On my front I'm presently on a mini Joomla! conference tour. I've spent the last week at Australia's Open Source Developer Conference in Brisbane. It was a great experience to catch up with people and see what is happening on the cutting edge of open source from open source telephony to seeing what cool stuff both MySQL/MariaDB and PostgreSQL have been developing. There is also stuff like catching up with old friends such as Joel Stanley who presented on getting Chromium working on a Beagleboard. Joel Stanley was, like me, a Summer of Code student so its awesome to run into these people from a range of backgrounds. One of his perspectives was power management and he shared that Google Mail sitting idle in Firefox consumed an entire watt of power. Considering that the laptop chewed 10W in total, thats a significant amount of chew.

This week I've be floating around Seattle attending Microsoft's Web Developer Conference. It has some interesting stuff and probably some nifty stuff around what they're doing with MSSQL (in case you haven't realised, I like databases a lot) as well as other initiatives. Microsoft have been doing some work with the Development Co-ordinators getting infrastructure in place to permit some better testing first on IIS and later to help support work building a MSSQL driver. So in the future (probably further rather than near) there is a chance we'll get Joomla! up and running with both IIS and MSSQL. With any luck we might be able to get Joomla! into Microsoft's Web Platform Installer this week as well.

Of course on the weekend coming I'll be then quickly flying with Mark Dexter to New York for the first international developers conference. It is looking like its going to be very exciting to catch up with some people and I'll be presenting on some tools you can use to make your life easier.

From then I'll be cooling my heels for a while and cleaning up after the recent JoomlaCode transfer. At the moment we've still got a few active issues with commit mailing lists and the repository browser displaying weird information. The Subversion issue is current lingering in their bug tracker doing not much so that one is going to bug us for a while until they come up with a fix. On the plus side we're running much more powerful machine for JoomlaCode. Both the database server and the primary server have been upgraded not only to much newer versions of tools (e.g. Subversion 1.6.6) but they're running Xeon E5520's Quad Cores (we've got two I believe) with 12GB of RAM each running some kick arse SAS hard disks. All together this should make life much more enjoyable on JoomlaCode and hopefully much faster as well under heavier load. At the moment I'm looking over the servers and our main server is chewing through maybe 20% CPU and the database server is pushing to get to 5% of CPU. At this point I'm confident we'll be able to handle a lot of the load that we see already (including those nasty people who periodically try to attack our servers).

JoomlaCode does really well, I've been flipping through the Webmaster Tools analytics and seeing how its been handling since the shift. JoomlaCode feeds Google alone an average 1.1GB a day (which is an amazing amount of data) and curiously our time spent downloading a page in millseconds has really dropped off since the latest swap over. I'll just let it show for yourself:

Last on my list is starting on some planning towards unifying identities across the suite of Joomla! sites. I'm still very much writing up all of my ideas and a plan for how this is going to happen. My dream is that one day you'll sign in somewhere (people.joomla.org maybe?) and you'll be able to go from there to any Joomla! property - from the JED to the forum to JoomlaCode. It is going to be a long task of rationalising logins across the different sites and handling conflict but it will hopefully be worth it. We're going to have a few stages in the middle which will be a bit ordinary looking but hopefully we'll come through to the end in a much better environment.

Other than this I have to write presentations for this weekend as well as catch up on some other documentation work for the project in addition to some refactoring and clean up of my own for 1.6. All in all, its exciting (albeit busy) times!

Update: Rochen sent me a quick copy of the specs for what is running the new JoomlaCode servers which is living in their data centre. Thanks to them for supporting us and they're running their Rochen Continuous Data Protection on the servers. And the specs:

• Dual Intel Xeon Gainestown E5520 8x 2.26Ghz Cores
• 12-Gig DDR3-1333 ECC Registered, 3x 4G
• 2x 146-Gig Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 SAS 15000rpm