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Defcon 18, Las Vegas

Sunday, August 1st, 2010

DEF CON 18 was held once again in Las Vegas at the Riviera Convention Center.

There were a handful of talks on the subjects of DNS and IPv6.

The hacker Jeopardy session was a lot of fun. I think the audience got more correct answers than the panel. I was impressed with the software somebody wrote to show the game categories – very convincing. Afterward, the EFF had an interesting fundraiser (your photo beside a “model”.)

The weather was hot but clear. The McDonald’s across the street is open 24 hours and has free WiFi.

I walked over to the Fashion Show Mall (about 1 mile.) It has a variety of restaurants on different levels, including a Maggiano’s, the Capital Grille, and a gourmet burger stand.

theregister.co.uk: Defcon speaker calls IPv6 a ’security nightmare’

Posted in Conferences, Open Source, Tech, Toys, Travel | No Comments »

O’Reilly Open Source Conference 2010, Portland

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

Once again, the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) was held in Portland, Oregon.

It was a good conference, and we had beautiful weather all week long.

Executive Summary

The themes promoted by the conference organizers were Cloud Computing, NoSQL, Emerging Languages (Scala, Erlang, Parrot, Go) and Android phone development.

The @oscon twitter channel was heavily used to coordinate amongst organizers and attendees. I used the TwiXtreme twitter client program on my BlackBerry.

Plug Computers were very popular in the Expo area. They are 5 watt ARM-based computers running Debian Linux that fit into a power brick-sized case and cost $99 to $129 depending on features. The Marvell booth had a few models on display, from GlobalScale (GuruPlug) and Ionics. High-end models have dual gigabit NICs, multiple USB ports, a WiFi access point and other expansion ports.

There was also continuing buzz regarding Facebook’s Flashcache SSD module (GPL v2) for linux, and also ZFS snapshots.

Tutorials

I went to the Gearman Cookbook tutorial, the first half of the Chef tutorial and some of the Cloud Summit talks.

The Gearman Cookbook tutorial was excellent. After a detailed overview of the Gearman architecture and implementations in Perl and C, a number of use cases were explored in detail, including before and after code samples. The talk was both easy to listen to as an overall survey, as well as providing immediately useful info for those wanting to deploy it.

The Chef tutorial was very detailed – too much so perhaps. I went to the first half only, since I am not planning to implement Chef soon (I use PXE and anaconda/kickstart with CentOS), and did not need that level of detail at this time. cfengine, puppet and chef are ops tools for configuring servers. Chef uses Ruby data structures for its configuration files, and has include files and other useful syntax. Basically, users can “code” server configuration, as if they were traditional apps.

I went to some of the Cloud Summit talks and BOFs, but found that anybody who has done a simple project using EC2 knew as much or more than the speakers, some I would call blowhards.

Marten Mickos, president of Eucalyptus, is refreshing in that he is always clear about being in it for the money, while also promoting Open Source.

Sessions

Some of the most memorable sessions to me were:

Introduction to MongoDB, Kristina Chodorow (MongoDB)

Kristina is the maintainer of the Perl and PHP drivers for MongoDB. She gave an overview of MongoDB, a NoSQL document store, and its command-line interface, which uses JavaScript.

Some day she will release a sharding tool for MongoDB.

Scaling SourceForge with MongoDB, Nosh Petigara (10gen), Rick Copeland (SourceForge.net / GeekNet)

Nosh and Rick gave an excellent review of incorporating MongoDB into the SourceForge site.

- SF query load is mostly read-only
- ops team benchmarked a few NoSQL candidates, and MongoDB won on performance
- original MySQL servers had 64 GB RAM. After migration to MongoDB, same server machines but only 8 GB RAM
- backup dumps are verified to be bitwise the same as masters
- have to be careful not to dump all documents in your database to the network or it will max out switches
- SF relies on first-class data centers and replication slaves, less worried about MongoDB mmap (not crash-safe)
- I personally looked at their performance numbers and site graphs (on an iPad), and the end result was impressive.

Perl Lightning Talks

As always, the Perl Lightning Talks are a highpoint of the conference.

The “cartoon” of Vincent Pit’s remarkable CPAN module(VPIT) contributions was both informative and hilarious. Vincent is a French Ph.D. candidate in advanced geometry.

Cloud BOF (3 Hours)

The Cloud BOF was disorganized, starting 30 minutes late and for some reason was subdivided into 4 audience groups. Startups and vendors trying to make a cloud sales push led the BOF, including cloud and DNS service providers.

The Health Regulations subgroup came up with a couple ways to make the Cloud palatable to regulators by using encryption on all data due to the multi-tenancy issues with sharing public VMs.

I was in the NoSQL group, which discussed general issues and particular successes. Memcached was the clearest winner, while some people also had success with MongoDB and Redis.

