thanks mrtopf for photographing and blogging :) http://technorati.com/tag/snowsprint2008

Nothing more to say! see you next year!

– jodok

Countdown for snow-sprint is running!

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Lovely Systems is proud to announce the 5th Snow-Sprint in a row. Between Friday 18th of January 2008 and 25th we’ll code, talk, eat, drink, sleep, ski, snowboard in the Austrian Alps.

This time we chose Hotel Piz Buin in the Area of Silvretta, below the highest Peak of our State – Piz Buin

(image from Wikipedia)

Sprint organisation is done on http://www.openplans.org/projects/snow-sprint-2008
We’ll definitely focus on Zope3 and High Traffic related topics – Plone People welcome!

Highlight the week in your calendar, add your name to the Openplans Wiki and book your flight.

See you in the mountains!

Jodok and the lovely team

or: “how to make zope/python at least 10 times faster”. Kudos to jukart, dobee, benji and j1m!

During the last weeks the lovely team was working hard on adding speed to some of our zope3 based applications. We were fighting problems that started with wrong bits in the EEPROM of network interfaces up to high level conceptual/architectural problems. That’s why I had the idea to write the story of our Decathlon :)
Our sites have pretty different “load profiles”. I’ll pick two of them:

Lovely Books
it’s a lovely books community site :) here are some stats: about 1.000 users, 82.000 books, 45.000 authors, 6.500 tags, 17.000 reviews,… in total a few million different objects in ZODB (and groooooowing).

• Users are mainly accessing “the long tail”.
  The database is beeing accessed randomly.
• Every user get’s a personalized view.
  As soon as the user is logged in, 99% of all pages can’t be cached.
• We have a lot of pages online.
  Google has roughly 170.000 different pages in his cache, caching all the pages is pretty senseless.
• Asynchronous Tasks might block application server threads.
  Calls to Amazons webservices,… block server threads while they are running.
• Adding books, rating, commenting, tagging, making friends changes the relations, results, friends all the times.
  A intelligent solution for cache invalidation is needed

Videoportal
Is a local video portal with quite some traffic. A few month after the official launch we’re serving up to 60MBit/s videos and have roughly half a Terabyte Data online. The top 10 videos had been viewed more than 100.000 times.

• Users are hammering top videos.
  The main traffic is static (video data) – and can be cached.
• Logged in users get personalized pages.
  Sometimes it’s just the name of the logged in user on top of the page.
• Live stats are important.
  We need to keep track of the number of videos viewed, and we need to keep track of it on a pro rata temporis basis.

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The fourth snowsprint is over, a big Zope and Plone sprint. This year with 56 people from 14 different countries. We met as usually in the alps of Austria and stayed at the very nice Gasthaus Hirschen. Everything perfectly organized thanks to our lovely sister Miann. This year we had a very nice mix of topics and the results are amazing.

• performance for viewlets and views in zope3 – they are now cachable!
• z3 training application – more people learned the wonderful world of zope 3 component architecture
• Philipp von Weitershausen gave a one day tutorial about Grok
• Multimedia for Plone – Nate lead the multimedia team and they added some new features to the Plone4Artists package
• Calendaring for Plone – from the calendaring track, lead by Spanky the best from different products was taken and put into a new one, check out dateable
• REST – me and Stefan Holek continued on the lovely.rest package for zope 3 that was started by Stephan Richter. We managed to add a REST api for Stefan’s lovely.counting counter with only few lines of code.

Much more was accomplished and even more was taught and learned. This is what some are saying: (more…)

i just returned from the lovely snow sprint where i also met christian scholz from com.lounge. Christian is recently very much involved in creating stuff for second life, which is the reason why i met him. We are involved in one of those many second life projects ;-)

Besides the usual 3d multiuser stuff, I have not seen anything useful in second life yet and i m convinced that a lot of things in there happen because of the hype of the topic. Anyway, what i wanted to say about second life: It looks crap and i was shocked about the limits in programming it but there is one thing which makes second life to something special:

As much as i know, it is one of the first 3d multiuser environments which can be modeled and built from within. The way how play and editing mode interact is awesome. I know there must have been things like this before, but actually second life is what cms systems or blogs were to the web. Machines which create machines. Know what i mean? Second life demonstrates the next level of 3d multiuser environments. I am very much convinced that second life will run for a while and has a lot of power.

Technorati Tags: second life

The snow sprint has always been a large and successful sprint due the sprinters, location, the lovely sisters :) and of course sponsorship. This year you can make the sprint as good it always has been or even better.There are many of you who work in companies, have customers, know organizations that are or will benefit from outcome from the sprint. Tell them that they can contribute by sponsoring the sprint. Sprints are extremely valuable and productive development gatherings. You can support Plone and Zope, the efforts of the attendees and help make future Sprints more affordable, accessible and productive.There are three different categories of sponsoring: 400 euros

• your logo on website – small size
• room in the new part of the snow-sprint house

1000 euros

• your logo on website – medium size
• room in the new part of the snow-sprint house
• 1 copy of philipps book

3000 euros

• your logo on website – large size
• room in the new part of the snow-sprint house
• 1 copy of philipps book
• 1 extra book
• 1 free snow-sprint ticket

Please help spread the word that there is way to contribute to development in a very easy way, just send an email to miann(at)lovelysystems.com and tell her how you want to sponsor the sprint.More information about the sprint see plone.org

What:
World famous Zope and Plone Developer meeting :)

When:
January 27th to February 3rd 2007

Where:
Sibratsgfäll, Vorarlberg, Austria

Details: see plone.org

Booking:
Maria-Anna, miann(at)lovelysystems.com

Sponsors:
Sprints are extremely valuable and productive development gatherings. You can support Plone, the efforts of the attendees and help make future Sprints more affordable, accessible and productive. On this snow sprint we will have tutorials on Zope3/Five and you can kick-start your education/development by come to the sprint or send some of your employees here.

To sponsor please send an email to jodok(at)lovelysystems.com with who you are and how much you want to sponsor.