Rainer Feike techblog

Other famous people who already took the survey:
Eloy took it
Myles took it
Thomas took it
Ashwin took it
Adam took it

And you should, too!

As Mr. Schwartz, CEO of SUN Microsystems wrote here, SUN is going to acquire MySQL AB for about 1 Billion Dollars.

What does this mean to Oracle, Sybase, DB2 and MSSQL Server?

It’s out of the question, that MySQL is the most used Database worldwide. The main reasons are, that MySQL runs with poor hardware, it’s easy to install, to administrate and to use. And it’s for free. When I look back at my jobs in the trading area of investment banks, I remember lot’s of Solaris/Sybase installations. Now, I foresee problems for Sybase here. When I look back at my jobs in the backoffice area of retail banking, I remember lot’s of Solaris/Oracle and AIX/DB2 installations. Will SUN MySQL be as reliable as Oracle or DB2 is? Then I foresee problems here as well.

Why should one pay for Oracle or DB2 when MySQL comes from SUN and is for free?

I am sure MSSQL will keep it’s place in the low-range small office area - just because of the MS certified staff that’s working here. But I foresee huge problems (see here also) for the big systems Oracle, Sybase and DB2.

All the IT world is moving to open source !!!

And that’s a good way

Yesterday I stared the beta run (this is very 2.0 webish) of my wiiclub project. It’s a community for Wii Gamers in German. It makes extensive use of lots of Drupals community features, like i.e.

• the userpoints api
• the fivestar rating
• the buddylist module
• the chartroom module
• lots of image galleries
• features cck types like a “game report”
• uses forum, blog, poll

The site is very much web2.0 like, that means it has

• community features
• bright colors
• orange button with gradient
• gradients in backgrounds
• big primary navigation
• a star like beta-batch
• rounded corners
• centered non-table layout
• cute icons
• clear breadcumb

So, if you are addicted to Wii - come join us

Last weeks I was working on a new Drupal driven company site. This time I wanted to create my theme from scratch (calles “ANewCompany”) and wanted to use heavy taxonomy for cross linking.
The site is on air now and promises professional web2.0 programming (German).

On the site I use following modules:

Blog, Book, Forum, Poll - for content creation
Comment, Contact - for visitor interaction
Drupal - for site registry
Locale - for string translation and adjustment
Menu, Path - for site navigation
Taxonomy - for cross linking and navigation
Search - for site wide full text search
Statistics - for access statistics
Akismet - for spam protection
Comment mail - for admin notifications
Service links - for social network linking
TinyMCE - as wysiwyg editor
Views - for some data mining and block representation
Fivestar, Voting API - for content voting

I developed a new page.tpl.php template where I’ve foreseen the regions as follows

  function ANewCompany_regions() {
      return array(
	  'header' => t ('header'),
          'content_top' => t('content top'),
          'content' => t('content'),
          'sidebar_left' => t('sidebar left'),
          'sidebar_right' => t('sidebar right'),
          'content_bottom' => t('content bottom'),
          'footer' => t('footer'),
          'super_footer' => t('super footer')
      );
  }

For the sidebars I use a table-less floating CSS layer concept for reasons i.e. stated here.
In my template.php file I overwrite theme_links for primary_links (to achieve rounded tabs as primary navigation) and the book navigation theme_book_navigation($node) to make it more nice. Special theming for blog and book content is done by node-blog.tpl.php and node-book.tpl.php files.

Next days I will working on a generalization of the theme to contribute it to the drupal theme repository.

After some months work with the fabulous Drupal system I have decided to offer professional services for that CMS in Germany. Based on Drupal 5.x I have created four websites last months, one for a community in the real estate business, one for stock investors and two drupal company sites.

I am really good in techniques like hooks, callbacks, templates and modularization from my business experience of the last years with C, C++, JAVA, PHP … on Unix and Windows. So it was pretty easy to get deep into Drupal (also thanks to my experiences with Wordpress and b2evolution as CMS’s). Drupal is fantastic.

Certainly, I will contribute my results (as far as allowed by my customers) back to the Drupal community as open source - and, if requested, I am willing to donate time and work to a German or international Drupal project. And to support the Drupal association with money, I will donate 5% of each Drupal related turnover (must check this against German tax laws first, probably I will have to use that 5% for advertising on drupal.org).