My neighbor was an engineer at Postrank.com. He said that they were happy with HAProxy, but much less happy with the unpredictable IO available when running MySQL on EC2. He also said to carefully look at storage volumes available to your instance, as one is a useful tmpfs. They use AuthSMTP to get around EC2 being generally blacklisted for outbound email.

Database BOFs

MySQL BOF

The MySQL AB engineering staff has left Oracle. Monty Program AB (21 staff) has the core developers, and Percona Inc. (32 staff) has the consultants. Oracle still has some of the InnoDB programmers.

The business plan for Monty Program AB is 60% commercially-sponsored MySQL development, and 40% community-request development. Monty would like commercial users of MySQL to sponsor patches that would benefit them.

Mark mentioned that using Nehalem instructions for CRC were much faster, and that Facebook was using partitions for truncating tables instead of doing multi-record deletes. (See his blog for more details.)

One person mentioned using a commercial backup tool, R1Soft, that inserts a linux kernel module to allow filesystem snapshots. He said to carefully test backup and restore in your environment, especially for filesystems greater than 1 TB which may exceed certain block counter limits. Peter said that some of his clients had used it with varying success.

It worked for him in his environment, and the file browser allows selective file restore (he uses it to restore by priority where a system runs multiple applications.) It starts at $299 for the Standard Edition, and also has MySQL Add-on and Enterprise Editions.

PostgreSQL BOF

The PostgreSQL BOF talked about 30 or so changes that went into version 9.

One of the most exciting new features is a native replication feature, called streaming replication (block-based.) The advantage over Slony-I replication is that Slony-I is trigger-based, so has a variety of issues included inability to replicate DDL commands.

Some of the developers mimed replication events, which was rather amusing to watch. Yes, it was taped.

PostgreSQL is released under the PostgreSQL Licence, which is BSDish.

Peter Zaitsev, co-founder of Percona, organized 3 BOFs, including XtraDB, XtraBackup, Maatkit, Percona Server, Sphinx Search and Running Databases on Flash Storage.

Sphinx Search BOF

Andrew Aksyonoff, the original programmer of Sphinx Search (GPL v2), couldn’t make it to OSCON (the good excuse was that he was busy coding), so Richard Kelm (Sphinx sales/customer support honcho) and Peter filled in (Percona is a business partner with Sphinx, and many of Percona’s clients use it.)

Some of the attendees were existing users, like myself, and some from HP and other companies were looking for a large-scale search solution or alternative to Lucene.

Monty mentioned that the latest MySQL 5.1 should be used, as there have been a number of performance and reliability improvements. Full-text search is supposed to be 10x faster than 5.0, and replication is nearly bug-free by now.

Sphinx Search now has real-time index updates in version 1.1.0 beta. Another very nice feature is SQL+FS indexing.

Here is the full Sphinx 1.1.0 changelog.

Running Databases on Flash Storage BOF

The Running Databases on Flash Storage BOF had a combination of MySQL and Postgres users who have tested or used most of the SSD products: FusionIO, violin, Intel, OCZ, etc. Everybody was happy with SSD IOPS performance, but less so with cost and metadata RAM requirements with the add-in boards (FusionIO may require 4 GB RAM for metadata.)

Peter said that 20% to 30% of his clients are already using SSD – across the spectrum of vendors and models. Some are also trying “massive RAM” solutions, like Cisco servers with 384 GB RAM.

Some users had 1+ TB Postgres databases with very thorny backup and mgmt. issues. One solution was to start a snapshot, but not do the copy operation.

Expo Notes

I had an enjoyable talk with Austin Hook, who has operated the OpenBSD Store for many years. He lives near Calgary, the center of OpenBSD/OpenSSH/PF development. He mentioned that some perennial financial contributors had stopped because of the recession, so here’s the donations link.

I also talked to some reps from a Brazilian outsourcing firm, ActMinds. They currently have 400 employees across Brazil and a sales office in Philadelphia. Brazil is only 2 hours ahead of EST. They said the minimum project size is 2 developers and developer turnover a low 5%/annum. Their pricing is $35 to $45/hour.

And I had fun handling the plug computers on display at the Marvell booth. The Ionics boards are amazingly densely populated.

Discussions

I had the opportunity to talk to a long-time Portland resident who works as a computer consultant. He said that the Portland economy is not doing great, and really hasn’t done well since old-growth logging was stopped after 90% of the forests were cleared. And although hundreds of miles of fiber optic has been laid downtown, it’s not available for residential use. However, the Beaverton area does have ubiquitous FTTH.

I also talked to somebody who attended the Emerging Languages talks. He’s working on his M.Sc. in Computer Science, so found those talks fascinating.

Twitter Humor

There were some humorous tweets:

- “my MongoDB and CouchDB mugs are fighting each other.”
- “I got one MongoDB mug, but need two to safely store coffee.”

Notes

Note to self: skip the nightly parties unless you have a date. The bars are too loud to talk to anybody.

