Archive for Work

Using Selenium RC with multiple users

Zachary Fox (from Alert Logic too) wrote a very good tutorial on how to run Selenium RC to execute unit tests in a team environment.

If you have multiple users running unit tests concurrently against the same Selenium RC server, some nasty things may happen. Zach explains how to properly setup multiple Selenium RC servers, so everyone can work on their own server.

New location for monthly Houston PHP / MySQL Users Group meeting

I’m happy to announce that we are finally changing the location for our monthly meetings, from the dreaded University of Houston main campus to a Galleria location.

Alert Logic has agreed to host the monthly meetings at their headquarters (we are next to the Marathon Oil building), so hopefully this will make it easier for people to attend. I’m looking forward to having a real meeting room with projector and wireless internet for a change!

I’ll be updating the meeting details today, but our new location will be the following:

Alert Logic, Inc.
1776 Yorktown
7th Floor
Houston, TX 77056

Driving directions from Downtown:

1. Head north on Travis St
2. Turn left on Walker St – go 0.4 mil
3. Take the I-45 North ramp – go 1.0 mi
4. Take exit 48B onto I-10 West – go 5.1 mi
5. Take exit 763 onto I-610 South – go 1.5 mi
6. Take exit 9B to Post Oak Blvd – go 0.8 mi
7. Turn right on Post Oak Blvd – go 0.5 mi
8. Turn right on San Felipe – go 0.6 mi
9. Turn left on Yorktown – go 0.1 mi

Alert Logic Threat Manager rated “Best Buy” by Security Magazine

Since I wasn’t really blogging back then, I forgot to mention that Alert Logic received a great review at Security Magazine in its April 2007 issue. We got a “Best Buy” rating when compared against some of our competitors.

We were all very proud of the new releases of Threat Manager over the past year, so it was very good to be recognized for the work. A perfect score, no less! All 5 stars.

Velocity conference coming up in June 2008

Velocity is the new O’Reilly conference aimed at discussing topics related to scaling web sites and applications on the Web. It seems really interesting, and I will try to attend.

Having access to some of the industry’s experts in scaling web sites will be really useful. In fact, Steve Souders is one of the program chairs of the conference, and he is also known as the creator of the very popular YSlow extension to Firefox.

Thousands of tables in a MySQL database

Just read about the potential performance implications of having thousands of tables in a single MySQL database over at Ask Bjørn Hansen’s blog.

We have that type of setup at Alert Logic, but I don’t remember any problems while shutting down the database server. I wonder if the FLUSH TABLES problem only happens that badly under MyISAM instead of InnoDB?

« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »