Wednesday January 11, 2006

I'd played around on a Windows box with Google Earth a bit last summer and was both enamored with technology and saddened by the absence of Mac OS X support. Well, happy days are here again: a Mac version is out now!

The satellite definitely took new pictures of my neck of the woods, last time I'd checked you could see our car in the driveway of our house. Now there's a long shadow over it like they shot the picture very early in the morning, can't see the car but you can see the garbage cans (well, the resolution isn't that good, they look like little blips).

Thanks, G!

google earth macosx

Tuesday January 10, 2006

There is widespread frustration with standards that try to boil the ocean of software problems that are out there to solve. Tim Bray has a sound advice:

If you're going to be designing a new XML language, first of all, consider not doing it.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

On the flip side, where completeness is an explicit upfront goal, there are internal tensions there as well. Either building for as many of the anticipated needs as possible or a profound commitment to refactoring has to be reckoned with. The danger of only implementing the simplist thing without a commitment to refactoring is that expediency tends to lead people, particularly if they haven't solved that type of problem before, to do the easy but counter-productive thing: taking short cuts, cutting and pasting and hard coding random magic doodads. As long as there is a commitment to refactoring, software atrophy can be combatted. Reducing duplication, separating concerns and coding to interfaces enables software to grow without declining in comprehensibility. Throw in a little test-driven development and you've got a lot of the standard shtick for agility.

Even though there's a project at work that I've been working on mostly solo, it's built for agility. The build system is relatively minimal thanks to maven. The core APIs and service interfaces (which favors simplicity: REST) are unit tested and the whole thing is monitored under CruiseControl to keep it all honest. This actually saved us the other day when a collaborator needed additional data included in the API's return values. He did the simplest thing (good) but I promptly got an email from CruiseControl that the build was broken. I reviewed his check-in and refactored it by moving the code that was put in-line in the method and moving it do it's own. I wrote a test for the method that fetches the additional data. And then wrote one for the original method's responses to include the additional data. The original method then acquired a flag to indicate whether the responses should be dressed up with this additional data; not all clients need it and it requires a round-trip to another data repository, making it a parameter makes sense since the applications that don't need it are performance sensitive. Afterwards, the code enjoyed additional benefits in that the caching had granularity that matched the distibution of the data sources. Getting the next mail from CruiseControl that it was happy with the build was very gratifying. I need to test-infect my colleagues so they learn to enjoy the same pavlovian response.

Anyway. I'm short on sleep and long on rambles this morning.

There are times when simple problems are mired in seemingly endless hand wringing and you have to stand up to shout JFDI. The Java software world, like RDF theorists and other parochial ivory tower clubs, seems to have a bad case of specificationitus. There are over 300 JSR's. Do we need all of those? On the other hand, great software is generally not created in a burst of a hackathon. There's no doubt that when a project has fallen into quicksand, getting all parties around a table and getting it out is an important way to clear the path. Rapid prototyping is often best accomplished in a focused push. I like prototyping to be used as a warm up exercise. If you can practice getting lift-off on a problem and you can attain high altitudes with some simple efforts, you're likelihood of making it to the moon increases.

agile refactoring technorati maven unit testing

Monday January 09, 2006

A lot of people blog on platforms that don't ping for them. They could just use ecto, it'll help with the post formatting, tagging, media integration as well as pinging. One of the features for Technorati members is that the ping page will render a link to initiate a ping for each of the blogs you've claimed.

If your blog platform won't ping on your behalf, drag those links up to your bookmark bar and click them whenever you publish a new post. The world is changing all around us. When you post, you're part of that change. When you use Technorati, you can watch it change. Welcome to the Real Time Web!

technorati ping ecto

Looks like I better hasten my effort to upgrade to Roller 2.x. This (v1.1) installation hit an OutOfMemoryError a little while ago and crashed the JVM in all of its hotspot glory. I'm suspicious of the caching implementation in Roller (IIRC, it's OSCache). For a non-clustered installation, plain-old-filesystem caches JFW. For distributed caches, JFW applies to memcached. We've been using the Java clients (and Perl and Python) for memcached productively for a long time now. Interestingly, some one was inspired to write a Java port of the memcached server. Crazy! And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

java roller hotspot

We must be doing something right. More kudos, this time from Jason Calacanis.

technorati calacanis

Sunday January 08, 2006

Props from Jeremy on our anti-blog spam efforts are certainly appreciated. I know we don't have a spam-free index, however the amount of spam we keep out of the index is truly astonishing. Our ping interface is deluged with a torrent of rubbish but we do our best to scrub the nasty stuff out of our update stream. The problem defies conventional mail spam or even blog comment spam analytic techniques as the structure of blog spam is very different. Deep examination of the content and structure across a pattern of web sites is often required to distinguish it as spam but in the end, the indicators are there. Most spammers' publishing behaviors are statistical outliers by nature; the numbers speak for themselves.