Note to the O’Reilly conference organizers: use meetup.com for the BOFs like ApacheCon does. The average audience was about 10 people, and with meetup it would be 4x that.

OSCON 2010 Slides
Tim Bray: Desperate Perl Hacker
Youtube: OSCON 2010 videos
blip.tv: OSCON2010 videos
wikipedia: Plug Computer
Jeremy Zawodny: MongoDB Early Impressions

Posted in BSD, Business, Conferences, Linux, MySQL, OSCON, Open Source, Oracle, Perl, Storage, Tech, Toys, Travel, User Groups, i18n | 1 Comment »

MySQL Conference 2010

Monday, April 12th, 2010

The MySQL Conference was this week in Santa Clara. It was a well-organized and educational event with everybody involved in the MySQL community showing up once again.

Executive Summary

The highlights were:

after 2 years of effort, the performance schema foundation is available as a 5.5.x patch. With another year of effort, it could be useful.
the various community forks (Percona/XtraDB, MariaDB, OurDelta) will merge in the next 3 months into a maintenance fork by Monty Program, since MP has the most original MySQL developers.
the various MySQL vendors are soldiering along, all releasing new, improved versions of their hw and sw products this year.
The largest independent MySQL-centric consulting companies are Percona with 32 staff, and Monty Program 40 with staff, with a target of 50 employees.
the MySQL source code will have to be modified to make MySQL fast enough to keep up with Fusion IO SSD devices. Currently, better than SSD performance can be gained by installing enough RAM to fit the entire database in buffer pool.
Drizzle development is going nicely, but note that it’s not backward compatible with MySQL. Drizzle is a 64-bit only fork of MySQL with emphasis on community code development, increasing performance and maintainability through a plug-in architecture and strict code cleanliness.

Monday Morning Tutorial

Using Partitioning in MySQL 5.1 and 5.5 with Giuseppe Maxia (Oracle)

- available in MySQL 5.1 and later only
- TO_DAYS and YEAR() special and recommended as they can prune partitions from lookups.
- when using TO_DAYS() as a partitoning function, the first partition matters. Use value less than zero for first partition to create NULL partition to double performance as a bug workaround.
- consider lock before inserting for all table types
- for performance, consider non-partitioned on masters, partitions on slaves.
- or different partition types

He also gave a nice tutorial on mysql sandboxes script.

Partition Limitations:

- cannot mix table types
- cannot make read-only

I talked to some advanced users, and none have found a practical use for partitions in their environment that was better than using regular table types for logging type applications.

This is due to the fact that partitions do not increase fault-tolerance, often don’t benchmark any faster, and have little in the way of administrative mgmt. support after partition creation.

Partitions can increase performance in applications where the index serves to stripe operations, but most people are just using dates for logging, with no practical benefit, as most operations fall into the current date partition.

Slides

Monday Afternoon Tutorial

Talked to Arjen Lenz and a friend at lunch.

- OpenQuery is suitable for affordable, long-term contract databae admin, not firefighting
- former partition tester and bugfixer
- replication bug with TCP errors, nagios plugin should compare both replication lag seconds and log position
- need SSL or heartbeat to detect/fix

memcached

- set all clients to same values
- use JSON or YAML, not Storable or Pickl

Tuesday

Performance Schema with Peter Gulutzan

- coded by Alff, but not GA yet
- PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA database optionally populated with events (mutex, lock, io) timing and count info
- allows simple SQL reporting of performance

EXPLAIN Demystified with Baron Schwartz (Percona Inc.)

- perennial nice EXPLAIN overview
- nice example of using mysql command prompt as pipeline for non-trivial processing

Introduction to InnoDB Monitoring System and Resource & Performance Tuning with Jimmy Yang

An Overview of Flash Storage for Databases with Vadim Tkach, Percona Inc.

- nice talk with useful performance graphs

Linux Performance Tuning and Stabilization Tips with Yoshinori Matsunobu, Sun Microsystems

- nice talk with detailed slide examples – he’s a hard worker
- he’s a fan of xfs, so some info not always useful for ext3. ie. deadline scheduler may be better on xfs, but it feels the same to me as cfq on ext3.

Wednesday

More Mastering the Art of Indexing with Yoshinori Matsunobu, Sun Microsystems

- second-part continuation of his talk from last year (!) Were you there?
- his understanding of the space requirements of blobs in Innodb is different than Peter Zaitsev’s.

Faster Than Alter – Less Downtime with Chris Schneider (Ning.com)

- Hipster presentation on doing practical DBA tasks
- likes doing dump and restore on Innodb tables, 30% faster afterwards on his tables.

InnoDB Architecture and Performance Optimization with Peter Zaitsev, Percona Inc.

- perennial comprehensive overview of Innodb
- talked about differences between Antelope and Barracuda file formats
lwn.net: A look at the MySQL forks

BOFs

O’Reilly failed to use meetup.com to promote the BOFs once again at this conference, so turnout was light to moderate as in past years.

