (or another social network aggregator) will introduce topic clustering, based on the keywords and topics of people you follow. Clusty.com has done topic clustering for years, though it’s not something that is of great use to ‘general’ searching (at least, not in many cases). Carrot2, an open source clustering engine, also provides this sort of functionality.
I took a first stab at clustering my feed data with carrot2. I’m not sure I had enough data to draw useful conclusions yet – it might need a larger body of a group of people’s tweets (for example) which I just didn’t have at the time.
For people who follow thousands of users, it would obviously be useful to have a ‘big picture’ view of the hottest topics being twittered/blogged/etc about. But take it one step beyond that. Being able to look at *other peoples’* topic clusters would give you an instant view as to whether they have people worth following.
When I look at twitter, I can look at other people’s followers. Great concept, but it doesn’t tell me anything about the topics those people tend to twitter about, so I’m never sure if it’s worth following them. Nor do I get any notion of how those people are related. Marrying facebook or plaxo data against twitter feeds would be useful, no? Or just letting me add my own relationship metadata in to twitter itself.
Getting a high level view of peoples’ topiclusters would be incredibly useful. “Topiclusters” – yeah, I just made up that word and yeah, it’s lame. “Topsters”? “Substers?” (subject clusters?).
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
- Get better clients!
- Make more money!
- Avoid costly mistakes!
