Simon Willison's Weblog: jeremy-zawodny

Fixing Poor MySQL Default Configuration Values

2009-11-09T17:07:46+00:00

Fixing Poor MySQL Default Configuration Values

Some tips from Jeremy Zawodny on configuring MySQL for high traffic environments—he suggests skip-name-resolve, connect_timeout=20, thread_cache_size=not-zero, max_connect_errors=very-high-number, slave_net_timeout=30.

Tags: jeremy-zawodny, mysql

The Truth about Web Navigation

2008-07-19T23:42:15+00:00

The Truth about Web Navigation

Jeremy Zawodny on regular users understanding the browser address bar: “They don’t. And they never will.” Then they’re going to get phished, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do to help them.

Tags: depressing, jeremy-zawodny, navigation, phishing, security, usability

Quoting Jeremy Zawodny

2008-01-17T19:05:56+00:00

Oh, and before anyone jumps on me about this not being "full" (meaning bi-directional) OpenID support, I'm quite aware of that. Consuming OpenID is a different beast that can't happen overnight. Give it some time. I'm optimistic that we'll get there.

— Jeremy Zawodny

Tags: jeremy-zawodny, openid, yahoo

PostgreSQL 7.4

2003-11-25T01:40:23+00:00

Last week's release of PostgreSQL 7.4 made a great open source project even better - it even managed to impress hard-core MySQL advocate Jeremy Zawodny. The detailed release notes show that most of the improvements were with regards to performance, but the thing that really caught my eye was tsearch2, the new full text indexing suite. A bit of digging brought up the CVS tree for the new module, which in turn lead me to this tutorial style overview of its capabilities.

I make extensive use of MySQL's built in full text indexing on this blog for both the search engine and the "related entries" lists, so it's a feature I've really been missing in my experiments with PostgreSQL.

Tags: jeremy-zawodny, postgresql

Easy installers for PHP scripts

2003-11-13T02:33:08+00:00

I tried out FUDforum last night, after Rasmus Lerdorf recommended it in a comment on Jeremy Zawodny's blog. Feature wise, it's pretty impressive but still doesn't quite do it for me - I want something that's trivial to integrate with an existing authentication system and outputs valid HTML (or XHTML) out of the box. Rasmus says it's the only board he's seen that doesn't have obvious security holes though so it's probably worth checking out if you need to set up a forum of that kind.

That said, what impressed me about FUDforum more than anything else was the installation process. The forum is distributed as a zipped archive, but when you extract it the only file you need to copy to your web server is a single 4.5 MB file called "install.php". You drop that in to a web facing directory and access it from your browser. It then steps you through the rest of the install, telling you which directories to chmod 777 so that the installation process can access them, asking for your database settings and automatically creating all of the scripts, database tables and configuration files it needs to run. It even refuses to let you in to the admin panel at the end until you've deleted the install.php file from the server. Pretty slick.

Of course, the need to chmod anything 777 in a shared hosting environment is a little bit worrying, but that's been a common problem with server side web development for as long as I can remember.

Tags: jeremy-zawodny, php, rasmus-lerdorf