I'm excited to share an important update about my role at Acquia, the company I co-founded 17 years ago. I'm transitioning from my operational roles as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) to become Executive Chairman. In this new role, I'll remain an Acquia employee, collaborating with Steve Reny (our CEO), our Board of Directors, and our leadership team on company strategy, product vision, and M&A.

This change comes at the right time for both Acquia and me. Acquia is stronger than ever, investing more in Drupal and innovation than at any point in our history. I made this decision so I can rebalance my time and focus on what matters most to me. I'm looking forward to spending more time with family and friends, as well as pursuing personal passions (including more blogging).

This change does not affect my commitment to Drupal or my role in the project. I will continue to lead the Drupal Project, helping to drive Drupal CMS, Drupal Core, and the Drupal Association.

Six months ago, I already chose to dedicate more of my time to Drupal. The progress we've made is remarkable. The energy in the Drupal community today is inspiring, and I'm amazed by how far we've come with Drupal Starshot. I'm truly excited to continue our work together.

Thank you for your continued trust and support!

We had an amazing two-day wedding in the heart of Tuscany. The wedding took place in a renovated Italian villa from the 11th century, surrounded by vineyards and olive groves. A magical place to celebrate with family and friends who flew in from all over the world.

Many people emailed and texted asking for some wedding photos. It will take our wedding photographer a few months to deliver the photos, but they shared some preview photos today.

The photos capture the love, energy and picturesque location of our wedding quite well!

The Forum of Young Global Leaders is a community formed by the most exceptional leaders from every region of the world and every stakeholder in society. The Young Global Leaders (YGLs) commit their energy and knowledge to the most critical issues facing humankind.

I feel very privileged to be included in such a diverse, yet cohesive group, that is passionate about shaping the future of the world. As a member of YGLs, I will work with others to initiate, develop and drive solutions on important, globally oriented issues, including health, education, the environment, global governance and security, and development and poverty. The past initiatives have ranged from freeing hundreds of millions of school-age children from parasitic worms, to a collaborative task force between company cafeterias and NGOs that is providing 23,300 children every day with school meals. Other projects include developing country-wide infrastructure for electric vehicles and sailing a catamaran made out of 12,500 reclaimed plastic bottles halfway round the world to draw attention to marine pollution and climate change.

Being a member will allow me to do of what I'm passionate about; evangelizing the Forum of Young Global Leaders about the benefits of Open Source in their missions, as well as directly putting to work the knowledge I have gained from my experiences with Drupal and Acquia. Can't wait to work with a group of leaders who are committed to "doing well and doing good".

For the foreseeable future, Mollom will continue to be offered as it is today. I will continue my role as general manager of Mollom, Ben will continue to lead the development of our products and the Mollom team will remain unchanged. If you are a user or customer of either Mollom or Acquia, everything will remain exactly the same.

When Ben and I started Mollom almost 5 years ago, we wanted to do something important. While most people were trying to figure out the social web, we were paddling out ahead of the wave, knowing that many websites would soon have to deal with increasing amounts of spam and content moderation. In the past five years, we have helped tens of thousands of people fight spammers on their websites, including some of the world's leading organizations.

We have blocked almost a billion spam messages since we started. It has been very rewarding for us to see that we have helped make the web a slightly better place. At the same time, we also built a healthy business. We successfully bootstrapped Mollom, and organically grew a team of 6 people.

The social wave keeps on growing; we're helping more and more people and organizations every day. But now that social wave has grown so big, we can't rest on our laurels. There are more business opportunities to explore, some of which we have been working on for a while.

At the business level, it made a lot of sense to merge Mollom into Acquia. Ben and I were looking to raise capital for Mollom to help fund future product development and expand our operations. It was clear that it would require a long-term commitment of my time – just at the point when I wanted to focus more on promoting Drupal globally and driving Acquia's growth and expansion. By having Acquia acquire Mollom, I can still be a part of Mollom, and Mollom could receive the resources to accelerate our efforts and create an even more exciting future for Mollom. It also allows me to double down on Drupal and Acquia. In short, I'm really excited to have Mollom as part of the Acquia family.

Keep an eye on us!

