Community Doesn't Scale: Why k5 Is Perpetually Dying
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Can't sleep. Dried sinuses are nature's way of making you suffer needlessly. You can only struggle so long before beginning to question the fundamentals. Of course, those are stupid questions, so instead you get out bed, rip music from a very old computer game, and question the nature of the online forum.  Yes, I write in a highly unnecessary narrative voice. Fuck you too.
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I see that Cory Doctorow has made another panicked grab at relevancy once again! His most recent InformationWeek article, How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community, is his latest exercise in self-deception where he tries convincing himself that he knows something about the hip, happenin' thang we call the Innanet.        That Cory has little useful knowledge of keeping hostile jerks from taking over online communities is proven most aptly and amusingly by the way he chose to keep hostile jerks from taking over his weblog BoingBoing: he destroyed its community by shutting off its comments system.
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Not every internet forum is blessed with the mentally ill. Love him or hate him, MichaelCrawford is one of Kuro5hin's best and most prolific writers. He is truly a K5 icon.    But, alas, tragedy has struck. The MichaelCrawford account has been struck down, deleted, anonymised. The full details of why this outrage against K5 has been perpetrated are not clear; it appears that the editor pwhysall  took offense at a recent failed Crawford submission to the queue and left snarky comments; in response, our favourite K5 writer with schizoaffective disorder submitted story called "Let's All Get pwhysall Laid". Since then, the MichaelCrawford account has been missing in action.    Inside: What you can do to help
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(Source: Lumension Security)  Today's IT security model is broken. In the ongoing battle to defend against malicious attacks, the industry studies and surveys continue to reveal a sobering fact: Although more than 99 percent of companies have anti-virus technology deployed, about 60 percent still suffer from malware infection every year. More organizations every year are also falling victim to data theft, despite the additional layers of IT security. Using traditional security measures, organizations must continuously react to risks, forcing them to constantly play catch-up with today's relentless barrage of viruses, spyware, Trojans and rogue devices. IT security has reached a tipping point, as reactive security solutions are simply unable to keep up with this constant tirade of malicious attacks. Join IDC Analyst Charles Kolodgy as he evaluates the "positive security model" as an emerging alternative and define its elements, including how this model lays a policy-based framework that facilitates proactive, continuous security across the enterprise.  In addition to Mr. Kolodgy's presentation, attendees will hear about: -How the Positive Security Model simplifes the entire security management lifecycle-Lumension Security's solutions, which provide you with unified protection and control of all endpoints-First hand experience from CWIE Holdings about the drawbacks of relying on traditional security measures
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The Hiveminds Magazine has pointed out a new effort that's been kicked off today to try to get the PHP community (and providers) to finally make the leap and drop PHP4 support all together:   The idea is to make a unified, concentrated effort to drop PHP4 support and drive PHP5 adoption in the year 2008. Think of it. All CMS, forum and framework projects going completely over to PHP5 on a set date! This would be like a bomb dropping on the web hosting world and cause ripples throughout the open source world.   They point out some of the projects that are leaning either way from ezPublish hanging on to PHP4 and apps like Drupal that have embraced PHP5. In fact, it's the Drupal group that's written up the proposal on how it would all go down - the "Go PHP5 Effort".   It is a dangerous cycle, and one that needs to be broken. The open source PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed open source PHP projects have all agreed that effective 5 February 2008, any new feature release will have a minimum  required PHP version no older than PHP 5.2.0.   There's tons of comments to the proposal in both parties (and some in between noting that there are already several PHP4 applications that run quite happily on PHP5).
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A great presentation by Ilia Alshanetsky from the International PHP Conference 2004. The only thing I would like to point out is that MMCache is still being actively developed, as evidenced by the CVS activity at sourceforge.  PS: You might need to use Mozilla to view this. IE sometimes doesn't work properly. I thought IE was a defacto standard :-)
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If idle hands are the devil's tools, then boredom at work must be his machine gun. In that spirit, here is this years (embarrassingly early) entry to a continuing K5 tradition, Predictions 2005, plus a look back at least years predictions.
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The folks over at php|architect have consolidated their community efforts (news, the podcast and their forums) all under one new website - the C7Y PHP Community Website.   Welcome to the new community site. We've still got a bit of finishing work to do, but I think everyone would agree that this is much better than the old site! Let us know what you think.    Rather than having their community efforts spread out over their current site, they decided on on centralized resource where people can get the latest news, check out the latest podcast and interact with fellow PHPers out there on the web.   Be sure to check it out for yourself and let them know what you think.
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I&#8217;m playing the devil&#8217;s advocate here, so keep that in mind in case I end up trampling all over anything you hold dear :) Google has taken a lot of flak on a lot of issues in the past few years - it&#8217;s a price an industry leader invariably has to pay.  Apart from Blogger spam [...]
