It occurs to me that doctors and scientists are encouraged to, and given job time, to write and publish papers/articles in journals, etc...

I think employers should be encouraging developers/architects to release or work on open source projects, post technical articles, keep a technical blog, etc... Not only does it let developers keep up with current tech, and encourage them to learn about new things, not just making it though another 4 hours of coding up this feature change, but it also increases the prestige of the developer and the employer. This can be a big help when looking to hire additional talent.

Companies need to realize how much they would benefit from having smart, self-motivated, technical people who are up on the cutting edge of technologies, who are active in the relevant technical communities, who are sharing info with others, and learning from the info others share. That sort of culture is not only it's own win, but allows you to lower turn-over and hire higher grade folks more easily.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2008/06/16/2003414884

It's especially interesting how the availability of 10MinuteMail in so many different languages makes it more likely to be a popular site in other countries. It stands to reason, but not something I'd really considered directly.

If your site isn't USA specific, you'd may want to consider offering your site in multiple languages.

I woke up this morning, got online through my new UMTS/HSPDA modem, and discovered that one of my servers had a load average of 239+

Not the best way to start the day.

Turns out an rsync backup job between two servers had gone nuts and was spinning them up through the roof. A couple

sudo killall rsync

commands, and everything started settling down.

What's important to note is that while the CPU was pegged, and the load average was over 200, I was still able ssh in, run top, ps, netstat, and navigate around looking at log files, with very little delay. It was just a little slow, but no more than a second wait for anything.

Also, all of my apps which used MySQL as their backend were all dead, with "database refused connection" errors. All of my apps which used PostgreSQL as their backend were a little slow, but were all still up and functioning without errors.

So, Debian and PostgreSQL for the win!

Good design is apparently harder than you might think.

Let's take a quick look at three big online cosmetic/accessory web store-fronts: Drugstore.com, Sephora.com, and Ulta.com.

I'm not an IA, so I won't try to do a big analysis. I'm just going to let you look at the three different home page looks across the three companies. To me, Ulta.com stands out as having a much cleaner and more pleasing design than either of the other sites.

Over at our new ATG Developer Community site, we're using Atlassian Crowd to manage our user accounts, groups, and single sign-on (SSO) between Jira, Confluence, to manage Subversion authentication, and to handle the forums (JForum) user accounts.

There was an example on how to integrate JForum and Crowd, which works pretty well. When you login to the forum, it checks Crowd and creates a local account if needed and logs you in.

However, we want single sign-on (SSO) so that our users don't need to login to the forums separately. We also want group membership in Crowd to be reflected in JForum to allow us to manage permissions based on Crowd managed groups.

I've written a JForum SSO implementation that ties into Crowd that I'm going to share here. It's version 1.1 (just added group sync), but it seems to work nicely.

Download the zip file here:
jforum-crowd-sso

unzip it into your jforum/WEB-INF/classes/ directory.

You have to install the crowd client jar, and the crowd.properties file.

You may also need to install the xfire jars if you get errors. I did.

Then you need to setup the sso configuration in the jforum/WEB-INF/config/SystemGlobals.properties

like this:

authentication.type=sso
sso.implementation = com.digitalsanctuary.jforum.CrowdSSO
sso.redirect = your crowd managed app login page
sso.crowd.syncGroups=false

That last flag should be set to true if you would like the user's groups synced from Crowd to JForum at auth time. This takes a second, so I made it optional. It does not push JForum group membership info to Crowd, it just syncs Crowd data down, as Crowd should be your master directory for that type of data.

The source code is available here for now:

CrowdSSO.java

-EDIT-

Added a full downloadable module and installation instructions here:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CROWDEXT/JForum+Single+Sign-On+Crowd+Connector