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I'm not very transient in my Internet usage, meaning that I use the Internet at home and at work, but not a lot while I'm traveling. On occasion however, I really wish I had a way to connect my laptop to the Internet somewhere where I don't have a wireless connection. These days, [...]
I'd be well within reason to suggest that it would be somewhat difficult to use the web without a good search. Google has been so successful that their name has become a verb in the English language that defines using their service to search for something on the web. Traditionally, search engines compile [...]
Scott Ruthfield from WhitePages.com is announcing a new open-source projects called Jiffy, a tool for measuring the end-to-end performance of Web sites (PDF slides). Jiffy provides real data about performance that is more complete and more fine grained than what you might get from Keynote or Gomez. Jiffy has four goals:
Jiffy comprises a JavaScript library that instruments the pages, an Apache proxy, a tool for putting log data into a database (Oracle for now), and reporting roll-up code and UI.
The basic idea is "mark and measure." You can set a mark and then make any number of measurements of how much time has elapsed from the mark. You can do immediate or batch submits depending on the requirements or your site and how much bandwidth with want to consume.
Bill Scott of Netflix has written an extension to Firebug for Jiffy.
Tags: performance web velocity08
David Friedman of Avenue A | Razorfish is talking about Web 2.0 technogies and ecommerce. The title was "Web 2.0: A reality check" and I was kind of expecting a cautionary tale, but it was more a tale that went something like "if you're not doing this, then you're dead."
The Web has always been a great place for surgical shopping. When you know what you want, you can go get it and the experience is largely good. Web 2.0 technologies give us the opportunity to put more of the fun of a traditional shopping experience into the Web.
Tags: ecommerce web social+networking
I really enjoyed this discussion on Web 2.0 and Wall Street from ETech with Bill Janeway and Peter Bloom. There are some interesting parallels and some great discussion from a couple of financial jocks who clearly get technology and, especially, the 'Net. Recommended.
Tags: itconversations web
Clay Shirky has posted a transcript of his Web 2.0 talk "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus." In it Shirky argues that television was the safety valve that society used to sponge up all the excess cognitive capacity that we developed after World War II. In effect, the mindless activity of watching television kept people from going crazy with all the spare cycles that they had.
Shirky says that with the Internet and Web, we're starting to re-use that capacity for social good, finding ways to create value from what was previously wasted.
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
From Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody
Referenced Tue Apr 29 2008 09:36:02 GMT-0600 (MDT)
Pretty interesting stuff. Go read the whole article.
Recently, I was browsing the YUI JavaScript forums and found a post about nesting the tab control. I haven't done that before personally, but have done things where my tabs had Ajax or DHTML dependencies inside the tabs. I decided I'd take a whack at this one and see what I could come [...]
I found this excellent writeup on serving JavaScript files posted on Digg.com. I think I'll convert some of those ideas to Python but I thought it worth posting here in the mean time with the link to the story. The next generation of web apps make heavy use of JavaScript and CSS. We’ll show you [...]
I was doing some maintenance on my blog, and was devastated to find that Typo was taking 225 megabytes of resident RAM. Yikes! After some creative debug thinking and digging I figured out it was due to sessions. Typo now stores sessions in the database, so my maintenance cron job to delete old sessions didn't clean up old sessions. (Ha! had you going for a second!)
Well I could write a cron job to run a script to clean the sessions out of the db, like:
#!/bin/sh
sqlite3 /path/to/typo/db/production.db 'delete from sessions'
Ok, that's a bit extreme, but you get the idea. But when I deleted the sessions in this manner the memory usage didn't drop at all until I had restarted the server, which seems unnecessary. So instead I changed typo's configuration to use a different session store. I commented out this line in config/environment.rb:
- config.action_controller.session_store = :active_record_store
+ #config.action_controller.session_store = :active_record_store
Then I restarted the server and fired up a browser. "Huh, that's odd… no sessions in tmp/sessions or /tmp or anywhere I can see. No, they're not in the database…" What I was seeing didn't match up with what all the stuff Google said. The default session store was PStore, aka file system, so they said. But apparently that recently changed in Rails, and now the default is CookieStore. From ActionController::Base documentation:
Sessions are stored in a browser cookie that‘s cryptographically signed, but unencrypted, by default. This prevents the user from tampering with the session but also allows him to see its contents.
Do not put secret information in session!