We have a lot to do, on this and on many fronts but we try to pay attention to the gripes as a measure of priorities. The kudos are nice, too!

zawodny technorati spam

The levers and dials of character set encoding can be overwhelming, just looking at the matrix supported by J2SE 1.4.2 gives me vertigo. Java's encoding conversion support is simple enough, if not garrulous:

String iso88591String = request.getParameter("q");
String utf8String = new String(iso88591String.getBytes("UTF-8"));

• Rome has implemented character set encoding detection into it's XmlReader class
• There's a SourceForge Java port of the Mozilla encoding detector
• The J2SE kit comes with an interesting encoding detector and converter that works with common Japanese encodings. If it's one of Shift JIS, EUC-JP, or ISO 2022 JP but you're not sure which, use JISAutoDetect and you'll get a unicode string back:

  String q_unknown_japanese = request.getParameter(q);
  String q_unicode  = new String(q_unknown.getBytes("ISO8859_1"),"JISAutoDetect");
  

• Did I miss something? That seems to be the story so far but if there are more (and better) options available, I'd sure like to know about it.

java mozilla character sets

Saturday January 07, 2006

Let's call the CGI specification what it is: a burned out and anemic teenager. While it seems kinda cool that Apache 2.2's is going to get mod_proxy_fcgi, I've long wondered about using AJP13 to interface with web application runtimes other than servlet containers.

Brian McCallister did a kick butt cut-to-the-chase preso on Ruby on Rails at ApacheCon in San Diego. I can imagine why he's gung-ho to get a FastCGI support upto date, it seems to be the the way to run RoR. But since learning that AJP13 was going to be (and now is) built in to Apache 2.2's mod_proxy framework, I've been thinking how much nicer it'd be for other application frameworks to also be able to run outside the HTTP request handling process/thread.

We have some services that run under mod_perl that I've been taking second (and third) looks at. Wouldn't it be nice to deploy that application independent of the HTTP server runtime as one can with a Java webapp? Essentially, when it's boiled down to bare metal, perhaps that's all FastCGI is but it, it... it's CGI! Isn't it just setting/getting global environment variables? STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR? Isn't that so, well, 1994? Maybe I need to think about it some more but that was my take away last time I built anything with FastCGI (admittedly, in the 1990's).

I found what looks like AJP13 protocol support for Perl. Even though I don't read Japanese I'll infer from the context that he was/is interested in the same thing. Though whenever I see "use threads" in Perl, I fear the worst. Anyway, the likelihood of me finding myself with the time on my hands to implement AJP13 in Ruby is low; first, I still need to learn Ruby enough to get crafty.

rubyonrails ruby java apache cgi fastcgi ajp13 perl mod_perl

As I expected to hear about after first reading of Microsoft's policies were reported last summer, MSN has (as reported by msnbc.com) censored a Chinese blog at Beijing's request.

IMO, it behooves the Chinese speaking blogosphere outside of China to vigorously discuss this. Beijing will have to adapt or retreat into isolation, they (and the world) can't afford the latter.

microsoft msn china censorship

Friday January 06, 2006

No, not a typo. OSDL is something else. I'm interested in OSLD. I've used Language::Guess to detect languages in arbitrary text with Perl, it works pretty well. But how are folks solving the problem in Java?

It looks like Oracle has language detection as part of their "Globalization Development Kit" ... but what about open source? Sadly, the Nutch Language Identifier Plugin only supports European languages, no CJK. What are the other options?

opensource open source i18n language java perl nutch oracle

Thursday January 05, 2006

I ran a test to prove to myself that for simple XML documents, the best way to parse them may be to skip capital P parsing altogether and just use a plain-old regular expression pattern match.

The XML format I wanted to test is the response from the Technorati /bloginfo API. I threw together a Perl based benchmark quickly enough and here are the results:

Benchmark: timing 10000 iterations of regexp, xpath...
    regexp:  0 wallclock secs ( 0.13 usr +  0.00 sys =  0.13 CPU) @ 76923.08/s (n=10000)
            (warning: too few iterations for a reliable count)
     xpath: 137 wallclock secs (136.17 usr +  0.04 sys = 136.21 CPU) @ 73.42/s (n=10000) 

Here's the Perl code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use XML::XPath;
use XML::XPath::XMLParser;
use XML::Parser;
use Benchmark qw(:all) ; 

my $X = new XML::Parser(ParseParamEnt => 0); # non-validating parsing, please

timethese(10000, {
    'xpath' => \&xpath,
    'regexp' => \&regexp
}); 

sub xpath {
    my $b = getBlog();
    my $parser = XML::XPath::XMLParser->new(parser => $X);
    my $root_node = $parser->parse($b);
    my $xp = XML::XPath->new(context => $root_node);
    my $nodeset = $xp->find('/tapi/document/result/weblog/author'); 
    die if ! defined($nodeset);
}

sub regexp {
    my $b = getBlog();
    my ($author) = $b =~ m{<author>(.*)</author>}sm; 
    die if ! defined($author);
}

