MySpace signs up to OpenID scheme

BBC NEWS | Technology | MySpace signs up to OpenID scheme: "MySpace members will soon be able to use their login details to get access to some other websites."

Protocol buffers: the early reviews are in [dive into mark]

Protocol buffers: the early reviews are in [dive into mark]

Google (my current employer) has finally open sourced protocol buffers, the data interchange format we use for internal server-to-server communication. The blogosphere’s response? “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”

Aaaaanyway…

Protocol buffers are “just” cross-platform data structures. All you have to write is the schema (a .proto file), then generate bindings in C++, Java, or Python. (Or Haskell. Or Perl.) The .proto file is just a schema; it doesn’t contain any data except default values. All getting and setting is done in code. The serialized over-the-wire format is designed to minimize network traffic, and deserialization (especially in C++) is designed to maximize performance. I can’t begin to describe how much effort Google spends maximizing performance at every level. We would tear down our data centers and rewire them with $500 ethernet cables if you could prove that it would reduce latency by 1%.

Besides being blindingly fast, protocol buffers have lots of neat features. A zero-size PB returns default values. You can nest PBs inside each other. And most importantly, PBs are both backward and forward compatible, which means you can upgrade servers gradually and they can still talk to each other in the interim. (When you have as many machines as Google has, it’s always the interim somewhere.)

Comparisons to other data formats was, I suppose, inevitable. Old-timers may remember ASN.1 or IIOP. Kids these days seem to compare everything to XML or JSON. They’re actually closer to Facebook’s Thrift (written by ex-Googlers) or SQL Server’s TDS. Protocol buffers won’t kill XML (no matter how much you wish they would), nor will they replace JSON, ASN.1, or carrier pigeon. But they’re simple and they’re fast and they scale like crazy, and that’s the way Google likes it.

BetaNews | Google releases its data encoding format to compete with XML

BetaNews | Google releases its data encoding format to compete with XML: "In an effort to solve the bulk and time-consumption problem when encoding large databases, Google developed its own alternative to XML. Yesterday, the company began evangelizing others to use it as an alternative to the industry standard.

There's an argument that open standards are only truly useful when one standard applies to any given category of service -- an argument that was raised in the matter of application formats. Now the broader category of data encoding -- handled nowadays by XML -- is about to receive a big challenge, ironically from the group perceived as the champion of open standards in Internet communication: Google.

Yesterday afternoon, Google publicly released documentation for a system it has been using internally, called Protocol Buffers, inviting others to use it as well. And in a surprising blog post, one of its own software engineers argued that its system was preferable to XML because it's less expensive to deploy, and can more easily scale up to very large databases."

Bit.ly: Please Use This TinyURL of the Future - ReadWriteWeb

Bit.ly: Please Use This TinyURL of the Future - ReadWriteWeb: "URL shorteners like TinyURL are a wildly popular way to share long links over email, IM, microblogging and other contexts. The millions of shortcuts that have been created through such services represent a huge opportunity to capture interesting data - but to date those opportunities have all just gone down the drain.

Bit.ly, a new URL shortening service from the innovation network Betaworks, is launching today with a staggering feature set for both end users and forward-looking developers."

TechCrunchIT � Blog Archive � A Million Businesses on Office Live While Generic Hosting Slides

TechCrunchIT � Blog Archive � A Million Businesses on Office Live While Generic Hosting Slides

At the same time today over at Pingdom they noticed that the search mind-share for ‘web hosting’ is continuing its downward trend. Generic hosting seems to be on it’s way out - the type of hosting that can be purchased from GoDaddy, 1&1 and many others where the basic plan offers a control panel, a shared host and some bandwidth.

Generic hosting is not only being replaced by services such as Office Live and Google Apps, but for personal user networks such as Wordpress.com and Blogger. For an SMB, there are a number of easy options available that require little development work and setup time with integration into other applications such as document management. The downward trend in generic hosting in favor of more specialized and integrated platforms will also definitely cut into the SMB web development market, as each of these solutions provide default templates that are easily branded and customized with a corporate identity.

The End of Theory

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

Board opens way for new top-level domains

Board opens way for new top-level domains - Network World: "Until now ICANN has kept close control over the creation of TLDs, but Thursday's vote could allow the creation of as many new gTLDs as there are domain names under the .com TLD today -- over 70 million. It could open the way for big corporations to run their own domains -- france.ebay instead of ebay.fr, for instance"

Agents fume over realestate.com.au glitch

Agents fume over realestate.com.au glitch - BizTech - Technology - theage.com.au: "Agents, who pay about $650 a month to have realestate.com.au connect them with home buyers, are furious and baffled as to how such a seemingly basic error at a high-tech internet company could go unnoticed for so long.

The delays meant many leads were lost and agents complained of damage to their reputations caused by the significant delays in following up queries."

RAM Footprint

A program's RAM footprint can be critical to its success. A program that uses too much memory can force the operating system to rely on virtual memory. Because virtual memory is many times slower than physical RAM, relying on virtual memory can result in slow performance and a poor user experience. While developing your system, be aware of your target deployment environment and consider how much RAM will be available on machines running your software.

Lazy Bastards: How we read online. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine

How we read online. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine

You're probably going to read this.

It's a short paragraph at the top of the page. It's surrounded by white space. It's in small type.

To really get your attention, I should write like this:

• Bulleted list
• Occasional use of bold to prevent skimming
• Short sentence fragments
• Explanatory subheads
• No puns
• Did I mention lists?

What Is This Article About?
For the past month, I've been away from the computer screen. Now I'm back reading on it many hours a day. Which got me thinking: How do we read online?

In which we prove that a college education can make some people dumber

Summary of Findings: Global Warming: A Divide on Causes and Solutions:



"There also are striking educational differences in partisans' views of global warming. Among Republicans, higher education is linked to greater skepticism about global warming -- fully 43% of Republicans with a college degree say that there is no evidence of global warming, compared with 24% of Republicans with less education."

Another symptom of the Republican War on Science.

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Understanding Amazon Web Services

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Understanding Amazon Web Services

Bezos goes on to note that Amazon's retailing operation is "a low gross margin business" compared to software and technology businesses, which "tend to have very high margins." The relatively low profitability of the retailing business gave Amazon the incentive to create a highly efficient, highly automated computing system, which in turn could become the foundation for a set of cloud computing services that could be sold at low enough prices to attract a large clientele. It also made a low-margin utility business attractive to the firm in a way that it isn't for a lot of large tech companies who are averse to making big capital investments in new, low-margin businesses.

"On the surface, superficially, [cloud computing] appears to be very different [from our retailing business]," Bezos sums up. "But the fact is we've been running a web-scale application for a long time, and we needed to build this set of infrastructure web services just to be able to manage our own internal house."

This is the great advantage that, at this early stage in the evolution of the utility computing industry, is held by companies like Amazon and Google. Building an efficient cloud-computing infrastructure does not represent an added expense for them; it's a prerequisite to the success of their existing business.

goosh.org - the unofficial google shell

goosh.org - the unofficial google shell.:
This google-interface behaves similar to a unix-shell.
You type commands and the results are shown on this page."

Google spotlights data center inner workings

Google spotlights data center inner workings | Tech news blog - CNET News.com: "The search colossus has shed only occasional light on its data center operations, but on Wednesday, Google fellow Jeff Dean turned a spotlight on some parts of the operation."

Capacity Planning for Web Operations

Capacity Planning for Web Operations: Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2008 — Co-produced by TechWeb & O'Reilly Conferences, April 22 - 25, 2008, San Francisco, CA: "Capacity planning for growth is not a new concept in web operations, but planning for the explosive and unpredictable types of growth that social applications experience is a whole new ballgame.

This talk will take a look at new and different approaches to capacity planning, and how we do it at Flickr. John Allspaw will cover real-world challenges and lessons learned"

Planning for growth

Planning for growth: "This paper presents a methodology for IT professionals to use to determine whether their Web site can satisfy future demands and to evaluate potential workload and infrastructure changes."

Zipf Distribution

Zipf Distribution of Website Popularity: "Much available data suggests that Web use follows a Zipf distribution." It appears to apply within a site and across sites. It also applies to outgoing page requests from a network and it applies to links.

"Zipf's law, an empirical law formulated using statistics, refers to the fact that many types of data studied in the physical and social sciences can be approximated with a Zipfian distribution, one of a family of related discrete power law probability distributions."

Web-surfing behavior: stuck in the 1990’s? � Online Journalism Blog

Web-surfing behavior: stuck in the 1990’s? � Online Journalism Blog: "A new research from Indiana University showed that 54% of URL requests had no referrals. That means that most of the time, people do not click on links. They merely pick a site in their favorites or type in an URL in the address bar. A mere 5% of URL requests came from search engines.

The figures can hardly be doubted. The study monitored 100,000 users over 9 months – the largest yet. What is more, the number of URL requests without referrals actually increased over the course of the study.

Users seem less Google-prone than what is often claimed. They spend little time surfing and prefer to go directly to destinations they know."

