/sigh.  What a crazy week.  E3 and the meetup fubar really screwed up my mood.  E3 is now over and the meetup fubar has been resolved.  If I could hit reset I truely would.

So after my email earlier this week to Rana, he responded and said that he thought about it too and wanted to work out the transfer to me.  I’m glad he changed his mind.  Maybe he had a change of heart and realized the errors or his way.  Or maybe it had something to do with the 20+ people that emailed him and complained about what he was doing.   I guess whichever it was doesn’t really matter.  I’m now the official organizer and I’m really looking forward to where the group is going. 

My email announcement to the group after everything was worked out:

Hi everyone.  I wanted give a quick update on the status of the group and its leadership.  There was quite a bit of confusion over the last week that should be clarified.

First, the resignation email over the weekend was not about me.  That was sent because the official organizer (used to be Julian Triber) stepped down.  He & I have been talking on several occasions about his stepping down because he did not have time to focus on the group due work related time constraints.

Second, after a bit of confusion for the first part of the week, the group has been transferred officially to me.  As you know I’ve been setting them up and hosting them for the last 9 months.  The group has come a long way over the last year and I’m proud to say that we now average well over 60 people for the last 5 months.  (According to meetup.com anyway; personally I believe it to be a lot more.  There is no way Terry’s OO talk only had 71 people.  The room was overflowing!)  I’m really excited about how the group is growing and how we are reaching more and more people every month.  We’re the largest PHP Meetup they have!

In addition to me becoming the organizer of the group, I’ve assigned Mariano Peterson to be the assistant organizer.  For the last several months Mariano has been a great help in planning recent speakers & topics.  Thank you Mariano for your great work.

Finally, I’ve made a few changes to the setup of the group on the meetup.com website.  A) I’ve expanded our group’s topics to include Software Developers (ranked 3^rd), LAMP (1^st), and Web Technology (20^th).  We usually cover these topics each month in addition to our core PHP (1^st).  This will expand the reach of our audience and hopefully bring in more members.  B) I’ve opened up the message boards so that we can now communicate there in addition to the mailing list.  I’ll be clearing out old job postings and antiquated topics over the weekend.  C) I’m updating some of the default group fields & pages like group description, about us, why someone should join, adding an optional new user introduction, and a few others.  If you have any suggestions let me know
and I’ll try to work them in.

Thank you all for your participation and support for this group.  I look forward to seeing you all at the August 7^th meetup where Joe Stump from Digg will be talking about deploying code with a PEAR channel.

Thanks,

Mike (aka Touge)

P.S. If you have any requests for topics, please let me
know.

Edit: This issue was resolved a few days later.

For the past nine months I have been organizing the San Francisco PHP Meetup group. During this time I was always under the impression that when the official organizer of the group resigned that the group would transfer to me so that I could continue running the group. Unfortunately this weekend the previous organizer resigned and did not transfer the group. Because he did not nominate a successor the organizer position became open for grabs for anyone. That’s right, for whatever reason, meetup.com feels that it is better to go to a first-come, first-served system rather than giving the assistant organizers a chance to run the meetup first. I’m sure you can tell where this is headed…

So when the group became open on Saturday someone else, Rana Singh, was able to take ownership of the group before I could. Initially I thought it was just a misunderstanding. I thought that perhaps he thought it was I who resigned not Julian. I definitely couldn’t fault him for thinking that, could I? So for the next 24 hours I attempted to contact him and straighten the situation out. To my overwhelming surprise, it was not a misunderstanding. He purposefully and willingly took ownership of the group and did not think there was anything wrong with not setting things to how they should have been. I was absolutely shocked that someone who had no involvement with the group for the last year could take over the group. As I talked with Rana over the phone Sunday night i could not believe the things that he was telling me. First I had a problem with how he told me he would be able to take the group to a level that I could not. This from someone who’s other groups cannot manage to have more than 20 people attend. Second, he wanted me to continue to setup and run the groups for him! I think that is that point where I started to feel insulted and taken advantage of.

After the first 24 hours of frustration I decided to contact several of the meetup members in hope of soliciting their support in explaining the mistake in the situation. Rather than have an open discussion of the matter, Rana choose to disable group emailing and replied to people’s complaints/concerns in a way that implied he was in the right because other people misunderstood the situation too! This seemed like very week reasoning to me (as well as to a few others in the discussion).  After almost a full day of heated discussion, I decided that it just was not worth it. I did not want to continue down this negative path. My hopes of Rana realizing the bad form of what he did slowly dwindled. Rather than continue to create more frustration and divide, I decided to not pursue the disagreement any farther.

This was my response:

I did a lot of thinking about this on my way home tonight and I’ve come to a decision. It is not one that I’m happy with but it one I can live with. I appreciate everyone’s support in this matter but I’ve decided to not pursue this conversation any farther. This started by what I thought was a simple misunderstanding and has since escalated into something that I do not want. Rana, I thought that after hearing the thoughts and support of the various members of this meetup you would reconsider you decision on what to do about this meetup. At this point I believe if you were going to change your mind you would have done so by now. I don’t want to continue to beat a dead horse and continue down this path of frustration. This group has always been about making the PHP community better and I’ve supported that fully. I’ve realized that by continuing this disagreement I am going against that principal and I would be creating additional frustrations and divisions. I do not want that.

