Besonders interessant war für mich die Entwicklung des E-Mail-Clients und der Einsatz des Zend Frameworks, auf dem einigeTeile der Website basieren. Mittlerweile bin ich ein Großer Befürworter des ZF. Wir haben sehr viel Zeit durch den Einsatz des Frameworks gespart.

Jeder Benutzer kann sich übrigens bei der Registrierung entscheiden ob er sich mit seiner eigenen E-Mail Adresse anmelden möchte, oder ob er eine kostenlose Adresse von Plusser.de haben möchte. Momentan sind mehrere Web und E-Mail Server für Plusser.de im Einsatz, wobei ich denke dass wir schon bald aufstocken werden müssen. Wir verwenden übrigens mehrere MySQL 5 Server mit Replikation sowie PHP5. Für das Load-Balancing sind zwei BIG-IP’s von F5 zuständig.

So, nun aber back 2 work …

Anyway, today i programmed a little php script that uses a different approach to determine who is the “Subversion King of the Month”. It’s counting the line delta directly from the svn repository using svnlook. So the developer with the most lines added to the repository (not the most commits) is the number one.
Here’s some example output (names are anonymized):

--- Most productive users for 11/2007 ---
1   usera                6319      42.47%
2   userb                5797      38.96%
3   userc                1990      13.37%
4   userd                 773      05.20%
--- Most active commiters for 11/2007 ---
1   usera                  47         47%
2   userb                  34         34%
3   userc                   4          4%
4   userd                   2          2%
-----------------------------------------

The script reads all commits (revisions) for the current month, counts the line delta (how many lines have been added/removed) and the amount of commits.
You can view the highlighted source here or download the script here. Use it on the command line like that:
php -f /path/to/svn/repository

I know that the number of lines comitted may not be the one and only criteria to measure the productivity of a developer. But its an indicator to start with.
So the question is: Are you the “Subversion King” in your company/project?

P.S.
Again, please, dont take this serious ;)

Check out the little demo of the movelogger here.

This technique may be usefull or not. But some use cases could be:

• Instead of eye tracking, use mouse tracking.
• Analyze the usage of ajax enabled websites.
• Spionage and other Bad Things™ (not recommended).

The whole thing is coded in javascript using Prototype and script.aculo.us with some php code on the server side.

The data recorded on the demo website is stored only in the php session on the server and gets deleted automatically, soon after you close your browser. But theoreticaly it would be possible to store that data in some kind of database for further analysis.

Please let me know what you think about this. Do you have any ideas for other uses of this technique ?

Here is an example:
The column text in table text1 has a case-sensitive collation (_cs suffix), the column in text2 has a case-insensitive collation (_ci suffix).

CREATE TABLE text1 (
  `text` varchar(50) character set latin1 collate latin1_general_cs NOT NULL default '',
  UNIQUE KEY uniq_text (text)
) ENGINE=MyISAM
;
INSERT INTO text1 (text) VALUES ('a');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

INSERT INTO text1 (text) VALUES ('A');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

CREATE TABLE text2 (
  `text` varchar(50) character set latin1 collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL default '',
  UNIQUE KEY uniq_text (text)
) ENGINE=MyISAM
;
INSERT INTO text2 (text) VALUES ('a');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

INSERT INTO text2 (text) VALUES ('A');
ERROR 1062 (23000): Duplicate entry 'A' for key 1

Constraints are also affected by collation:
The queries on table text1 give different results (a and A), the two queries on table text2 result in the same row twice (a).

SELECT * FROM text1 WHERE text = 'a';
+------+
| text |
+------+
| a    |
+------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)

SELECT * FROM text1 WHERE text = 'A';
+------+
| text |
+------+
| A    |
+------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

SELECT * FROM text2 WHERE text = 'a';
+------+
| text |
+------+
| a    |
+------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

SELECT * FROM text2 WHERE text = 'A';
+------+
| text |
+------+
| a    |
+------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

You can display all available collations using

SHOW COLLATION;

or

SHOW COLLATION LIKE 'latin%';

The ip 24.141.55.x has added about 400,000 plain text strings to the database.
It started (21 Aug 2006 12:27:50) with “3QOOk28N” and “NtIDSzQ7″, then went over to dictionary words
like “codex”, “hazard”, “strength” to finaly end the mass attack with “Zyzzogeton” (what ever this is supposed to mean) on 02 Sep 2006 06:57:45. For more then ten days the server had a somehow higher load then usual thanks to this guy (although i did not recognized it before yesterday).