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Jacob Santos makes some of his own comments about the recent PHP5 adoption talk that's been going around in the PHP community (spurred on by comments made by Matt of the Wordpress project).   Matt brings up some good points. What might be limiting PHP 5 adoption, could just be the lack of interest in developers. [...] Up until reading his rant, I've lived in a box where everyone I've talked to, used and enjoyed PHP 5 and its vast extensions. Developing in PHP 5.0 was uneventfully, but you learn to appreciate PHP 5 with the core inclusion of PDO with PHP 5.1. PHP 5 is not without annoyances. In the core developers attempts to "better" the language, they made changes that broke code that previously worked.   He looks at a few of the items for debate surrounding the move from PHP4 to PHP5 including the extensions that come bundled with PHP5, solving the register_globals issue, and a brief mention of the Standard PHP Library.
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Since the K5 Emperor of Icecream, eavier, foisted the augean task of ghetto-reviewing onto my skinny shoulders this year, here goes. First, we begin with the grimy w/hole itself, and then move to the individual rotting parts thereof. The obvious changes to the ghetto landscape were: trhurler didn't come back from his hike, MichaelCrawford started giving it away, my kuron brethren were badly trolled by a xanax-popping dysfunctional alcoholic), both Egil and insomnyuk decided to suicidomize themselfs, NIWS/Spellcheckbot attacked (again), and rusty took apart his bathroom and added walls to K5.   Rotting parts inside:
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A good architecture should be able to adapt to accommodate evolutionary technological enhancements, but when the fundamental characteristics of a key component change significantly, the system equilibrium can be disrupted and must be re-architected to re-establish balance. But with the ever-growing adoption of server virtualization, the equilibrium between processor and I/O resources is now being disrupted.
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Fluery still roots for JBoss...Edward Tufte mostly likes iPhone interface...mysteries of Linux's /proc files...multicore compression...Actually *using* mammoth telephotos
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The leading vendors in the data warehousing market are running scared of new entrants to the market that are offering data warehouse appliances (i.e. pre-integrated hardware, software, storage combinations) that can offer greatly superior performance at a significantly lower price.  In this white paper we will dispel the 'fog of war' that currently pervades the data warehousing landscape, dismissing those question marks that are irrelevant and gratuitous, but highlighting any genuine issues that need to be addressed.
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There's a big yellow bar on the Twitter home page today saying it will be down for maintenence betw 10AM and 10PM today. I haven't heard any grumbling about this, but it's worth a bit of a grumble. What other basic form of communication goes down for 12 hours at a time? What if the web went offline for 12 hours at a time? It's unthinkable, because the web is built on the Internet and is decentralized and redundant. A single router or server can go down for a few hours, days or forever, and the web keeps on tickin.  Same with email. If Gmail started having twelve-hour planned outages, as much as I like Gmail, I'd switch. I can't be without email for any extended period of time.  Okay, let's give the guys at Twitter credit -- they stopped being flip about Twitter taking naps or showers. No one likes jokes when a line of communication is down. Now I'd like them to take another step. Assuming these long outages are really necessary, explain to us what they're for. I can take a guess -- something about their database needs changing, and all the data in all the files must be processed to implement the change. Any updates made while such a process is running would be lost, so the server must be shut off. But this is just a guess.  Another guess -- maybe they've hired a scaling expert who needs to make one final major adjustment before these outages are a thing of the past? No one would want to make such a promise, that's offering too much temptation to Dr Murphy, but that would be good news. Maybe Twitter is getting on to solid ground, finally.  It's fairly amazing that there isn't a viable Twitter clone out there yet. I'd also like to see something much more decentralized, based on static files, available to any Twitter-like system. It doesn't seem that far out of reach. With all the scaling troubles Twitter has had it's surprising that there haven't yet been any entrepreneurs willing to enter the space as competition to Twitter.  Users and developers are learning first-hand why centralized systems are so fragile. I'm sure they're doing a heroic job at Twitter, the best they can with what they have, but it's not good enough when the service takes a 12-hour break while many of the humans that depend on it are awake and working.
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Killing two birds with one stone Hands on Iâve been fascinated by cross-platform programming for more years than I care to remember, and my interest has recently been sharpened by the acquisition of a number of Apple Macs â both Intel and PPC (PowerPC). This article focuses primarily on some technical aspects of Qt, Trolltechâs cross-platform C++ toolkit which, as you may know, is the architectural core behind the KDE desktop on Linux. At the end, I show how easy it is to create a simple application without writing a line of code.â¦
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PÃ¡draic Brady continues his series looking at the creation of complex views in the Zend Framework with part six today all about gathering together the thoughts and ideas from the previous articles into a cohesive whole.   Part 6 now takes our previous fragments of theory and attempts to stitch them together into a cohesive whole - a description of a possible end solution. Yes, I know code talks loudly, and we'll get there with an almighty bang in Part 7 (which I promise is no more than a week away). Until then it's more verbosity.   He suggests a list of six terms to help get everyone on the same page when talking about the complex views:   Includes Partials Dispatches Layouts Placeholders Response Segments   Since these terms would mean nothing without proper definitions, he provides a few paragraphs on each explaining what they are and, where necessary, using code to illustrate the point.