Category: General

Here’s an interesting one – the InnoDB component that helps keep MySQL ticking along is now owned by Oracle. MySQL is the most popular database system for web applications, which is why we chose it to power Elgg[1]; Oracle is the most powerful corporate database software vendor in the world. They say they’ve got a…

My local install of Elgg now reads in entries from RSS files and aggregates them on a page. A couple of interface tweaks and I’ll upload my work to this site, probably over the weekend. Assuming there isn’t some kind of almighty programming hiccup, this should be a neat little feature – it’s certainly just…

Microsoft Windows celebrates its 20th birthday this week. I’d post something really acerbic, but I’m sitting at a Windows 2000 workstation; my laptop at home (on which 90% of the Elgg code was written) runs Windows XP. I have a desktop that dual boots Windows 2000 and Mandrake Linux, but I’m going to be honest:…

It’s an open secret that I was inspired to write the first draft for Elgg (we’ll call it version 0.001) after experiences supporting and programming for one of the closed-source virtual learning environments. I felt, and still feel, that it is unfair for universities to be locked into expensive contracts for software they cannot alter…