sub getBlog {
    return q{<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- generator="Technorati API version 1.0 /bloginfo" -->
<!DOCTYPE tapi PUBLIC "-//Technorati, Inc.//DTD TAPI 0.02//EN" "http://api.technorati.com/dtd/tapi-002.xml">
<tapi version="1.0">
<document>
<result>
  <url>http://www.arachna.com/roller/page/spidaman</url>
  <weblog>
    <name>What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]</name>
    <url>http://www.arachna.com/roller/page/spidaman</url>
    <rssurl>http://www.arachna.com/roller/rss/spidaman</rssurl>
    <atomurl></atomurl>
    <inboundblogs>6</inboundblogs>
    <inboundlinks>8</inboundlinks>
    <lastupdate>2006-01-02 18:38:03</lastupdate>
    <lastupdate-unixtime>1136255883</lastupdate-unixtime>
    <created>2004-02-23 12:04:51</created>
    <created-unixtime>1077566691</created-unixtime>
    <rank>false</rank>
    <lat>0.0</lat>
    <lon>0.0</lon>
    <lang>26110</lang>
    <author>
      <username>spidaman</username>
      <firstname>Ian</firstname>
      <lastname>Kallen</lastname>
      <thumbnailpicture>http://static.technorati.com/progimages/photo.jpg?uid=11648</thumbnailpicture>
    </author>
  </weblog>
  <inboundblogs>6</inboundblogs>
  <inboundlinks>8</inboundlinks>
</result>
</document>
</tapi>
};
}

For some of the messaging infrastructure at Technorati where the messages are real simple name/value constructs, we've been passing on using XML at all. Using a designated-character-delimited format string (say, tabs) that can be rapidly transformed into a java.util.Map (or a Perl hash, a Python dictionary, yadda yadda yea) and passing messages that way buys a lot of cheap milage. We like cheap milage.

xpath regexp perl java messaging technorati

Wednesday January 04, 2006

Now that I'm messing around with a roller implementation from within the last 7 months (migrated from Roller 0.98 to 1.1), I'm going to work on closing the gap to 2.0. Migrating all of my apps from an old (3.x) version of MySQL to 4.1.x wasn't too bad. But it appears that somewhere along the way to Roller 2.0, somewhere in the MySQL upgrade cycle perhaps, the post <-> category mappings got mangled and that was resulting in NPE's when the system tries to fetch the categories.

In the meantime, I implemented embedding cosmos links in my posts by patching WEB-INF/classes/weblog.vm (from the 1.1.2 release):

479,486c479
< #end
< 
< #macro( showCosmosLink $entry )
<     <a href="http://technorati.com/search/$absBaseURL/page/$userName/#formatDate($plainFormat $entry.PubTime )"><img
<         src="http://static.technorati.com/pix/icn-talkbubble.gif"
<         border="0"
<         title="Links to this Post" /></a>
< #end
---
> #end

#foreach( $entry in $entries )
    <a name="$utilities.encode($entry.anchor)" id="$utilities.encode($entry.anchor)"></a>
    <b>$entry.title</b> #showEntryText($entry)
    <span class="dateStamp">(#showTimestamp($entry.pubTime))</span>
    #showEntryPermalink( $entry )
    #showCosmosLink( $entry )
    #showCommentsPageLink( $entry )
    <br/>
    <br/>
#end 

technorati roller velocity mysql

Sunday January 01, 2006

This blog had a nice long vacation but it is now occupied, again. No, I wasn't in Borneo. I wasn't kidnapped by aliens (you never can be sure though, can you?). Nor was I in the hospital. I just found myself wanting to fix my blogging platform but always too busy to do it. So I just didn't blog at all (except for on my super secret alter-ego blogs). While my efforts at going from 0.98 to 2.0.x of Roller never seemed to work out, I did get it to a 1.1 release (hey, take a little progress if you can't get it all). Most of all, I ditched my old template and stylesheet, they were pretty long in the tooth... (I think) this seems a lot cleaner.

A lot has happened with Technorati, the blogosphere, my deep dives into various technologies and other stuff. And there's more to come. And it's a new year. And speaking of which, it's that time again.

So here are my New Years Resolutions:

Health

I'm going to get off my butt and get my cardiovascular system working. I'm going to overcome this rotator-cuff injury I've been hoping would just get better by itself (but never has). Ten years ago, I was physically fit easily, never got fat, injuries just healed themselves and I had no lack of physical agility and stamina. It didn't seem to matter that I didn't really try to take care of myself. Well, what a difference a decade makes and it matters now.

Friends and Family

No, I don't need a new calling plan. I need to maintain my personal relationships a bit better. Between work and being with the kiddos and my better half, most of my other relationships have suffered.

Happy 2006!

Friday July 01, 2005

The numbers cited in this BBC article about the Chinese online population are really staggering.

• 100 million internet users, about 30 million with broadband
• 358 million mobile phone users

Of course, how Beijing's appetite for control will adapt remains a fascinating question. There's no shortage of folks willing to probe the boundaries, contrast Microsoft's willingness to play along. But perhaps the most interesting development ahead is a balkanization of the internet. As the U.S. Department of Commerce asserts continued control of ICANN and China asserts more control on its domestic web sites, it doesn't seem that far fetched.

china censorship icann microsoft blogs

Thursday June 23, 2005

Presenting the newly updated Technorati Japan!

technorati japan