My presentation at LOSUG on tuesday went down like a house on fire - I think it would be safe to say that the phrase for the evening was ‘It’s a cache!’.

For that to make sense, you need to look at the slides, which are now available here.

Attendance was great, but it seems the last minute change of day meant that some people missed the session. We had 151 people register, and about 80 turned up on the night.

Just today I got yet another email asking me why we do not rewrite PHP to get rid of all the cruft and past mistakes. These kinds of emails obviously have become more frequent since the namespace backslash decision. First up I wonder why people send such emails to me? After all I have only very rudimentary knowledge of C, let alone all the PHP specific infrastructure (macros etc.). So I am probably the person with the least ability to make something like that happen or even judge its feasibility among all of "PHP core" folks. But still since the question is often enough posed to me, I guess its more efficient if I reply to it in an easily linkable location. So the gist of my answer is: I would welcome a serious effort to rewrite PHP from scratch, but I do not think it should be done by PHP.net

Let me start with a disclaimer: Of course PHP is not without error. Far from it. …

Ok, here is something I wish I could travel back in time and shoot who ever decided it would be smart to make RDBMS locale dependent. As in crap like different decimal separators or worse yet date formats. If at all leave this work to the client, but better yet leave it to the frontend. Today I went through a bit of work until I finally figured out that in order to have SQL Server understand an ISO date (running against a DB configured as German), I needed to set the dateformat in the connection session with a query like "SET DATEFORMAT ymd". You might be wondering about the fact that "ymd" doesn't look very ISO date, but all it actually tells SQL Server is that the numbers between the separators are to denote year first, month second and day third. What really ticks me off though is that I once again forgot to look at the number one source for making RDBMS …

Follow up from Part 1.

Attended "What Developers should care about MySQL ?" by Colin and "Groovy and Grails" by Chuk-munn Lee.

I enjoyed both the talks for different reasons. Colin's talk explained the pluggable storage engine architecture that is unique to MySQL (pronounced my-ess-kew-ell, not my-sequel). It was interesting to know that the different storage engines can be picked a la carte based upon the requirements. The performance comparison for INSERTs was 5x between MyISAM, InnoDB and Archive storage engines. But then InnoDB provide transactions and other goodies. Multiple performance tuning tips such …

Follow up from Part 1.

Attended "What Developers should care about MySQL ?" by Colin and "Groovy and Grails" by Chuk-munn Lee.

I enjoyed both the talks for different reasons. Colin's talk explained the pluggable storage engine architecture that is unique to MySQL (pronounced my-ess-kew-ell, not my-sequel). It was interesting to know that the different storage engines can be picked a la carte based upon the requirements. The performance comparison for INSERTs was 5x between MyISAM, InnoDB and Archive storage engines. But then InnoDB provide transactions and other goodies. Multiple performance tuning tips such …

In the last few months Sun has expanded significantly our online outreach efforts and we currently have (at least :-)) three Webinar series that cover the GlassFish products. Going through them:

The Sun Tech Days Singapore started earlier this morning - over 1100 developers, an outstanding audience!!!

The kick off had a good local flare when the Gods of Longevity, Fortune, and Prosperity (Fu Lu Shou) showed up to start the event ;-) The build up to their appearance was really exciting as evident from the video below:

This particular event will also be recorded in Singapore Book of Records for the largest numbers of Sun developers playing a rattle together :) Here are some pictures from the event:

A Toshiba laptop and an iPod was …

There are a couple of bookstores in my neighborhood. They could not be more different from one another.

The first is known to focus on best seller lists, to promote popular books, and use displays and traditional retail techniques to drive business. They seem to do well, year in, year out. The other bookstore is more of a community treasure, beloved by the neighborhood, with a focus on the (thoughtful) insights of their staff. Those insights are delivered via small note cards appended to shelving throughout the store, where books are displayed alphabetically, with library-like neutrality.

The first store is very market focused, changes with the season, and seems to be quite succesful. The latter store, beloved though it may be, struggles to stay in business.

Now you might consider that an awkward …

This blog highlights couple of contributions by Campus Ambassadors (CA) from University of Essex and Frankfurt towards GlassFish.

Pre-condition: No one out of 25 present ever heard about GlassFish
Post-condition: Everyone is looking forward to put their hands on, how great it is! dear all, we are approaching labs where …

I have been tagged by numerous people (Marcus, Lars, Mark and probably a few others .. just too man people playing along!).

So semi random facts about me ..

• I actually picked my first name Lukas myself. At birth my name was Kahwe Haddad, but when I was adopted by the man I call my father in elementary school I changed my last name to his and also picked a new first name, moving Kahwe to be my middle name.
• As some may have guessed from my birth name, I am half persian on my fathers side. My mother is from East Germany and actually escaped with her family from East Germany. My adoptive father is american. So I am a German, with a …