Yesterday I launched my first Drupal project in alpha state.

It’s a project for a customer in the real-estate business and I selected Drupal as CMS because of it’s very well selection of extension modules and - sure - for it’s perfect team editing features.
Drupal is, like Plone, in the leading Tools area for high-end websites with dynamic content. A key-strength for my purpose was it’s possibility to assign different roles to editors with different tasks. So I can keep the power about i.e. the menu-structure but let a story writer do the business content.

Above these business reasons, I am glad to have my first PHP5 and MySQL 5 project now. All other projects I’m currently running are based on PHP4 and MySQL 4, so I hope to make new (good) experiences with this new versions. I have waited very long for triggers in MySQL - needed to do some projects in Oracle, just because of the availability of triggers. And I have heard a lot about the processing speed improvements of PHP5. Well, I am going forward…

Some links for CMS comparison:
Drupal vs. Plone
Wordpress vs. Drupal: here, hier (german) and here.

About the new Yahoo! Panama API.

When I read the interview with Yahoo!’s Dan Broberg, Managing Director of Sales Technology on Alan’s Blog, I got a feeling that yahoo!’s running after Google.

For “advanced” support, we are not charging all that much, $2000 per month. This level provides our partners with more support, more dedicated Yahoo engineering resources should they need support. At the advanced and elite levels, we’ll make specific commitments regarding uptime, and provide our partners with in our product roadmap process.

They sell support for using their API - that’s not a 2.0 approach! That’s old IT business. A 2.0 approach would be to have a FAQ + a forum + a wiki + a developer blog - and all of that for free.

APRK: Google has taken a different approach. They don’t charge for support, but rather charge a nominal fee for each API action, 25c per thousand API tokens.

DB: We’re interested in best serving our advertisers, and we differentiate from our competition when it makes sense.

Is this eloquent marketing speech? Well, sure it makes sense for the selling company to charge a monthly fee instead of charging per action.
But to be fair, the free of support use is free of charge

What does this change next few months? Can’t see any effects now, specially cause Google bought YouTube, DoubleClick and FeedBurner lately, there is more effort necessary to change the commercial search market than a “free API” (may be as stable as a rock). Is it a step in the AdWords direction? But AdWords is for free also, and I am not quite sure to earn more from Yahoo! adclicks than I do from Google’s.

Do I?
Is Yahoo! on the loose?

By the way, what do they do to their directory?

Today I read a lot about the new “Google Gears” project. And it makes me wonder what google is doing here. Google Gears is a mix of a runtime-environment and an API to develop applications that run online as well as offline.

At a first impression it reminds me for old battles like with “Lotus Notes” where one could synchronize online and offline data. Simple for EMails but horrible for i.e. documents and complicated database content.

So why is google joining this business? My only explanation is, that they want to support their online application market (like their google-docs and picassa) by adding strong offline and synchronization capabilities. Making web applications run offline in a browser is one more step away from a single-user desktop PC - and from the OS needed here.

With their runtime-environment, google adds like an apache, and a mySQL Server to your PC. To synchronize the data on your local PC with your host system, google suggest a online synchronization via ajax technics (see here).

I will examine this in detail later because it is interesting. But for this time, I can not see how google will handle the more complicated problems of synchronization (like missed merges, concurrency problems, huge amounts of data …).

Google ist extending their power in a very new way. They redefine searching in the internet by giving pages value depending on how many people visit the page, where they come from and how long they stay.

How do they do this? The key is their Analytics -Knowledge. Because Google-Analytics is the very best website analysis tool - best in content, best in drilling down, best in installation effort, best in cost, best in speed - everybody uses it. And because every webmaster is using Google-Analytics Google knows where the webusers go to.

By using simple statistics Google can relay on their knowledge by at least - let’s say 95%. They know how many websites exist, and they know how many websites are using Analytics. The rest is simple statistics.

So, while all the SEO’s are staring at the pagerank, Google is redesigning their search algorithm. Important is what attracts people, valuable is what keeps them staying a long time, sustaining is what makes them come back. It will be a little bit like yellow press.

In the end, I think all over valuable content for the masses will make the race to the Google Top Ten. What is still necessary to make it perfect for Google is some semantic knowledge. I am keen on Google’s next “free-of-charge” product.

In any case the losers will be msn, yahoo, altavista… they don’t have the Analytics, their search results will stay miserable.