In contrast to the “donor of hashes” mentioned above, the ip 195.114.42.x has requested clear text strings for about 53,800 md5 hashes. The attack started on 02 Sep 2006 04:27:24 and lasted until 12:49 the same day. 53,800 queries in 8 hours is a good score.

So, in reaction to this abuse, the web site sleeps some milliseconds with each query from now on.
Normal users should not be affected by this, but these mass query scripts should be slowed down, at least a little bit.

Actually I do not have anything against such mass queries to my server. However the other services running on the machine should not be impaired.

Conclusion: Thanks to the donor, shame on the leecher.

• the name for the source table / view
• the primary key columns of the source table / view
• the desired name for the materialized view

Basically this procedure does the following:

• It drops the materialized view if it already exists
• It creates the materialized view with the structure and data of the source table
• It adds a primary key to the newly created materialized view

However the procedure does not create triggers on the table. This could be an improvement for a next version ;)
To call the procedure use:

CALL create_mview('big_table', 'id', 'view_m_big_table');

And here’s the procedure:

DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS create_mview;
DELIMITER //
CREATE PROCEDURE create_mview (IN source_table VARCHAR(150), IN primary_key VARCHAR(150), IN target_table  VARCHAR(150))
LANGUAGE SQL
NOT DETERMINISTIC
CONTAINS SQL
SQL SECURITY DEFINER
MODIFIES SQL DATA
BEGIN
-- declare some variables ...
DECLARE m_view_name VARCHAR(150);
DECLARE create_m_view_sql TEXT;
DECLARE drop_m_view_sql TEXT;
DECLARE add_primary_key_sql TEXT;
--
-- create the sql queries to drop the materialized view, create the tmaterialized view
-- and add a primary key to the materialized view.
SET m_view_name:=concat('view_m_', source_table);
SET @drop_m_view_sql:=concat('DROP TABLE IF EXISTS ',target_table);
SET @create_m_view_sql:=concat('CREATE TABLE ', target_table , ' SELECT * FROM ', source_table);
SET @add_primary_key_sql:=concat('ALTER TABLE ', target_table , ' ADD PRIMARY KEY (', primary_key ,')');
--
-- drop the materialized view if it exists
PREPARE stmt1 FROM @drop_m_view_sql;
EXECUTE stmt1;
--
-- create the table
PREPARE stmt2 FROM @create_m_view_sql;
EXECUTE stmt2;
--
-- add the primary key
PREPARE stmt3 FROM @add_primary_key_sql;
EXECUTE stmt3;
--
DEALLOCATE PREPARE stmt1;
DEALLOCATE PREPARE stmt2;
DEALLOCATE PREPARE stmt3;
--
END; //
DELIMITER ;

You can download the procedure also.

The Hamachi website describes how it works:
“Hamachi is a UDP-based virtual private networking system. Its peers utilize the help of a 3rd node called mediation server to locate each other and to boot strap the connection between themselves. The connection itself is direct and once it’s established no traffic flows through our servers.”

The installation procedure is very easy:
In short: download, double-click, join or create a network, invite your friends, done.

After install you’ve got a new network adapter with a 5.x.x.x IP attached to it. Now you can create a “Network” (optionally with a password) and start inviting your friends to join your network. After inviting your friends your see their IP addresses in the “contact window”. It’s now possible to ping them, browse their files or whatever. You can only ping the IP addresses that are in your network / contact list.

The great thing about Hamachi is that it works with almost any network configuration. It doesn’t matter if your behind a firewall or nated. Hamachi is also secure. The complete traffic between the peers is SSL encrypted.

Most people use Hamachi to play multiplayer games using the VPN.
I use Hamachi to grant my friends access to the Apache virtual hosts that are running on my development machine.

The only disadvantage of Hamachi is that the mediation-server is not available. That’s why I only use it for “private” things. To connect to my companies network I’m using OpenVPN which is also quite comfortable.