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

I am thrilled to announce that we (Spark::red) have just launched the ATG Developer Community!

It is a free, open, community portal for everyone who works with ATG software, developers, architects, project managers, business users, everyone. The site has a wiki for posting articles, your own pages and blog entries, how-tos, and more. There is also a number of forums for discussion and asking questions. We also offer free Subversion code hosting, and Jira issue tracking for open source ATG related projects and code development.

Please check it out, register, and tell us what we can add to make it more useful.

Tim O'Reilly regards Web 2.0 as business embracing the web as a platform and using its strengths (global audiences, for example). (source Wikipedia).

I've typically considered Web 2.0 to be sites using technologies like AJAX and Flash to provide an enhanced user interface (think Google Maps), and/or involving community users are as a critical component of the site.

Lately though, it seems the trend is to make sites that provide a minimal value add on top of some one else's data/service. The other trend is to not have a revenue plan. So many startup companies are operating on investor's money with no real plan on making real money. They and their investors are hoping for an M&A event to make the gamble worthwhile. If they do manage to luck out and get bought by a bigger fish, often that bigger fish also lacks a concrete plan for generating real revenue.

This whole thing seems crazy to me.

It seems like a game of finding bigger and bigger suckers. I'm not saying you have to make money on everything you do. You can run a site for fun, or to enhance your brand, or whatever. But if you're taking money from investors without any idea how you're going to be able to pay them back, you're just taking advantage of suckers with money. The whole thing seems dishonest to me.