Sphinx BOF hosted by Andrew Aksyonoff

I’ve been familiar with SphinxSearch for years and am a production user, so the general audience discussion was not interesting to me.

However, I had a chance to talk to Andrew about my take on the October Apache (Search!) Conference last October and suggested a few things:

explain collections on the Sphinx homepage, since many users insist on this feature. The question, of course, is what does the term ‘collections’ mean to various people?
make it possible for a non-technical end-user (like a marketing asst.) to highlight 10 items for feature on the first page of results
Microsoft is EOLing FAST for linux users, so think about promotion to that segment, who is considering migration to Lucene mainly – because Lucene is free, and migration is the same cost to any other product.
look at the myriad “value-added features” of commercial search engines, mostly related to adserver integration, and decide what can be supported.

MariaDB BOF hosted by Monty

Not much talk about MariaDB, but lots of drinking! (See Monty’s keynote for more detailed info.)

Conference Wrapup

Overall, another good MySQL conference. The organizers restored balance to the presentations, with a fair number of independent consultants and end-users doing talks. (Though I miss the awesome Percona Performance Conference from last year.)

BOFs should be promoted on meetup.com to double participation.

There should be a room with exotic hardware to demonstrate high performance MySQL and MySQL Cluster configurations – SANs, Infiniband, failover, etc.

The lunch food was quite good on all days, as noted by several people. (Important because the suburban venue is not within walking distance to outside restaurants.)

Posted in Conferences, Linux, MySQL, Open Source, Perl, Tech, Toys | No Comments »

ApacheCon 2009 Oakland

Friday, November 6th, 2009

I went to ApacheCon 2009 in Oakland. Why Oakland? The ASF was founded here 10 years ago.

Executive Summary

Most of the attendees that I talked to were primarily interested in search technologies, or were Apache project comitters. The search users were already using either Lucene and Solr, or were using commercial software and evaluating Lucene and Solr.

Also a lot of interest in Hadoop, Zookeeper and NoSQL projects.

I added a wikipedia NoSQL project features table after the NoSQL BoF.

The conference was very well-organized, with tutorials, BoFs, a BarCamp, and sessions. Meetup.com was used to generate the highest BoF turnout that I’ve ever seen – close to 100 at the Lucene and Hadoop BoFs. (O’Reilly Conferences can learn from that.)

The Oakland Convention Center was a good venue for this conference, though the attached Oakland Marriott hotel is $$$$ and fond of surcharges, like $33/day for parking, $5 draught beer and $3.75 for a bottle of water in-room.

The keynotes and one track per day were recorded and are available for $99 at Linux Pro Magazine Streaming.

StoneCircle Productions was the conference organizer.

Conference Notes

Monday

Although I live in San Jose, Oakland is far enough away that I’ve never been there. Oakland has a compact downtown full of historical-era buildings, and Alameda is also nice, but things get less pretty at night.

I went to the Lucene tutorial on Monday.

Lunch Conversations

- awesome views of Bay Area past Golden Gate bridge from 21st floor
- FAST pretty good indexing and search solution, but bought by Microsoft recently (going to continue linux support or not?)
- FAST has FQL (users pronounce it fecal) query language
- 150 FAST servers replaced by 40 lucene servers by 1 company
- FAST4 to FAST5 upgrade tough, similar to port to say lucene, forced upgrades for support
- linguistics is 60% of value of Fast according to Monster, 13 languages supported
- “bad stems” can be a nightmare
- SOLR gives you 90% of what you would need to program in java, built on top of Lucene
- Open Source search is not really about price, but about control and flexibility

Monday Afternoon – Lucene Tutorial

- user-assigned document id not mandatory, but great idea for many reasons, including after an index-rebuild
- lucene-assigned id only valid for that snapshot (life of score doc)
- parameter to keep or delete old index directory
- StringBuilder is more efficient than strcat
- populating title column is a good idea
- results boosting handy for ecommerce, specials, etc.
- LUKE – handy tool for index statistics, etc.
- Searcher class, snapshot in time, won’t see new merges
- contrib/ has more analyzers
- snowball stemmers
- use 1 tokenizer and 0 or more token filters
- precision-recall curve ??
- n-grams and shingles (”the president”, “United states”)
- pre-2.9 lucene, numbers and dates really strings
- 2.9 NumericField builds tri structure, help optimize range queries
- SOLR analysis tool apache-solr
- relevance feedback with MoreLikeThis

Monday BoFs

Couchdb

- “ground computing”
- “offline by default”
- now an ubuntu service
- mozilla raindrop to combine chat client msgs
- lockless
- append-only btree
- rsyncable since append-only, also replication
- checksums everywhere
- windows not first class yet, mozilla improving it

@mozilla

- browsercouch
- don’t like sql
- brasstacks test tool storage
- store now, index later
- replicate to handle large indexing load
- testbot ci

Marklogic

- commercial
- xml-centric
- great for articles, books
- transactional
- search-centric
- structure-aware
- schema-free
- xquery-driven
- extremely fast, largest 200 TB xml, 166 on hosts
- clustered
- database server
- 180 clients, 150 employees
- markmail.org demo contains 42 million email messages, very impressive performance with 5 views in almost realtime. Search is distributed across 160 nodes.

JCR in 15 minutes

- Bertrand Del
- JCR is JackRabbit,
a fully conforming implementation of the Content Repository for Java Technology API (JCR). A content repository is a hierarchical content store with support for structured and unstructured content, full text search, versioning, transactions, observation, and more.
- the ultimate content store
- content repo, union of database and filesystem, best of both worlds
- full-text search combined with structured search

Solr Flair

- information forage
- “resume-driven design”

Lucene Numerics

- available in 1.4
- tune by modifying precisionStep

HBASE

One bewildered attendee wished for a NoSQL product matrix, so I added that to the wikipedia NoSQL page.

Wednesday Sessions

Becoming a Pig Developer, Alan Gates

- Apache Pig is a sub-project of Apache Hadoop.
- this talk was really how to use PIG as an end-user, not to become a Pig project developer

Apache Hadoop in the Cloud, Tom White

- general comments on using EC2 with Hadoop mostly

Practical HBase, Michael Stack

- Apache HBase is the Apache Hadoop database, similar to BigTable.
- HBASE usage

mod_jk / mod_proxy and others, Jean-Frederic Clere and 2 others

- mod_jk, mod_proxy, mod_serf and mod_cluster original topics
- mostly focused on mod_jk, mod_proxy and isapi_redirect
- good talk by 3 long-term project contributors
- jk is kind of Java-centric, with support for Apache JServ Protocol (AJP) only available in Java back-end servers for now, like Tomcat
- isapi_redirect is primary way to do redirects on Windows IIS
- survey of audience showed several mod_proxy users, maybe one intentional mod_jk user

Thursday Sessions

“Apache Lucene and Apache Solr Performance Tuning with Mark Miller” was packed, so moving along to a different room …

Scalable Internet Architectures, Theo Schlossnagle

- amazing and thought-provoking talk, also one of the most popular
- think about performance from network packet level to application level
- carp, vrrp, whackamole
- alterdns, neustar
- dynact
- anycast (shared IP), geoip (but need actually accurate database)
- activemq, rabbitmq instead of Spread
- “memcached is the worst thing that ever happened to our industry – it solves a problem, just not the original problem”

- many apps today are so poorly designed that network issues never become scalability concerns – ie. RoR applications
- max out at 500 requests per second across 40 boxes – RoR
- firebug and yslow have been fantastic at making front-end engineers aware of networking performance
- 10 gb nics suck
- instead of one big 20 Gbps loadbalancer, use anycast from core router to 5x 4 gpbs cheaper load balancers
- spiky load or DDoS – announce a /32 to separate load balancer, use symmetric return path

- jms, aqmp, spread

durable message queues

- activemq (java)
- openamq (c) – hard to use
- rabbitmq (erlang) – nice except in durable mode because erlang disk io blows

- most common protocol Stomp is awful and slow (hard to read 100k messages per second) and not binary, but lots of clients exist.

- activemq and stomp is a good start.
- rabbitmq and native connectors are better, but no perl client.

- PCI compliance requires a stateful firewall. Hard to do 1.5 million packets per second traffic for most medium-sized data centers, need to use a CDN to distribute static requests and distribute the packets somewhere else
- leaving trailing / off causes 302, doubles traffic
- Slides
- read/write ratio is 1 … likely IM or email?
- went over some networking details with Paul L. afterwards

Recent Developments in SSL and Browsers, Rick Andrews, Thawte

- 1.6 billion OCSP requests per day, need good infrastructure to support that
- intermediate CA allows root CA to be offline – chained hierarchy – SSLCertificateChainFile,
needs intermediate certificates before cross-certificates, some clients need in proper order
- EV hierarchy more complex. wanted new EV root, but older browsers don’t know about it.
- browser ubiquity problem with any new feature, hash or crypto algorithm
- logotypes – trademark and copyright issues with using other companies’ logos in a product
- Verisign does not have apache httpd committers, but should
- 1 attendee wanted to sign JavaScript files, but what does it mean if most sites link to 10 advertising and tracking scripts? what do you tell the user if 1 JS is not signed?

Subversion Meetup

Organizers didn’t show up, so spent 10 minutes talking to a handful of end-users about subversion gripes and moved along to …

Hadoop Meetup

Zookeeper

- zk is persistent to disk
- can run on one node, but 3 is minimum non-toy
- zk is popular in academia now for some reason
- avoid split-brain partitioning between 2 data centers – bad
- very recent merge to fix -368, not ready for production yet
- people using it for a message queue, perhaps more reliable than many other Open Source ones
- need 1 zk node for testing, but 3 zk nodes for non-trivial implementation

Scribe

- github
- 4x to 5x compression with lzo. similar disk bw improvement

A local owner of a gelato store handed out 6 free samples from a portable gelato freezer.