Well a quick grep -ri session app lib told me that typo wasn't storing
anything secret, so I decided that default was alright with me. Now I don't
have to set up any session cleanup script at all. Sweet.
Now, don't stop there. You should set your session key and secret while you're
hanging out in config/environment.rb. Add the following lines in the same
place as the line you commented out above:
config.action_controller.session['session_key'] = 'something unique'
config.action_controller.session['secret'] = 'get this from rake secret'
So the more I work with Django the more I long for a solid development environment to work in. I use Wingware for much of my python development, with its rockin debugger and code completion, its more than I could ask for. Until the curse of the Java class. This quarter I’m taking a Java projects course, most of the class uses Eclipse but a few use Netbeans. My problem is, I got spoiled so fast by the incredible templates support, content suggestions, quick fixes and always dead on code completion. Going back to Wing feels like a halfway-there IDE. I know that pythons interpreted nature makes source completion much more difficult, now I would argue that with an interpreter, you could actually step through the code to some extent. However, I respect that dynamic objects are never gonna be easy to support. My beef is with the lack of support for super-popular frameworks (this goes for everybody!) Ruby on Rails has literally dozens of solid IDEs and a few that are just spectacular (see Aptana, or Netbeans). Why can’t I get even basic highlighting support for my Django templates? Why can’t I get any completion options on Models except my own?
Its just frustrating, Django is still a pleasure to develop in, even with just Gedit and a terminal, but is it really out of the question to consider providing a big pretty environment for those of us that like that?
I did dig up this and this. I guess its a step in the right direction, but its almost embarrassing next to the Rails environments.
I finally got around to intalling cricket. Cricket is a very handy extremely flexible front end to RRDTool. It makes it relatively easy to track and graph almost any kind of statistic you want.
So far I am only tracking Apache, MySQL, server load and uptime. I plan to expand this greatly very soon.
Apache2! yay!
The only special Apache modules I added were PHP5 and the Subversion stuff.
The base config was very simple, almost all defaults. The special stuff happens in the VirtualHosts. I start off with a NameVirtualHost directive for the IP address my hosts share. Added an empty VirtualHost directive so my default site will really be the default. Now Include the Includes/ directory. So far, so normal.
The fun stuff happens inside. Here is my personal site as an example. This one is slightly different due to the SSL site, and the non-shared IP.
<VirtualHost 66.219.198.20:80>
ServerName kittypee.com
ServerAlias www.kittypee.com *.kittypee.com
DocumentRoot /home/fungus/public_html
ErrorLog /home/fungus/logs/kittypee.com-error
CustomLog /home/fungus/logs/kittypee.com-access combined
RewriteEngine on
RewriteMap hostname prg:/usr/local/bin/shortname
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} !^[0-9]
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} !^www
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} !^kittypee.com
RewriteRule ^/(.+) /home/fungus/public_html/${hostname:%{SERVER_NAME}}/$1
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost 66.219.198.20:443>
ServerName kittypee.com
ServerAlias www.kittypee.com
DocumentRoot /home/fungus/public_html
ErrorLog /home/fungus/logs/kittypee.com-error
CustomLog /home/fungus/logs/kittypee.com-access combined
SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /home/fungus/ssl.cert
SSLCertificateKeyFile /home/fungus/ssl.key
<Location /svn>
DAV svn
SVNParentPath /home/fungus/svn
AuthType Basic
AuthName kittypee.com
AuthUserFile /home/fungus/etc/svn.basic.passwd
Require valid-user
AuthzSVNAccessFile /home/fungus/etc/svn-access.conf
</Location>
</VirtualHost>
Some credit goes to Virtualmin, and the virtual subdomains credit goes to TextDrive
Here is another article from Digg.com highlighting some effective web design techniques. I'm stockpiling these for the next time I have a new project that requires a new face. This one is particularly informative since it gives examples at the beginning of how users use the web and then shows how you can [...]
So I've started following and using twitter far more than I was before. Its really a quite awesome and addictive service, and while I have noticed dozens of slick ways to update twitter, there aren't many easy ways to track your personal Timeline. I decided I wanted a more notification oriented system, so I started to hack apart the gnome-blog applet, and make a little twitter daemon who checks for new updates and uses libnotify to show some lovely notifications. Now it really only monitors feeds now, but I'm planning on hacking up some basic posting abilities in the near future. Anyways, an obligatory screenshot is below:
Anyways, I'd like to vent about 3 problems I see with the state of things at Gnome.