• Primarily, it allows me to reduce my travel and spend more time with my family. I flew 65,000 miles in the first five months of this year and 100,000 miles in total last year. Being away from home that much isn't fun; neither is having permanent jet lag.
• My wife has accepted a research position at the Broad Institute, a genomics research center jointly affiliated with MIT and Harvard. It is a tremendous opportunity for her as a postdoctoral researcher. Did I mention how proud I am of her?
• Acquia, my company, is based in Boston, and I want to spend more actual person-to-person time there. While working remotely is OK, nothing beats face-to-face interaction, especially when you're a fast-growing startup.

We've decided to move for a period of two years and to return to Belgium in 2012. By then, Axl and Stan can go to school in Belgium, my wife can resume her research position at the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology, and hopefully, Acquia will have offices in Europe.

Moving 3,500 miles from your hometown, most of your relatives, and many of your best friends is not an easy choice. It's quite likely that – at this early date – we do not understand how significant a change it will really be. While we'll miss our friends and family in Belgium, we believe that it will be a win-win.

I'll keep you posted about our move and our adventures abroad!

Welcome to the world, Stan!

If you're interested in learning more about how Mollom works, check out the 'How Mollom works' page and visit the Mollom FAQs for more details.

We currently provide modules for Drupal 5 and Drupal 6. For all you developers out there who'd like to build Mollom plug-ins, we will be releasing full API documentation very soon. We would be thrilled to put your home-brew plug-in for your favorite platform on our download page.

Mollom vs. Akismet vs. Defensio?

Mollom does offer some of the same features as Akismet or Defensio, but our goal goes further than spam blocking alone. We want to increase the overall quality of your site's content. For example, Mollom's CAPTCHA service already helps block fake user accounts, and we are experimenting with various automated content-quality assessments, including blocking obscene, violent, and profane content.

We have some great new features in the pipeline, so please check back with us regularly for more news or subscribe to Mollom's RSS feed.

Mollom and Acquia?

Mollom is a self-funded, garage-style project. I do take it very seriously, but it is nowhere near the size or scope of Acquia, which obviously remains my full-time commitment.

Mollom is a separate effort for three reasons: (i) I started it a while ago, (ii) I'm working on it with a friend who is not involved with Drupal or Acquia, and (iii) unlike Acquia, Mollom is reaching out to as many content management systems and web applications as we can engage (and not just Drupal).

While Mollom is not corporately associated with Acquia, Acquia does intend to offer Mollom services as part of its subscription offerings. See Acquia's Caliper project.

Thank you to our testers

We would like to thank all of our private beta testers for their help and suggestions over the past few months – you've gotten us to this important milestone, guys. Thank you!

Title

Profiling Techniques for Performance Analysis and Optimization of Java Applications

Abstract

As Java applications become more complex and as virtualization becomes more important, we need to investigate profiling techniques that combine information captured at different layers of the execution stack. We present three novel profiling techniques. The central attribute of these contributions is that they link information gathered at different levels of the execution stack, and that this information is used to gather more complete profiles. By collecting information at the micro-processor level, we have profile information that is more accurate, faster to obtain, or that was otherwise not available. We show that these advances in profiling techniques lead to better understanding of program behavior and faster executing Java applications.

Logistics

The presentation is free to attend for all, but RSVP by e-mail or in the comments. It starts at 16:00h on Thursday, January 24th, and will take place at the Jozef Plateauzaal (Jozef Plateaustraat 22, 9000 Gent).

The Drupal community does an incredible job building the Drupal technology and making sure that Drupal is on the forefront of the technical innovation. The Drupal Association does a great job supporting and protecting that community by improving our server infrastructure, by organizing Drupal conferences, by helping to protect the Drupal trademark. Last but not least, the Drupal consultants do an outstanding job developing websites and training people to use Drupal. Together we managed to create an incredibly successful project.

However, one piece is missing. Before we go there, let me provide a little more context.

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the future of the web, and the future of Drupal in particular. I've also increasingly been spending time on what I want to do after I'm done with my PhD work. Since the two of those are coming together shortly, it's time for me to start blogging about the next stages of Drupal, and my life.

The vision

First, Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 should be all about reaching out to more and different people. Making Drupal easier to use, easier to theme, easier to translate, and easier to develop for. Drupal 6 will do exactly that, and with Drupal 7 we should maintain that strategy. We want to make Drupal the best web content management platform; "the Linux of the web".

