MySQL's ironic outage

I stumbled across MySQL's dev site yesterday and guess what I saw....

Watching Cricket: India and Australia

For those looking to watch the Test Series between India and Australia, I found a site that works. These sites change daily.

This site uses an Internet Explorer plug-in and it works well. Note that it is also a site with lots of adwords panels thay may get you to click other links - if you're a first-time user, look for a square panel asking you to install a plugin, which is under the heading "India versus Australia".

The plug-in works for me, but if it crashes your computer, gives you a disease or spoils your milk, don't blame me.

Site is back online

Sorry to everyone while my site was offline, but it's back now. All the images are still offline, but I don't think many people will miss then for the moment :)

Is this the highest load average ever?

This has to take the cake for being the highest load average in the history of linux. It is not photoshopped - I took a screenshot while working on a server a few days ago.

Strategic KPIs

After recently re-reading Jim Collins' book Good To Great, it got me thinking about Strategic KPIs for my business.

Let's start by defining the difference between a metric and a KPI. A metric measures something and is usually used in the process of managing something, while a strategic KPI on the other hand, is a key metric designed to guide an organisation to a certain outcome.

Dennis over at visualrevenue.com cleverly summarises a KPI as having seven characteristics:

1. it summarises the organisation's goals,
2. it is decided by management,
3. it provides context,
4. it creates meaning at all levels of the organisation,
5. it is based on legitimate data,
6. it is easy to understand, and
7. it leads to action.

This fits nicely with Jim Collins' description of the Hedgehog Concept. He suggests that companies that go from being 'good' to being 'great' choose one fundamental KPI (what I call a strategic KPI) to focus their strategic thinking and decision-making.

So, thinking about this for my company Datalink, I have come up with these some strategic KPIs along with some commentary on how they may be applied. All that's left now is to choose one to base FY09's business activity...

Profit per staff
A strategic KPI that focuses a company on maximising productivity in its team.

This KPI is mainly improved by “doing more with less”. Production automation and leveraged services improve this KPI; service customisation reduces it.

Profit per product
A strategic KPI that focuses a business on providing the same product or service to more customers while reducing the cost per sale and cost per supply of that product.

This KPI encourages businesses to find leverage in the sale and supply of their products and services, while reducing customisation. It can be improved by selling a product to more customers, and by streamlining processes towards a bulk delivery model.

Profit per project
A strategic KPI that focuses service-based companies on achieving the maximum profit per project they work on.

This KPI is not improved by selling more projects, but instead it focuses the company to evaluate and carefully select each project it works to provide a direct profit. Thus, loss-leader projects should not be undertaken with the hope of later profit. Another way to improve this KPI is to undertake similar projects, to find leverage and re-use with other projects.

Profit per customer
A strategic KPI that focuses the business on maximising profit for each customer.

This KPI is improved by altering the distribution of customers towards ones that re-spend frequently on high profit services, and by either cross-selling or dropping low-profit customers.
If all services are of equal GP, the focus is on getting existing customers to spend more. If some services are of higher profit than others, shifting customers onto different services can work. Also, reducing costs that are not in line with the direct provision of customer services (such as R&D expenses) will lift this KPI.

Profit per line of code
A strategic KPI for software development firms that focuses on code re-use.

This is similar to profit per product, except that full products don't need to be developed, as long as code can be shared between projects.

Profit per site visitor
If implemented, this would turn Datalink into a geocities, where the act of building customer websites would be only to increase traffic. We would then directly monetise our customers' traffic. Obviously we aren't going to do this one, but it is a great example of some of the more innovative strategic KPIs in use for web-based businesses.

Connecting to MS SQL server from PHP using MAMP on OSX

Update! Please read the comments for important info on this hack

I recently rebuilt my MacBook Pro to run Leopard, and afterwards found a few problems getting PHP set up. Cutting a long story short I have switched temporarily from Marc Liyanage's PHP distribution to MAMP, which provides Apache, MySQL and PHP in one package.

While I'm not 100% happy with MAMP, I did manage to get both xdebug and mssql extensions compiled and working, which got me back to being productive quickly, so it has been positive from that respect. Which brings me to this post.

I'm probably one of about 5 people in the world stupid enough to develop PHP on a Mac while connecting to a MS SQL server, so I need the mssql extension compiled for PHP.

Here's how I got it all going.

1. Download the latest freetds sourcecode and compile it.

cd freetds-0.64
./configure --prefix=/Applications/MAMP/Library --with-tdsver=8.0 --sysconfdir=/Applications/MAMP/conf/freetds
make
make install

2. Download the latest PHP sourcecode and compile it. Note that you don't need to configure anything special here, because we're not going to use it.

cd php-5.2.5
./configure
make

3. now build the mssql.so extension.

cd ext/mssql
phpize
./configure --with-mssql=/Applications/MAMP/Library
make

4. now install the compiled extension

cp modules/mssql.so /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20050922/
echo "extension=mssql.so" >> /Applications/MAMP/conf/php5/php.ini

And voila! After a restart, you'll have a working mssql extension using freetds on MAMP.

Getting MySQL running on leopard

Here's a maxosxhint about how to get MySQL working in leopard. The trick is to use the new launchctl method to start it up.

Note that when I read this hint today there was a mistake in the shell commands (omitting the ".plist" extension for the launchd file), but read it carefully and you'll pick it up.