1) Autotools! Blah! NO ONE LIKES THEM! I honestly spent about 50% of my time getting the build to work right, it was painful and a major hurdle to getting started. I know we haven''t really found something that offers the same functionality, but seriously, can't we just beef up waf or something? Not saying I have a solution, just saying we need one if we are going to continue to attract new developers.
2) Bonobo/Gnome-Panel/Applets API: Overly complicated, a pain to test/setup. What are we doing? When KDE4 just dropped the most intuitive widgeting system around on us (and Google Gadgets is popular on other platforms) why can't we take some hints from them? Don't get me wrong, some applets are best written in C and bound to a factory process. But really, for everyday hacks and widgets, we NEED a simple and powerful system, and soon. Webkit provides the perfect engine for us to work from, but we don't have to go with XHTML/CSS/JS. One of the new open Flash platforms is fine, or Moonlight could be awesome. Really, there are tons of options, the pyro desktop could be a start, I'm open to ideas.
3) Project Space: This will probably never be an official Gnome desktop project, but its kinda cool and fun, and I had to host it at Google Code (My only other real option was launchpad) we should really set something up like what fdo has with some personal Git or Hg space to store relevant, but not-yet-ready projects. The wiki is enough for pages on theme, but we need some hosting.
If you travel and haven't yet heard of TripIt, you're going to be sooo excited! TripIt is a site that keeps track of your travel. But unlike many other sites that promise to help you with your travel, this one is so easy and useful, you'll actually use it.
Here's what you do: when you get an itinerary from the airline or a hotel, just email it to plans@tripit.com. You're done.
When you email your first item to TripIt, they'll create an account for you and send you a confirmation email. Click the link and you're in. I was amazed to find the hotel and airline reservations for my upcoming trip to San Diego were there, cataloged and turned into a very nice looking itinerary that included Google maps, addresses, click able links and anything else I'd need.
TripIt didn't understand the conference registration email I sent, but they stored it as a note and I moved it to the San Diego trip with two clicks. Easy as can be and now it's all together.
TripIt includes some social features so you can collaborate on a trip with others. I played around with that a bit and also logged in from my iPhone since that's where I'd be wanting most to get to it from when I'm on the road. I was a little disappointed with that. There doesn't seem to be any special support for mobile devices. Another feature I'd love to see is an iCalendar view of the trips so they can be added to Google Calendar, iCal, etc.
Even with those missing features, this is a very cool application. Believe me, your assistant doesn't make itineraries this nice.
Update: Jay informs me via a comment that there is an iCal link. I was looking on the itinerary page, but it's on the page that lists your itinerary. That's so cool. I subscribed to my TripIt calendar and now all that stuff shows up on my calendar just because I forwarded the emails to TripIt. Nice. Very nice.
I decided to make a blog entry for this so I can come back again and review it later. I fall exactly into the category of "developers creating websites". Luckily, most of the work I do, at least professionally, has someone else to be in charge of how it looks! I found [...]
So what is all this RSS hype? I've known about RSS feeds, what they are for, and how to use them for quite a while. It's not like they are new or anything! It wasn't until recently that I started to actually use them though. I didn't know what I was [...]
So, I've been working on a few small web projects for an assortment of businesses, pretty standard fair stuff, so I've seized the opportunity to finally do something of a personal analysis of the enormous mass of web frameworks out there (Rails, TG, Django etc). Before anyone gets the wrong idea, this is _NOT_ a comparison, its an opinion. I've just been working with Django for the past several days, and I feel like I owe it a little bit of word-of-mouth.
Let me first explain, Django is really a completely different beast than either Rails or TurboGears. In my experiance, it seems that the real goal of those systems is to make sure we have to code as little as often, so massive slews of differently formatted configuration files, naming conventions and templates are really to be expected. Here's the problem, I'm a developer. I _like_ coding. Now, sometimes it is nice to design a SQL schema, and find your objects already waiting for you. Its also nice to have an authentication framework, templates are fine too, as long as its not a whole new language. The problem I started to run into fairly early on was I didn't know the 'Ruby on Rails' way to do it, but knew perfectly well how I might have done it in a chitzy CGI.
Turbo Gears wasn't much better, again, the goals of the project seems to be as little code as possible, but code is a wonderful common denominator, chances are if I'm using a python web framework, I already know python, why do I need a slew of other random file formats and templating systems? While Turbo Gears did offer an interesting GUI API (all AJAX'ed up of course) its still fairly new, and as a result, wasn't really featureful enough for my needs, and I was stuck with it, so I ventured onward.