That being said, Rana, I wish you the best of luck with this meetup group. Unfortunately I will not be able to support you as an assistant-organizer. I feel cheated out of something I worked very hard on and cannot in good conscience support this type of behavior. I cannot support someone who would think there is nothing wrong with what has happened here, ignored the wishes of the community and who has placed restrictions on the open communication of the group.

Thank you very much to each of you who took time out of your busy schedules to participate in this discuss and express your support of me. I truly appreciate it and value your friendships. Chris, thank you for your help with mediating this disagreement. It could not have been easy for you and I appreciate your patience and willingness to work with all parties involved.

The last nine months have been a time of immense joy for me. I have enjoyed the group and the lively discussions and even the occasional rants. Yes Terry, I’m talking about you and your thoughts about Ruby on Rails. With this group I’ve felt a sense of belonging and I’m proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish together. I’m particularly pleased how with each of your support (especially you Terry) we were able to take a small group of people (<10) and turning it into something much larger. Having 75-100 techie/programmers meet monthly to discuss their passions and to learn new things has never ceased to amaze me. Programmers tend to not be the most extroverted people I know. I have learned a lot from the speakers and other group members as well as made some good friends. Don’t worry, I definitely plan on keeping in touch.

As I am not able to communicate to the group as a whole, if you could pass on my well wishes to the group and/or the individuals you know I would appreciate it.

Thank you again for all of your support,
Mike

Kudos to Mariano for taking the lead while I’m out on paternity leave (I’m going to write about that ones of these days) and setting up July’s PHP Meetup.  Thanks to an introduction from Terry, Mariano asked Andrei Zmievski to talk about the unicode updates to PHP 6.  Due to the 4th of July, we’ve moved the meetup from it’s normal date/time to Thursday July 10th @ 7pm.  It is still at CNET like usual (thanks to GameSpot.com funding the meetup).

Title: PHP::$unicode->i18n()

Description:
PHP 6 brings fully functional and mature Unicode support to the Web world. This talk will cover all the layers of the PHP (bread)/Unicode (butter)/i18n (jam) sandwich. Come and find out how to work with locales, use collation to compare and sort strings, and format numbers, currencies, and dates for any country in the world. Bring your appetite because the toasty goodness is waiting.

When: Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 7pm
Where: CNET Networks: 235 2nd St, San Francisco, CA  94518

You can RSVP on the SF PHP Meetup’s site or just show up.  I always like it when people RSVP so that I know how much food to buy.  But it isn’t a prereq or anything.

EDIT: I just saw that Terry mentioned PB&J and I like the idea.  So PB&J it is; plus the usual chips, sodas, candy, etc. of course. 

The tenants of my townhouse in Rohnert Park are moving out at the end of July.  Kind of bad timing since work is going to be so busy for the entire month.  :(  Not really a big deal except they told me the week before that they were planning on staying… ah the perils of renting to college students.

If you’re interested in renting in Rohnert Park, CA shoot me an email or call me and we’ll talk.

Address:
1440 Gold Way
Rohnert Park, CA  94518

Rent:
$1600/month due on the 1st; late on the 5th.
$1650 security deposit.
12 month lease; co-signers are okay.
Water & Garbage are included.
Proof of insurance required.

Amenities:
Dishwasher, fridge, new oven, 1 car garage, washer & dryer, public pool, quite neighborhood.
I prefer no pets, but I’m fairly flexible for small pets like cats.

Craigslist posting: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/nby/apa/736809109.html

A shameless plug for CNET… We’re hiring a few Senior Software Engineers for GameSpot.com, TV.com and Chow.com. Yes, that’s a Sr SE positions for each of those sites. We’re raising the bar and looking to bring on some powerful coders to expand the functionality of our sites. Here’s a brief list of the job skill requirements:

Must Have:

• Expert PHP skills, bonus for RoR
• 5-7 years of real world experience engineering web solutions for LAMP stacks
• Strong relational DB knowledge (table optimization, query optimization)
• Ability to prioritize and lead multiple simultaneous projects effectively
• Excellent understanding of OO software engineering concepts
• Ability to arhitect solid, scalable, extensible solutions for SE needs
• Excited by working on high-level design and architecture
• Comfortable mentoring junior engineers
• Expereince with formal release processes
• Strong verbal, written, analytical and communication skills

Bonus for:

• Admin experience with MySQL, Apache, SVN
• Background developing in a more structured language (C, C++, Java, etc)
• At least 3 years experience in high-traffic/high-availability web sites
• Strong UI experience with javaScript and AJAX using mootools or other JS Frameworks
• Experience with following technologies: Memcached, Smarty, SOLR, Lucene, Zend Framework

If you think you have what it takes, head over to our Jobs site and apply: https://careers.cnetnetworks.com/joblist.html

If you want to discuss the job in more detail first, please don’t hesitate to send me an at michael[]tougeron[]cnet[]com.

