Net Data Design, LLC Blog

There are times when a product that you use, like, program for and have become very familiar with begins to lose it’s luster. I’m speaking of a very well known CMS, who will at this point remain nameless. We’ll just refer to it as BrandX for now. That time comes when you have this “feeling” and its confirmed by a long-time good client. It’s at that point you know that ignoring it won’t make it go away.

Over the past year or so I have become more familiar with and almost comfortable with the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.) I have been a die-hard Microsoft developer and admit that my strength is in the IIS, MSSQL, and .NET stack. All developer have they’re comfort zone, but I digress. Lets talk Joomla!.

Lets start with the test server. It’s VM running Ubuntu 9.10 with the LAMP stack installed. A freshly downloaded copy of Joomla! 1.5 in place and the installation begins. Here is where some other CMS’s can take a lesson (including BrandX)! The installation was very straight forward and took literally a minute to complete! A few minor configuration settings,a database name, user and presto, your in business.

That was the easy part. Now what to do in this new interface? A new world compared to BrandX! As with any “new” product a learning curve is a certainty, but Joomla! is truly a whole new world. I’ll write back with my finding and I look forward tou your comments.

While there are some that say that a MySQL/InnoDB “monopoly” isn’t healthy in the long run. What is a bit puzzling is the Oracle acquisition of Innobase Oy (the makers of InnoDB) a few years ago. The question in regards to this acquisition is whether Oracle is serious about seeing MySQL grow and prosper, or was that a means to get a strangle-hold on a vital piece of MySQL?

To Oracle’s credit, they have published  a press release stating their commitments regarding their acquisition of MySQL by way of acquiring Sun. Personally, I’m not buying it.

For years Oracle worked, behind the scenes to discredit MySQL and tried hard to understand how their customers could ever consider using such an “immature” product instead of their lead product. In fact, it was so important to Oracle that they offered some very substantial discounts to customers who were using MySQL and Oracle. The good news is that this strategy didn’t work. MySQL had and has a staunch following that has always been a little leery of Oracle.

I’ve been a CTO at two locations that used Oracle and have found their practices to be cut-throat, sometimes bordering on ruthless. Is Oracle a serious threat to the open-source community? In my estimation, it certainly is, more than most of my colleagues, although a huge percentage of them would agree that this acquisition is not good for MySQL. Does Oracle participate in the open-source community? Sure, in a manner that supports themselves through commercial offerings. This is not the true spirit of open-source and leads to a slippery slope.

I’ve posted a poll on the right of this post, feel free to participate.

After over a million downloads of WordPress 2.9 and lots of feedback from all of you, we’re releasing WordPress 2.9.1. This release addresses a handful of minor issues as well as a rather annoying problem where scheduled posts and pingbacks are not processed correctly due to incompatibilities with some hosts. If any of these issues affect you, give 2.9.1 a try. Download 2.9.1 or upgrade automatically from the Tools->Upgrade menu in your blog’s admin area.

We, as an SMB (small and medium business), have been using Amazon’s S3 for sometime now. We are a small software development company that specializes in web applications. We also host web applications and sites. The benefit of S3 is it gives us the ability to keep complete off-site back-ups as well as share certain files with outside contractors and clients.

This probably isn’t anything earth shattering to most, but it certainly beats our old system of taking back-up tapes and DVD off-site every night. That method had too many short-comings to say the least.

Recently, for one of our secure document storage web applications, we started incorporating a data provider that utilizes the S3 API. Setting a search provider for S3 proved to be a bit of a challenge, but so far it has worked out fairly well.

So lets get back to the topic at hand. For the SMB looking for a cost effective way to keep file storage organized and highly available, I’m hard pressed to come up with another viable solution. If you’re the owner of a SMB or work for one, what options have you explored? What method of [off-site] back-up are you using? I’d really like to hear from you…