Now, I had passed over Django initially because some reading left me with the impression that it wasn't nearly as much of a 'Magical Framework' as the other 2. It turnes out, thats what makes it rock. While Django doesn't have a flashy "Build ____ in 10 min screencast', and doesn't try to make decisions for you, its basically a nice pythonic wrapper around all the nasty bits of working with the web. Django only has 1 real config file, and its just python declarations, to handle url mapping, you get regular expressions. I know it doesn't sound glamorus, but after only an hour or so with Django, its abundantly obvious it was designed by real web developers. Theres an incredibly powerful and sleek caching system, a down right dirt easy templating system (its basically python, 20 minutes and you have it down).
I think perhaps the single most defining design decision (and one that does a great job embedding the usefulness of Django) is the lack of 'toolkit' like elements in the API. Instead, JSON and XML serialization are made fast and easy to use. Django doesn't shove a website on you, its really just a set of libraries and tools but with a little more polish and glue. Not to short what Django offers, on the contrary, I think it brilliant. I know python, so why shouldn't I define my models in SQLObject?
<offtopic> I wanted to apologize for the blog bumps I've been having, I think a post or 2 got reposted to some Planets, I hope it wasn't too irritating! </offtopic>
There are a few key statistics that every website operator selling a product or service should track. Of course, these are useful for other types of sites too, but when you’re attempting to sell something, you need to know where to spend your time and/or money to be most effective. Unique vs New Vistors A lot [...]
I came across this article on Digg.com. It contains pretty concise tips that I can follow and make sure I’m doing. Since I’m not a designer and don’t necessarily have the best ability to choose matching colors and appropriate fonts etc, I find articles like these helpful to bookmark for reference when tuning [...]
During my experiments with WP-Super-cache, I noticed a strange thing happen to my Adsense ads. A short while after getting gzip compression to work properly, all my ad content had foreign characters and strange seemingly unrelated content. Having changed nothing on my blog except for installing WP-super-cache, I decided to add an additional check to [...]
I was pretty excited to see an update to WP-Cache. The first thing I noticed is that when I enabled the new super cache compression option, I started getting a file save as dialog instead of my pages. As of the current version of WP-Super-Cache, the readme.txt file states that if you get [...]
I’ve upgraded my old WP-Cache plugin to this one that I found on Digg.com today. From the Digg.com Post: Tired of clicking a link off the Digg front page only to find a crashed or mortally lagged site on the other side? Finally, Donncha (one of the main WordPress developers) has solved the problem once and [...]
Since I upgraded to Wordpress 2.3, The biggest thing I missed about my old Simple Tags Plugin was the auto-completion that happened for tags when I started typing them in on a post. I started missing that so much that I began to think of writing a new plugin. Before beginning on such [...]
Scott and I were contacted by a group of MBA students studying Marketing Management at MGSM. They were asked to prepare a short presentation about a web 2.0 company and chose to present on MyDrawings.com. I thought others would be interested in the response to their questions.
I just posted my interview with Bruce Johnson on the Google Web Toolkit. This was a fun interview and I learned a lot. GWT allows you to write AJAX applications in Java that then gets compiled to Javascript.
Tags: google java javascript ajax web
Using the plugin Was watching this video describing how to "slice" web page designs two days ago and it inspired me. After a tiny bit of digging I found that one can easily script inkscape using python. Here's the process I've used for slicing web
Dave suggests that we not use "graph" when we mean "network." To that end, I think we should further dismiss the confusion of the word "web" and avoid that in usage as well since it's less descriptive than "network" and not even technically correct. From now, on, no more "World Wide Web." We'll talk about the World Wide Network. Hmm, maybe not...
Tags: nomenclature networks web
NBC has announced that it will open its own download site for it's programs after a dispute with Apple over the price and DRM for its programs on ITMS.
There are a lot of people who think NBC is mad to take their shows off of ITMS and maybe they are, but I think NBC and others are bound to explore their options in this brave new world.
We call NBC, CBS, ABC, and others "networks" because in the old days they had to worry about distribution because of the limits of technology (VHF television has a 50 mile or so radius). So, NBC had to have a local affiliate to distribute their shows to various parts of the country.
