On July 4, 2008, I had the pleasure of attending the second ever OpenX seminar, held in Cologne, Germany. About 50 publishers (representing a wide variety of large and small sites) from Germany showed up, and 3 OpenX users from eBuddy in The Netherlands had traveled from Amsterdam to join the seminar. We were welcomed by Anna Skorupa and Simon Bailey from OpenX. Also present were Niels Leenheer (one of the original creators of phpAdsNew, OpenX’s predecessor), Heiko Weber (OpenX consultant) and Tobias Schwarz (another OpenX consultant).

Simon opened the seminar with a demo of the OpenX 2.5 beta release, focusing on new features and developments for the near future. He also showed some early work related to the OpenX plugins and extensions framework that’s going to be part of OpenX 2.7/2.8. The last subject before the lunch break was a presentation about an exciting new development at OpenX, the “marketplace”, a virtual exchange for advertisers, ad networks and publishers to improve transparency and performance of the display advertising market.

After lunch, Tobias Schwarz talked about optimizing performance of the OpenX system, by going over a real life case that was brought forward by one of the delegates. The tips he gave were about tuning & tweaking the MySQL database, optimizing php performance by employing a php excellerator, speeding up ad delivery by using a content delivery network, and optimizing OpenX’s configuration setting.

Heiko Weber had the honor of closing the seminar with his presentation about scaling OpenX even further, through the use of a multi-server cluster, MySQL replication and OpenX’s distributed statistics mechanism.

Overall, it was a very interesting seminar, with lots of opportunities to meet publishers, OpenX representatives and fellow consultants. I shot a few photos of the event.

I’d like to thank Anna Skorupa for organizing a very smooth and enjoyable event. And thanks to Simon Bailey, for explaining about the OpenX marketplace at this seminar but also over dinner the night before.

It was fun meeting fellow OpenX community consultants Heiko Weber and Tobias Schwarz in person. We have worked together before but never had the opportunity to shake hands. And it was also the first time I met Niels Leenheer in person, even though we live only a few minutes away from each other.

There are plans for more seminars, the next one is likely to be held in Los Angeles (I may not be able to attend that one). Visit the OpenX blog to stay up to date about this, or to view their trip report about this seminar.

Update: the next OpenX community event is in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on Thursday, November 13, 2008.

I read an article the other day, reporting on some shocking statistics from a study by Accenture. They surveyed 800 American and British frequent internet users. It turned out more than half of them had only one password for all websites, web mail, online banking and other internet usages. The reason people give for doing so is easy to understand: its very hard to come up with and remember different passwords for all different sites.

This week, Google posted some guidelines on their Official Blog, on how to choose a good password and how to keep it safe.

In my business, I constantly have to come up with new passwords, for accounts and systems I work on for my clients or for my own use. Instead of being creative with new passwords, I use a tiny little tool on my computer that generates completely random passwords for me. It’s called Password Generator, and it’s free! You can download it here (PC only).

What this program does not do for you is remember which password you created for which site. That’s the second challenge. My web browser Firefox can remember them for me, and since access to my PC is protected by a password too (and that one I do remember of course), I feel it’s reasonably safe this way.

The OpenX weblog today posted a message about my community contributions. It was in response to the fact that it is exactly 4 years ago that I joined the OpenX community forum, and also that I recently posted my 2000th reply on that forum. Apparently, that event did not go unnoticed. The blog post also mentions my recent step to become a full time consultant, which was possible in a major way to the OpenX related projects I frequently do.

I’m very proud about this recognition of my work in the OpenX community and the comments by a key OpenX people that appeared on the blog.

If you’ve read the book “The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy” by Douglas Adams, you know what this is about. In the book, a computer computes the answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything”. It takes a few million years, and when it’s done the answer turns out to be: 42. This immediately presents a new problem. Although the answer is crystal clear, it doesn’t seem to be of much use. Without the proper question, it appears to be worthless. So the same computer is asked if it can provide the question to the question that has 42 as the answer. The computer thinks for a while and then it says: yes, I can do it, but it’s tricky. It may take a while.

For me, personally, this is much more simple. There is a question to which I can reply: 42. That question is: “At what age are you going to start your own full time business?”. Today I turn 42, that magical age, and during this next year I intend to quit my job and start my own consulting firm.