Technology We Use
We use a wide range of technologies in our effort to bring new information to the web. Because of the licensing costs, typically we use open source software. Our typical hosting platform for a web site is Apache running on Linux.
As far as the database portion of our systems, we run MySQL using InnoDB to provide transactions, row locking, hot back up for MySQ, all without compromising the high read performance of MySQL.
We currently support a number of open source projects in order to leave the world a little better than we found it. For example we recently made a donation to the Perl Foundation. Perl is a one of the core languages of the net and most of our projects tend to get written in Perl.
We also contribute to the Xao Web Development Suite currently maintained by Andrew Maltsev. We are currently extending the suite to include a new Forum object and blog platform.
Whatever technology we continue to develop, we will endeavor to open source those elements we feel that will benefit the community at large. Once again, trying to leave the world in a better place than we found it.
Xao Web Development Platform
I wanted to give a little background on Xao, a project very near and dear to my heart. The Xao software project began on Xao Inc, a company I used to work at landed a largish (for a small software firm)contract to develop a order system linking 3M, Brady, Loctite and several other manufacturers with a mid market distributor. While much of the project is not web viewable, the public web site portion is viewable RS Hughes - industrial distributor.
One of the interesting challenges we faced with the project was the distributor's need to incorporate content from a number of manufacturers. This meant taking data in widely varying formats, data structures and building a system that could normalize that data into a single structure.
Out of the work of for that system came a system initially called Clearingpoint. This little gem of software then got buried in the acquisition of Brave New Worlds by VA Linux Systems. When Xao was spun off from VA Linux we began work again on Clearingpoint. This eventually evolved into the Xao Software Suite. Since Xao Inc is no longer doing active development, Ejelta has taken over the project. Thalasar is currently actively involved in the Xao Software suite. Our current project is the forum object - which will add our own unique twist on forums. The initial forum object is due in mid June.
Drupal Outage = Felix Culpa
I have begun recently working with a PHP based CMS (Content Management System) call Drupal. Drupal recently got some play in Slashdot as their site went dark. Remarkably Drupal.org had a Page Rank of 8 on a shared hosting environment.
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Laptops
Yesterday the laptops arrived for the web mail station project. I have to say I am very impressed with them. They appear to be well engineered, small and relatively light. Kudos to HP.
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Center for Addiction
Well Center for Addiction has officially launched. I have been doing a soft pedal launch for about three weeks now, working out the bugs, slowly adding content. It's one of the first site I have developed in Drupal. Drupal.
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Google Online Storage Service
This highlights a exactly Google's competitve advantage. They understand their most powerfu feature is the Google platform. They have always used this to role out new ideas that change the way people view the web.
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Inventor of Hotmail turns his attention to weblogs
Cause Sabeer's last too projects went so well. I love the fact that they mention Arzoo. Here's their quote
Mr Bhatia's new venture is his first since investing $8m of his own money, along with $7m raised from financial backers in Arzoo, a virtual classroom of free-lance academics and computer specialists who answer questions on IT problems encountered at home, or in a large workplace. That venture, however, ultimately flopped as a business.
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LAMP lights the way in open-source security
Here's the real meat of why the LAMP stack is really beginning to make traction in the corporate marketplace.
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Yahoo! Pipes is LIVE!
Pipes which is currently under a Digg effect, strikes me as a really really cool idea. For so long the cool factor of Google has meant that Yahoo has labored under the "big and popular" but not cool.
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Upgraded MT
I upgraded my version of MT to the latest version 3.34. It went off completely without a problem. I find that amazing consideering the instructions were to simply overwrite most of my previous installations files.
Upgrade Complete. Mostly.
I have to hand to the guys over at Six Apart the latest version of Movable Type (3.34) is a great improvement over the previous version I was running. Updating and changing templates was a snap. I now use the the Style Catcher plugin for managing styles and it's a great help. I will be making changes to the templates over the next week but this template is a great improvement over the template "inspired" by Craig Newmark.
Sunday Link Roundup
In the Sunday Roundup I cover areas that I find interesting in the blogosphere. This week it's comment spam - which seems to plague every single CMS platform. There are a number of ways people are fighting comment spam. On the Movable Type front here's a link to the MT wiki on fighting comment spam in MT. Here's how Drupal deals with comment spam. There's also the comment spam service Akismet and a link to one blogger's experience with Akismet
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