This all broke down with cable, when cable companies began providing distribution without any shows of their own (to speak of). Of course the old model survived for the "networks" but new "channels" like ESPN, Bravo, Lifetime, and others sprang up who have no local affiliates. Some local affiliates, like TBS, even became national channels through cable distribution.
The networks don't need local distribution anymore. We're beginning to networks offer their shows directly to audiences over the Internet. That's what the NBC/ITMS story is all about.
So if NBC isn't a network, what is it? An aggregator. NBC, CBS, ESPN, and others aggregate new and old video entertainment into a package, wrap it in a brand, and make money from the aggregations. This is essentially editorial in nature. They hope they'll select programming that makes you trust their brand as a good place to go to be entertained.
As an aside, this is very much what IT Conversations does. We're not a podcast, but rather a podcast aggregator who exercises editorial control over what shows appear on our channel.
More to the point, it's also the business that Google, Yahoo!, Apple (with ITMS), and others are in. The Internet has given the "networks" a lot of competition that they didn't have before as the price for virtually free distribution and unlimited shelf space (the longtail phenomenon).
There are plenty of reasons to believe that editorial control of program selection is a vital, important function, but it's not clear that the big guys will be the ones who win. Back to IT Conversations: it's niche player in a niche market but to the thousands of loyal listeners, it's just what they need for that small area of their world.
The point is that you don't need loads of money to get into the aggregation business anymore. Move over NBC, iTunes is the least of your problems.
This is great essay from Raganwald on what users expect and IT fails to deliver. Hyperbole? Sure, but that makes it funny and just like antiseptic, the sting let's you know it's working.
Tags: programming web
I shortened the page load times on the Utah Open Source Planet by bringing the number of posts down from 60 to 40.
OK, so that’s a little dramatic, but still, my blog’s google placement for certain keywords has suffered sorely and it troubles me.
It all started with comment spam. I installed a spam eating plug-in to keep the flood from pouring over my blog, and it worked well - too well. At first, I was delighted to see that my INBOX was no longer filled with emails alerting me to the fact that posts needed moderating. After a while, it seems that they tapered off all together. “Great!” I thought, “This thing must really be learning what spam looks like.”
After some time, I googled “AGI” and noticed my site wasn’t in the result list. I thought that was odd as the keyword “AGI” had always included my blog in the top 10 or so (this is just a guess as my vanity googling was never very formal). I thought my page rank must have gone down, so I checked…
“Ahhh! Blank pages everywhere!”
Somehow the plug-in had jacked the WP “loop” and the result was blank pages - lots of them. For some reason, the problem didn’t manifest itself until sometime after installing the plug-in.
I’m no PHP hacker, but I did my best to follow the code. I was never able to figure out what was happening; I suppose if I knew more about WordPress, I could’ve figured it out as the PHP was fairly easy to follow. I didn’t want to dive into WP more then I already had (I’m going to replace it with a homespun Django blog anyway), so I decided to just update it to the latest WP version and see if that would fix it. It did.
Now, I find that google has nearly dropped my blog off the face of the earth. Check the search results…
Gundy 1st — 6th
Gabe Gunderson 1st — 340th
Gunderson ~15th — 392nd
Gabriel ~35th — 931st
Gabe ~35th — 871st
AGI ~10th — 291st
Asterisk C# 1st — 313th
The traffic graph seems to back it up:
Anyway, If I’m not in your blogroll, you can add me to it and help stop this search engine injustice! Or, if you need less lofty motivation, you can just do it to throw a dog a bone!
P.S. I’m now using Akismet to fight spam (on the recommendation of others).
A year ago, I gave wordpress a spin and started sharing with the world some of the many things that interest me. This tends to be stuff about Open Source/Free software. The cool thing about Open Source software is that it seems to have universal appeal. This map shows typical geographic locations of my site’s visitors.
Anyway, it’s fun to think that as I sleep, there are people in Asia or Europe browsing the web server that warms the space under my stairs. :)
Two things about this site are bound to change this year. One, I’ll be writing my own blogging system (in Django). Two, I’ll be working on making the information here more helpful to those who visit. It won’t be a big deal; I’ll just be making an effort to think about what the reader may need to know, giving better links, invite questions, etc.
Here’s to a great new year!
This should lead to some interesting search results. If so, I’ll share what I’ve learned 5 or 6 weeks from now.
It’s kinda like setting a trap. Analytics - that’s some fun stuff :)
