As a few LinkedIn friends already noticed, I have started working together with the Galera team at Codership. It is a part time "advisor" position and I still continue my full time work at Nokia, supporting various databases behind the new HERE.com portal.

We get a lot of requests for more blogs and better documentation to explain in-depth how Galera work. That's an area I will work on a lot. The first "deliverable" is out today: the first Galera white paper.

Last week both Sheeri and Mark Callaghan pointed my attention to the fact that if they comment on articles on this blog, they end up getting lot of email spam that is sent via OpenLife.cc. Thank you for informing me, I was completely unaware that this was still happening. The problem should now be fixed - you should not get any more spam mail, whether related to your old comments on this site or any new ones I hope you will still make.

When spam bots figured out how to spam Drupal based blogs - including working around the Captcha - I enabled the Drupal Antispam module which uses the Akismet service to check all incoming comments for spam. It has worked very well. On average AntiSpam blocks 40 spam comments a day, and the accuracy is very good (see stats below).

I use small apps to connect my blog, twitter and facebook accounts together. (...as described previously.) So when I post something on twitter, also my facebook status gets updated with the same message.

This week the Facebook app called "Twitter" did a small change: It would still post my tweets to my Facebook wall, but not set my Facebook status to the same message. I don't know why someone made this change, and if there are some users that will think of it as an improvement. At least for myself, I had started to use Twitter as the primary way to update both my Facebook and Twitter statuses conveniently at the same time.

Last week I finally uploaded to Drupal.org the Vineyard theme - ie the theme I created and use for openlife.cc. Releasing the theme as open source is something I always planned of doing, but never really got round to it. I'm especially proud of the fact the theme looks different than most Drupal themes I've seen, so I hope others can use this as a basis for creating nice sites.

In June I upgraded the Drupal version running OpenLife.cc. Unfortunately I forgot to turn on caching again - or maybe I didn't even understand it was so important. Turns out requests to the front page without caching on would easily use up 7-15% of the shared server's CPU, per request!

I've been enjoying a nice vacation - the Sun is shining, so to speak :-). But a couple of days I've enjoyed upgrading www.openlife.cc to a newer drupal version, and also adding some much delayed blogging and Web2.0 enhancments.

Notes about the upgrade process (Drupal 4.7 to 6)

I had never upgraded openlife.cc, so I had to go through 2 major version upgrades. To do this, I created a staging site on my laptop so I could spend several days fixing things that would and did break when upgrading.

If you are reading this it means the nameserver update is in effect and we have officially moved to a new web hotel. From its inception openlife.cc has been located on a GoDaddy.com server, and almost from day one I had my doubts about it: "BTW, is this GoDaddy server slow or what? Or is it just Drupal? I wonder what will happen when I actually get some visitors." Now I know what happened. After the site was added to planetmysql.com, response times went from slow (like 20-30 secs) to unusable (60 secs, which means 50% of the time you'd just stare at a white page after page timeout). I already relocated the Finnish sister site avoinelama.fi some time ago, and actually regretted my first choice of hosting provider DreamHost, only to find out that the current one HostGator, wasn't perfect either (doesn't support unix style directories /~hingo/, but at least allows a hacked redirect to save the day).

Modified by Henrik Ingo from
original picture by "Just Taken Pics'" @ Flickr. CC-BY

I haven't written much on this blog related to my work. There's a simple reason: Apart from some welcome exceptions, my work at Sesca is not at all related to Open Source. And even when it is, we are not supposed to talk about our work much in public. Also, as a manager my work is rather boring sometimes, not something I'd want to write about.

All of this is about to change though. On Monday I will start working as a Sales Engineer (or some call it "pre-sales consultant") for MySQL! Here's a list of things I'm looking forward to:

Last week I was supposed to be in Spain for the Free Software World Conference. I was invited there to give a short speech, but due to some last minute changes I had to stay in Finland. Just as well, because then I caught a really bad flu, so I wouldn't have enjoyed air planes and hot weather that much.

I'm glad that somebody has already asked how he could contribute to the collaborative version of Open Life. We came to the conclusion that the collaborative edition will be a completely new book, written in collaboration by all of us who want to be a part of it. The new book will be called "Open Life 2.0" as a working title. The "old book" will be referred to as "Open Life 1.0"