Back on April 5th my wife Denise and I went to a 3D Ultrasound center to check out some pictures of the baby coming in June. I’m not a huge fan of places like this. There seem to be a lot of medical centers and procedures popping up these days. I have to wonder if they are taking advantage of the John Q Public’s health paranoia or if they provide a valuable service. Anyway, that’s off-topic…

I posted them up on Flickr so my family can see them. It is pretty amazing how detailed the photos are of the face. Of course he had to be difficult and keep his foot in his face the whole time. This one is probably my favorite.

I think the “Dad” hormones are kicking in. I cannot wait for the next 6 weeks to pass and for him to pop out.

MySQL Proxy is one of the new products that MySQL released this year that has some real promise. In the MySQL Proxy, the Friendly Man in the Middle session Jan Kneschke went over the existing and planned features of the proxy.

MySQL Proxy has a c-based event driven core that has command line support, event handling and a Lua-based scripting layer. The proxy is loading into MySQL via the plugin interface. With the community edition, you are responsible for writing your own scripts. But with MySQL Enterprise, it will come with several pre-built scripts that add some enhanced functionality.

The most basic use of MySQL Proxy is to rewrite or alter your queries. If you have a costly query that is killing your db, but you’re not sure where it is coming from, you can write a Lua script to either reject the query or to alter it and make it more manageable. It stops the dba from having to wait for a developer to update code and/or deploy the fix.

Another trick you can do with MySQL Proxy is to create new SQL commands. While this is probably not going to be a great idea, you can see a few interesting examples at http://thenoyes.com/littlenoise/?p=63. It is a good way to expand on functionality at the lowest level. Or to lose/forget where you put it when you switch to another db.

Continue reading this post…

Wednesday afternoon Monty went through the Architecture of Maria, what the new features are and what its roadmap will be. For those of you who are not aware of Maria, it is a new db engine that Monty announced back in January.

Maria was designed to be a crash-safe replacement for MyISAM. Maria supports the same row formats and features as MyISAM. This means it can be fully compatible with MyISAM by simply running it in non-transactional control. It will be ACID compliant and have multi-version concurrency control (MVCC).

Continue reading this post…

The Applied Partitioning and Scaling Your Database System session by Phil Hildebrand appears to be a very popular session. The line outside the door was more of a crowd than a line. The talk was about the new partitioning abilities of MySQL 5.1.

The new table partitioning system has several benefits for your large datasets where you are having performance issues due to the volume of data. It can reduce the seek & scan set sizes and reduce the INSERT/UPDATE transaction durations. If you are already performing UNION queries or secondary queries to find data in an archive table, this functionality may be for you.

There are four (point 5) partitioning styles available for your use:

1. Range
   • Very useful for situations where the data is accessed by date
   • Usually used when a limited number of primary partitions are needed
   • It supports sub-partitions (the .5 partition type)
2. List
   • Good for when you are grouping data in partitions out of order (e.g., SELECT 1,5,7 in partition X)
   • As the name implies, you list which data goes into which partition
   • Higher maintenance costs in many situations
   • Supports sub-partitions
3. Hash
   • Usually has a lower maintenance cost
   • Partitions the data based on the hash that you tell it
   • Good for when you have non-intelligent keys
   • Works with both a limited and a large number of Partitions
4. Key
   • Similar to Hash partitioning, but based on one or more of the fields in the primary key instead of a user-defined hash
   • If there is no primary key, then the first unique index is used
   • Does not require the key to be integer based
5. Subpartitions
   • As the name implies, a partition within a partition
   • You can only create subpartitions for Range & List
   • If needed, subpartitions can be spread across volumes

The alter table statements are fairly simplistic; “ALTER TABLE my_table PARTITION BY KEY() PARTITIONS 50″ will create 50 partitions for that table.  If you need to add more partitions, you can just run “ALTER TABLE my_table ADD PARTITION PARTITIONS 25″ and your table will now have 75 partitions.  Of course you can shrink the size of the partitions as well.  One of the nice features of the partition modification is that the data is re-allocated as appropriate.

All in all, this looks like a much better solution than the standard 10/90 tables.

This morning’s first session is hosted by Giuseppe Maxia about MySQL Sandbox. This tool was created so that you can quickly & easily setup sandbox servers for testing MySQL. It installs side servers on a machine that is already running MySQL. Sandbox installs quickly without disturbing the existing MySQL installation.

The home for the MySQL Sandbox project is hosted on SourceForge.net. It is not an officially supported product which is why Giuseppe keeps it on SourceForge.

The Sandbox was designed so that you don’t have to go through the hassle, and potentially error prone, steps of setting up multiple sandbox databases. It’s very common for these manual installations to accidentally install in the same data directory (can corrupt your data) or install with the same port/socket (MySQL won’t start).

Details of installing and using after the break… Continue reading this post…