How to Sync Google Calendar with Outlook and Smartphones Automatically

How to Sync Google Calendar with Outlook and Smartphones Automatically: "My big complaint about Google Calendar was lack of support for easily syncing calendar data with my smartphone. I use Outlook for my personal information management because it's still the only thing that puts all my data in one place the way I want it. Google Calendar's iCal export made manual syncing with Outlook possible, but I want to get all my calendar data from my computer to my phone automatically. There have been several third party solutions that attempt to address this with varying levels of success. Just recently, Google released Google Calendar Sync, completely addressing the automatic sync between Outlook and Google Calendar.

Here's how you can sync Outlook with Google Calendar"

Transfer calendars between Outlook and Google Calendar - Outlook - Microsoft Office Online

Transfer calendars between Outlook and Google Calendar - Outlook - Microsoft Office Online: "By using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, you can import and export calendars from Google Calendar as Calendar Snapshots in the iCalendar format. This functionality enables you to transfer calendars between Outlook and Google Calendar. You can also subscribe to a Google Calendar in Office Outlook 2007 or use a Google-provided application to synchronize items on your Outlook calendar and Google Calendar."

Beyond Blogs

Beyond Blogs
Three years ago our cover story showcased the phenomenon. A lot has changed since then

Official Google Website Optimizer Blog

Official Google Website Optimizer Blog
"Now let's look at how we do website redesigns today. We typically invite local agencies to razzle and dazzle us with their portfolios. We choose things that look nice and make us feel good about spending tens of thousands of dollars (if not more) on a redesign. We get enchanted by talk of Web 2.0, widgets, gadgets, video, surveys and interactive movies. If we're using a really good agency, they'll ask for or already know our current web-analytics metrics so there's a baseline against which to measure. And after months of brainstorming and discussions, we see initial concept mocks, and the new site is unveiled—perhaps a press release is issued.

The irony is, that launch day should really be the first day of a test, to see if the new site really does perform better than the old one. Sure, you think it looks better and your gut tells you it must perform better (especially since you've become emotionally invested in it). But the reality is you don't know. Even if you compare baseline web stats, you won't know if improvements are seasonal (almost any redesign in the fall outperforms a summer predecessor) or due to another external factor (like a new ad campaign)."

civilization at okanogan1.com � Drupal versus everybody. A CMS Software review

civilization at okanogan1.com --- Drupal versus everybody. A CMS Software review

The Ultranet System Re-tender

$60m school software plan faces costly delays - Education News - theage.com.au

"Ultranet will link all government schools, allowing students to submit work and communicate with teachers and classmates, as well as being used by teachers to plan and create lessons."

Man Babies

Photo-fiddling site is both creepy and quirky - web - Technology - theage.com.au: "what some would say is the last thing the world needs - another photo-fiddling website"

Gmail S/MIME for Firefox

Gmail S/MIME for Firefox: "Gmail S/MIME provides Firefox users with S/MIME support for Gmail. S/MIME support is integrated directly into Google's Gmail web interface. Reading and sending of encrypted mail is supported. Signing of messages is supported as of version 0.2.0. Verification of signatures is not supported in the current version."

James Gosling and Tor Norbye Javascript / YUI / Netbeans demo

2008 JavaOne Conference
"In a general session with James Gosling at JavaOne last week, Tor “NetBeans Guy” Norbye demoed the really nice JavaScript support that was just added to NetBeans (code completion, browser-compatibility warnings, syntax highlighting, refactoring, etc). He did so using YUI, and NetBeans did a very nice job with the code complete, etc. Really slick demo…"


skip over the first 8'30 minutes to get to the YUI/Netbeans demo

Hard Drive Recovery Service

DriveSavers Hard Drive Recovery Service: How a Dead Maxtor External Drive is Repaired
This is a cautionary tale - moral - never keep digital data in just one place.

UPDATE by JH: of course it might have been a lot worse.

Amazon.com: Learning the Yahoo! User Interface library: Dan Wellman: Books

Amazon.com: Learning the Yahoo! User Interface library: Dan Wellman: Books
The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML, and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses. This book covers all released components whether utility, control, core file, or CSS tool. Methods of the YAHOO Global Object are used and discussed throughout the book. The basics of each control will be presented, along with a detailed example showing its use to create complex, fully featured, cross-browser, Web 2.0 user interfaces. Besides giving you a deep understand of the YUI library, this book will expand your knowledge of object-oriented JavaScript programming, as well as strengthen your understanding of the DOM and CSS. You will learn to create a number of powerful JavaScript controls that can be used straight away in your own applications.

Tilt-Shift Lens

Nikon 24 mm f/3.5 PC-E Nikkor ED: "A lens like the Nikon 24 PC-E does two fundamental things that no other type of lens can do.
– it allows you to change the plane of focus, from near to far to any other axis.
– it provides a very large image circle, much larger than the image area needs, and then allows you to move the image area anywhere within that circle."