Friday Sessions

Building Intelligent Search Applications with the Lucene Ecosystem, Ted Dunnin

- some matrix math
- using his matrix math optimization, a perl program on 1 server was faster than Mahout running on a $250k cluster
- tdunning.blogspot.com

- the original LLR in NLP paper
“Accurate Methods for the Statistics of Surprise and Coincidence” check on citeseer
- Mahout project
tdunning [at] apache.org

Realtime Search, Jason Rutherglen

- many technical issues prevent Lucene from being able to do realtime search
- lots of patches done, lots to do
- audience member thanked author for great work so far

Closing Plenary: Brian Behlendorf on Open Source and Charity

Talked to Alex Karasulu a little after the final presentation. He’s a committer on the Apache Directory project. He suggested adding dbm to the NoSQL product matrix. Wants a MacBook Air with 8 GB RAM to run his Java apps.

Conference Schedule Grid

Posted in Conferences, MySQL, Open Source, Perl, Tech, Toys, Travel, i18n | 1 Comment »

Zend PHP Conference 2009

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

The Zend PHP Conference was downtown at the San Jose Convention Center, so I went to that this week.

It was a well-organized, fun-sized conference – just big enough to use half the convention center, which made it easy to get around without a lot of walking between session rooms.

There was also an official, parallel unconference in 2 rooms priced at $199 for non-conference attendees.

The talks were high-quality, the food was great, and wifi worked everywhere. What more could one ask for? Well, a few more power strips next time, perhaps.

I was impressed with the number of attendees from Europe, Australia – and Utah!

I went to Matthew Weier O’Phinney’s tutorials on Monday. He’s the Project Manger for the Zend Framework, including design and supervision of the framework programmers. He’s an excellent speaker and really knows his stuff. Both his Intro to Zend Framework, and Ajax with Zend Framework tutorials were excellent.

My favorite talk of the conference was Eric Farrar’s talk on Mobile Data Synchronization. His slides went through many of the pitfalls of data synchronization, then actually provided a solution: use Sybase’s mobilLink, which is free to use with MySQL and SQLAnywhere. He said a team of 24 has been working for 10 years on that, and it is deployed in millions of devices. He works on the ultraliteweb project.

A Digg sysadmin did an interesting operations talk on the evolution of the Digg data center over the past few years. They’re up to 800 servers in 2 Equinix locations now, and use pre-cabled racks of servers from Penguin Computing. Software-wise, they like Cassandra key-value pair, clusto and puppet. They tried some commercial software in 2007, and didn’t enjoy the experience.

I had some great lunch break talks with other folks. One guy from Ohio was getting interesting SEO results by serving raw XML to clients, and having client-side JavaScript provide styling for human users.

I talked to a couple folks about their experiences using MySQL NDB Cluster in production. They both said it’s flaky, with one having already abandoned it for regular MySQL database with Innodb. He was also using RightScale and Amazon for document processing, and was happy with that combo.

There were about 20 exhibitors in 2 aisles, so easy to talk to all of them.

I got personal demos of RightScale’s cloud admin app, Zend Studio IDE, and BCDSoftware’s WebSmart PHP code generator.

WebSmart PHP is a $4600 code generator for ex-RPG and COBOL programmers. It provides a basic IDE, but the interesting part is that whatever you might want to do is either documented in hundreds of online technote examples, or available by contacting their unlimited support department.

Some of the unconference talks I went to included improving cookie security by embedding the SSL session id, and part of the continuous integration session (they talked about Hudson and CruiseControl, but not BuildBot).

The unconference talk on PHP and queues was quite good, with an overview of Amazon Simple Queues (good), Gearman (no persistence), beanstalkd (rave), and custom PHP and C queues (don’t roll your own unless you want long-term job security.)

The closing keynote was what I was mainly at the conference for … the PHP Frameworks Shoot-out with the framework project leaders.

Here’s my notes from my perspective as a listener. Please email me with any corrections.

Agavi
- David
- borrow from Symfony PHPunit code
- would use Symfony as alternate
- CI ORM is a pointless reimplementation, Rails programmers are morons shaped by pragmatism of Rails model
- hates complexity of validation code, context from Majove too many interdependencies
- 5.3 nice to have universal exception handling fw
- believes 5.3 is a major new release not comparable to 5.1 or 5.2 that frameworks need to support
- bigger the team and complexity, better agavi is because more structure

CakePHP
- Nate Abele
- hates long class names
- hates ACL system needs to be redocumented or cleaned up
- PHP 4 at this point, next release on 5.3

CodeIgniter
- Ed Finkel
- Symfony generates too many files, brain hurts; input filtering in ZF overcomplicated
- hates complex routing, unlike Limonade
- CI is not recommended for complex systems

Symfony
- Fabien Potencier
- French
- full stack
- secure by default
- would use Django and ZF
- hates 1.1 form framework complexity that users painpoint
- 5.3 is nice, but no plans to port to 5.3 because of large users update cycle time

Zend Framework
- Matthew Weier O’Phinney
- ZF routing from Rails, lots of stealing
- would use CodeIgniter
- hates heavy-weight dispatch cycle in ZF, to be rewritten in 2.0
- 5.3 ZF already testing with it, backwards compatible to 5.2.