The beauty of Drupal is that people can build powerful websites with little effort simply by combining different modules into one site; it is something we should continue to optimize for. I hope that that as a community you want to join me in putting (more of) the custom content types and (part of) views into Drupal Core. But not just that; Drupal's success arises from its community and the hundreds of contributed modules this community creates. We should continue to empower our contributors so they can continue to write great modules and deliver them in an exceptional way.

Second, with the rise of Facebook, Open Social, and friends, I'm not sure there is a future for (social community) websites that don't provide an API. Starting with Drupal 7 we should also start to focus more on the ability to create, share and mash up managed content. The idea is to let Drupal be a data repository that can be accessed by tools and websites across the network. It is where custom content types, web service APIs, semantic web technologies and Drupal's fine-grained access control mechanism come together. I want Drupal 7 to be a stepping stone when it comes to data mobility. This will allow people and companies to create value-added services that improve the users' efficiency.

Third, when I examine the landscape of Open Source projects that have had big impact on the technology industry, I've concluded that projects which have had the biggest impact (usually) have a well-capitalized company behind them. Jboss, Linux and MySQL have all benefited not only technically, but the presence of a well-capitalized provider for those projects has made those projects palatable to users who might not have otherwise tried the software.

The company

So what is missing? It's two things: (i) a company that supports me in providing leadership to the Drupal community in exploring the vision I described above, and (ii) a company that is to Drupal what Ubuntu or RedHat are to Linux. If we want Drupal to grow by at least a factor of 10, keeping Drupal a hobby project as it is today, and taking a regular programming job at a big Belgian bank is clearly not going to cut it.

Thus, I'm starting a Drupal company whose current working name is 'Acquia'. Acquia's software products will include a number of Drupal distributions – for community networks, digital media properties, corporate websites, and others. In addition to providing Drupal distributions, Acquia will build the Drupal-tuned analogue of the RedHat Network, over which we can deliver a wide variety of electronic services intended to be useful to people developing and operating Drupal websites. An example such service is an automated upgrade/update service, an uptime and performance monitoring / reporting service, a configuration management service, etc.

I was fortunate enough to meet an experienced CEO, Jay Batson, that I have come to like and trust, who managed to translate this vision into a business plan and who can complement my technical strength and community management skills with business experience in running Open Source software companies. (The last company Jay started was Pingtel, and Open Source enterprise-scale IP PBX, recently acquired by Bluesocket.) Jay has been invaluable so far.

The inevitable fear

Well, fear not.

Acquia is not going to fork or close-source Drupal. Acquia wants to see the Drupal community succeed and to do so, Acquia will listen to and work with the community to advance Drupal. The Drupal Association continues to operate the drupal.org domain, I continue to own the Drupal trademark, and the Drupal community continues to set the technical direction of the Drupal project. Drupal.com has not been sold.

Acquia's success is directly tied to overall success of the Drupal project - and to how widely-used it becomes. We understand better than anyone else that Acquia will never succeed on its own; we will only succeed if we are part of the larger Drupal community. We will contribute to Drupal development just as other companies or individuals do today. Our investors fully expect us to use a portion of the resources they've provided to help make Drupal even better, since our own success depends on significantly growing the widespread use of Drupal.

Furthermore, I'm expressly permitted to make decisions within the Drupal project that may not always be in Acquia's best commercial interest. This was a hard requirement for me. Acquia fully expects that a portion of my time will be spent on activities associated with the project at large (vs. Acquia's own software development). In essence, since the health and vitality of the Drupal project at large is extremely important to us, we've taken great pains to make sure that I am able to continue to act for the best interests of the Drupal community at large as I have done for the past 7 years.

The community has my heart and respect, and that won't change. Fear not.

Conclusions

So rather than working on Drupal in my spare time, I will soon have the time and resources to provide the leadership it takes to help get Drupal to the next level. I'm looking forward to leading the many thousands of you to the next step of this incredible adventure. It's been a little bit hard for me to not say anything about this before - mostly because I'm so excited about it. But it didn't make business sense to speak about this effort until it was for-real. Now that it is, I'm much happier that I can talk about it, because I want to think together with all of you about how we can make it a really really good thing for Drupal.

As a start, I've prepared a FAQ for our website. We (the company) will have more to say as we go along, and I will, too. Keep an eye on this blog or on our company website.