Greg Szorc and I created a new Phi Kappa Theta website for our chapter. We used Drupal as the content management system and I am thoroughly impressed. It is the best content management system I have ever used. It is very easy to modify and theme and the number of additional modules available is insane. I am very pleased with how the site turned out.
We are currently working on modifying the CAS single signon module to allow only certain CAS authenticated users to login. Once logged in, brothers, alumni, and pledges will be presented private information including forums, a wiki section, and the ability to modify the public site.
We have been so impressed with Drupal that we are looking into an even bigger project. More details to come later.
Greg Szorc recently pointed me to this excellent PHP optimization tutorial presented at OSCON 2006 by Rasmus Lerdorf. In the tutorial, he shows how to build a website with some basic SQL calls that handles over 1100 requests/sec using optimization techniques. One of the optimizations he uses is an opcode cacher for PHP called APC. In gentoo, to get this optimization working required a simple emerge dev-php5/pecl-apc. Mr. Lerdorf then goes on to use http_load and callgrind to demonstrate the performance of the website and isolate problem sections.
The performance this PHP cacher provides is by far the best I have seen. I enabled it on this site and the pages are loading lightning fast. I did run into some problems. WP-Cache, an excellent page output caching module for WordPress, and APC don’t play well together. They caused a “White Page of Death” - that is, the first time I loaded a webpage, the page returns blank. Subsequent requests return the desired page, but this is hardly ideal.
Mark Jaquith documented this “white page of death” problem that occurs between the interaction of APC and WP-Cache. His solution, to filter out apc caching wp-cache’d pages, has not seemed to work for me yet. As of right now, I have disabled wp-cache because the performance benefits of APC outweighed those of WP-Cache.
Hopefully, one day, these two excellent solutions will live in harmony. I will continue to try to get them to co-exist as Mr. Jaquith has done. Currently, I have tried setting apc.filters=”-.*cache.*\.php” and apc.filters=”wp-cache-config”. I have tried every possible permutation of flushing the cache and restarting apache. No luck yet.
I played around a lot with the layout and style of the site. I did a lot of integration work with Gallery2 and wordpress. The result speaks for itself. The site will be slow today due to the upgrades.
Inspired by reading this hackaday article, I walked across the street and purchased a lock for $4 and had a crack at it. I think it took me about 12 minutes to find the winning combination. Scary, but fun!
The “Master Unlocked” tutorial was a bit more robust and is the one I’d recommend if you’re having problems.
Looks like our little IBM Extreme Blue project is helping to make some big waves 
IBM To Support Xen Virtualization Software For Suse 10 Linux
We’re currently the top story on digg.com! This is too cool.
While I still can’t say exactly what our project does, IBM has now gone public in their support for Xen Virtualization Server on select versions of their blades. In addition, they will allow, “IBM customers to use familiar IBM management software to provision and manage multiple Xen virtual machines.”