The sessions that had an audio recording will be released as podcasts, one per week, and hosted on devzone.zend.com.

Thanks to Zend for organizing a great conference.

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Defcon 17, Las Vegas

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009

Estimates are about 8,000 people showed up for Defcon 17. The Riviera corridors were gridlocked at times – foreboding for next year.

Everybody was carrying a netbook, often with 500 mA USB wifi cards and 12″ external antenna. I can’t believe how many people had powered-on iPhones and Windows notebooks in a “hostile network environment.”

Some favorite talks were:

Metaphish (Spearphishing with Metasploit, PDFs and Tor) – blended attacks are the future.
Passwords – remarkable what a student can do with a couple home PCs and a little time. The recent FOSS dev sites disclosures provide lots of data to analyze.
Clobbering the Cloud – lots of low-hanging fruit in cloud services.

cnn.com: story on conference

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OSCON 2009 – San Jose

Friday, July 24th, 2009

For the first time in a decade, the O’Reilly Perl and Open Source Conference (OSCON) was held San Jose again for 2009.

(I have heard that the City of San Jose Business Development office is very, very accommodating towards conferences these days.)

There was great attendance, and plenty to see with about 15 simultaneous tracks, lots of BoFs, and an active exhibits area.

One of the changes this year was more OS talks, including some for linux and FreeBSD. This is a welcome change, though many kernel hackers won’t travel to the USA, for various legal issues.

My favorites were:

talk – YAML by Ingy. YAML is a serialization standard for all programming languages and is a superset of JSON, in that YAML supports types and references. The Perl module is YAML.pm. Although it is a “serialization standard”, best results are obtained when both sides of the exchange are controlled by the programmer (ie. different word sizes or floating point standards will likely cause issues.)
Perl lightning talk – Esthetic Randomness by Joseph Brenner. Joseph likes to post-process random output before display to get a more desirable appearance. He’s kind of goth-looking, so the overall subject and delivery made it an interesting 5 minutes.
BoF – MySQL social with Monty, Percona (now 25 employees!) and Mark C.
exhibit – Haiku OS (the Open Source BeOS clone) demo. 2 developers, now at Google, reimplemented BFS from the textbook. Haiku can run with 64 MB RAM. Posix compatible, so the gcc toolchain works. The ARM port is a GSoC project. The video support comes from from ffmpeg, xiph, etc.

Regarding the MySQL BoFs, I think they can be summarized like this: the community is not going to wait for MySQL AB/Sun/Oracle to dick around any further.

Monty Program AB, Percona and Drizzle are going to have forks regardless of what Oracle does. Either the official MySQL documentation will be freed, or rewritten by Monty Program AB and Drizzle.

Typo3 CMS also had a community booth. They are the #1 European CMS with support for 38 languages.

I didn’t see much use for the “OSCamp” attendee-organized tracks personally. Whereas at the MySQL Conference the Percona Performance Conference was necessary to fix the broken speaker selection process that was weighed towards MySQL/Sun staff instead of productive community contributors, that wasn’t an issue this time around.

The talk on Perl and Unicode was pedantic (focusing on UTF-8 bit patterns, presumably for those needing to detect and fix corruption) but comprehensive, as Tom Christiansen was in attendance to provide up-to-the-minute comments and tips. perluniintro is very helpful.

The PHP Best Practices talk was informative, as the 2 presenters have worked as PHP programming consultants and seen how projects go wrong. They tend to use whatever PHP framework the client is using, and have nothing glowing to say about any particular one.

I’d say that the world of PHP frameworks (dozens) is even more fragmented than Perl (Catalyst, Mason, embperl, CGI::Application are the major ones), which is indeed astonishing. And ironic – since PHP is itself a templating language.

Stonehenge Consulting threw another of their famous drunkfests at a local bar for those wearing their neon yellow t-shirts. If you want to get hammered for free, this is always the spot.

I talked to Randy Ray a little about what can be done with svlug.pm considering that the South Bay is suburban and thus less centralized than a dense city. Stay tuned.

Other Perl lightning talks included:

Larry Wall’s son talking about black holes
Scott Smith talking about Getopt::Complete, which can do svn command-line style nested args
connie willis bellwether talked about Flocks and the hive mind as defined by 3 rules.
Don’t Blame Perl – It’s the programmer’s problem if they don’t use modules, scoping, comments, brevity, objects.
Cool Perl6 – hyperoperators (work on arrays) with a card game sample using extended-ASCII symbols.
svn is not totally useless – it pointed the world towards git.

The closing talk on linux economics seemed to be an eye-opener for the audience. Most cell carriers and OEMs are at a severe disadvantage to Apple in the apps market, so they may need linux (or Haiku) to mount any kind of response that makes financial sense.

In the conference wrap-up segment, Allison Randal and an O’Reilly rep fielded questions from the audience and answered in “Twitter mode” – single sentences less than 140 characters in length.

OSCON 2009 Speaker Presentation Files
youtube.com: oscon 2009 video clips
wikipedia: Monty Program AB
mtocker: Understanding the MySQL forks

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MySQL Conference 2009

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

The MySQL Conference was, as usual for the past few years, at the Santa Clara Convention Center (home of the $14 bistro burger.)

And once again, MySQL got bought by another company. Last year Sun, this year Oracle.

I found out about the Oracle buy while eating lunch with a DBA from Utah who was there to write the MySQL certification test and investigate MySQL as a cheaper replacement for … Oracle.

This year there were actually 3 simultaneous conferences – O’Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo, MySQL Camp (free) and the Percona Performance Conference (free) – 10 simultaneous tracks from 8:30 am to about 9 pm. Julian Cash was also doing creative photography next to MySQL Camp.

Storage-class Memory (NOR Flash)

Last year’s Expo theme seemed to be “3rd party commercial storage engines” (Kickfire, Tokutek, etc.) This year’s theme probably was “enterprise storage-class memory” – and likely the most exciting thing there.

Storage-class memory is NOR flash memory that is mapped to memory space using a Hypertransport controller, unlike SSD which is NAND memory mapped to IO space.

Virident and Schooner demoed Sun and Intel quad-cpu MySQL and Memcached appliances with 2 processor slots attached to 512 MB of NOR flash. When NOR flash density is improved, that will become 1 TB.

Virident, with an office in Milpitas, said that Innodb operations are 70x faster than hard drives because of Hypertransport, optimization of Innodb for byte accesses instead of blocks, and removal of usermode-kernelmode transitions. (MyISAM not optimized yet.) The Virident appliance prices range from around $15K to $45K per appliance. Demo machines and other testing arrangements are available according to the sales rep.

Schooner has a relationship with IBM support to provide on-site service.

mysqld

Regarding the MySQL software, I saw more progress and excitement from 3rd parties than MySQL AB.

The Google V3 patch and Percona patches plus XFS and tcmallloc on linux appear to finally provide good overall performance and adequate multi-core performance to 16 cores for Innodb. Mark Callaghan from Google talked about these at his Cloud talk, then did his usual shout-out to Heikki and Ken Jacobs of Oracle to pick up the ball and run with it.

MySQL Workbench Client Program

MySQL Workbench comes in two versions, no charge and SE. Both versions can print professional-looking schema diagrams from create table statements, and SE can make a remote connection.

(I asked the developers to add a legend of symbols used.)

SE also has a roles feature that a DBA can use like macros to populate the usual user, db and host tables.

Replication and Storage BOF

I attended the Replication and Backup BOF, hosted by Mats Kindahl and Charles Bell from Mysql. It was a strange experience … the MySQL employees had a rosy view of their world (belief in replication working perfectly “guaranteed” and mysqldump being fast and safe, and unaware of potential problems of “FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK” and Innodb), and myself and other experienced users had a very different viewpoint (replication requiring periodic checksumming and snapshots being the slowest acceptable backup method.)

But then again, Innodb sells Innobackup, so no urgency to quiesce it for snapshots, I guess.

Open Storage BOF

Raymond Austin, Sun Workgroup Storage, organized this BOF to request wishlists from MySQL DBAs. It took a while to convey that most DBAs don’t normally run MySQL on NFS. Most of the discussion revolved around: desire for ZFS to provide backward compatibility forever, storage hardware should have checksums everywhere, double parity (RAID6), and reasonable drive controller UER error propagation and control (ie. don’t trash the array upon 1 error in the middle of a rebuild.)

Drizzle BOF

Drizzle is a project to prune MySQL to an essential core for users who want performance more than features, while building a development community that MySQL AB did not encourage hard enough.

Brian Aker did the initial setup of Drizzle.

Jay Pipes talked about anybody was welcome to contribute, whether working on the website, writing client programs, or C/C++ on the server. Just don’t add locks, and ensure the server is modular and scales connection-wise.

In the expo area I talked to Matt Gentry from iDashboards.com. They’re a Detroit company that creates BI dashboards for clients. Funnily enough, his clients most often request speedometer displays, often 4 across, which consume the most display area without providing any more information.

blip.tv: Keynote Videos
filefrag
sf.net: oprofile
performancewiki.com: oprofile
ibm developerworks: Smashing performance with OProfile
Alex’s Notes from Percona performance Conference

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