Complexe mais pas compliqué

Actually Implementing Group Management Using ZooKeeper

2010-01-11T11:29:00.000-08:00

I wrote a post at the KaChing eng blog on Actually Implementing Group Management Using ZooKeeper.

Van Gogh says

2009-05-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why? I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age, would be to go there on foot.

I believe the California DMV is screwing me

2009-03-09T22:33:00.000-07:00

I guess I'm late registering, so I got this notice that my registration was due 12/31/2008. That makes me around 40 days late. My bill says my penalty fee is $147.

Looking up the penalty rules at http://dmv.ca.gov/vr/vr_info.htm it says for 30 days to 1 year late the fee is 60% of the license fee and 60% of the weight fee. My numbers:

License fee: $121
Weight fee: $24

60% of that sum is NOT $147. I'm going to have to call them, so please pray for me.

git-rebase --onto master branch topic

2008-07-24T18:01:00.000-07:00

is awesome!

(where master is branch's parent, branch is topic's parent)

Some favorite blog quotes

2008-07-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

I'm going to scale my foot up your ass

The Edge is Where the Innovation Happens
The Edge is Where the Smarts are in a "Stupid Network"
The Edge is What Gives The Internet its Ability to Scale
The Edge is Who Gives U2 Its Distinctive Sound

I would believe in god if I found out he made screen.

Good things learned the first month at Ning

2008-07-05T15:16:00.000-07:00

Asynchronous code reviews work well, though make sure that the software sends nasty-grams after no feedback for a few days.

JConsole is a decent tool. I'm surprised I've never used it before.

We have a nice JMX idiom where you register a class and tag methods with a @Managed annotation. This avoids the need to create separate interfaces and implemenations for MBean classes.

Google Guice is nice for the static type checking and annotations. I've always hated XML files for configuration.

Try out jDBI from Ning's Brian McCallister when you want to directly hook into your db.

TestNG is sweet. Classifying tests to group them as fast, slow, etc., is really nice.

String.format(). Why haven't I been using this??

SugarSync 1.0 is released

2008-03-19T18:27:00.000-07:00

http://sugarsync.com

openfile.net now up

2008-03-14T17:40:00.000-07:00

openfile.net is up and has the latest about OpenFile!

Announcing OpenFile

2008-02-28T10:59:00.000-08:00

A small group of us at work came up with an idea for a new web API that we are developing and would like as much community involvement as possible. We're calling it "OpenFile" in the spirit of OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, etc. From our in-progress spec:

Users store more and more of their data in disparate services: photos on Flickr, SmugMug, Snapfish; files in Amazon S3, Box.net, Mozy; documents on Google Documents, Zoho, etc. At the same time there are more and more web web-enabled applications that would like access to these sets of data to offer additional value: online image editing, audio and video transcoding, remote access, etc. Often a client wants to perform relatively simple operations: open a file, save a file, but every service provider implements this in a different manner. For these basic operations there needs to be an easier way for clients to access the user's data from any kind of provider in a uniform way, and at the same time protecting the privacy and security of the data itself.

The OpenFile API is a vendor-neutral protocol for desktop and web clients to be granted limited access to users' data that is managed by an external service provider. Its specific goals are to:

Provide clients the web equivalent of "Open File" and "Save As" dialogs that are managed by a user's service provider rather than the client, avoiding the exposure of private data to a requesting client, such as the user's folder structure. This also encourages the user to authorize the minimum amount of data to the client, rather than granting carte blanche access to all possible operations.

Allow authorized clients to then "Open" (read) and "Save" (write) authorized files.

Interoperate with open standards such as OAuth to avoid disclosing a user's credentials for a service provider to a client.

Intended audience

This specification is intended for:

Data storage/backup providers who want to enable their users to access their data via numerous third-party clients in a standard and secure way.

Web services that want to simplify and extend their current methods of importing and exporting file data.

Community participation

Please join the mailing list if you are interested in contributing, editing, or implementing this specification. We hope to emulate the process used by the OAuth mailing list in developing this spec: mailing list membership by application to avoid extraneous posts, quick discussions and voting on issues, rapid progress towards implementation and adoption.

Examples

Photo editing web site

Alice discovers a new web-based picture editing service picedit.com and wants to try it out on some of her pictures which are stored in the OpenFile-enabled myphotos.com site at the URL alice.myphotos.com.

On picedit.com's Import page there is a textbox where Alice can enter her OpenFile provider URL (alice.myphotos.com) so that picedit.com can learn how to pull photos from it. Alice is then redirected to alice.myphotos.com, which asks her to login if she's not logged in already, and then to select what photos she wants to grant picedit.com access to.

Alice chooses just one photo of her cat and is redirected back to picedit.com, which then pulls the picture of her cat from alice.myphotos.com. Alice then starts editing the photo.

When she's done she presses the "Save" button, causing picedit.com to push the updated image back to alice.myphotos.com where it will replace the previous version.

Online music store

Joe just bought the final Daft Punk album missing from his collection on drm-free.com. He can download it directly into his computer, but he also wants it available from his online-streaming service stream-it.net, and he wants it backed up to his offsite-backup service back-it-up.com.

On drm-free.com Joe enters the OpenFile endpoint URLs for both his services: stream-it.net and back-it-up.com.

First he's redirected to stream-it.net's "Save As" dialog, where he is asked if he wishes to allow drm-free.com to write some files. Joe navigates his folder structure and sets up a new folder for the album data, then is redirected back to drm-free.com.

Next he's redirected to back-it-up.com where he goes through the same authorization process for drm-free.com.

Finally drm-free.com begins transferring the music files to both services, keeping Joe informed about the progress of the transfers.

Notes on reading with an iPhone

2008-01-20T21:38:00.000-08:00

1. Usually surfing on the notebook, then you have to go somewhere, the bathroom, the train, some meeting, wherever. Click a bookmarklet to add the current URL to del.icio.us with tag 'toread'.

2. Bring up my del.icio.us 'toread' tag page on the iPhone. Tap the link, continue reading.

3. Reading two-column PDFs in web browsers really, really sucks. You can't fit one column on the screen given the type size, and then you end up scrolling down the first column, scrolling up to the top of the page to the second column, then going back to the first column for the next page, etc. PDF reading programs, *please* rip these PDFs apart on the fly and make them single-column. You'll make us all a lot happier.

4. iPhone can't tap-zoom when rendering PDFs. I assume they have some structure detection algorithms for HTML. Adding bitmap box/column detection for PDFs shouldn't be that hard.

Review of our new Sharpcast SugarSync product

2008-01-17T09:14:00.000-08:00

The real beauty of SugarSync is that it's real-time - so when you update something on the cloud, it is automatically synced to your computer (and vice versa).

Complicated version number

2008-01-08T09:30:00.000-08:00

This document is for Apache Solr version 1.2.2007.10.02.22.27.12. If you are using a different version of Solr, please consult the documentation that was distributed with the version you are using.

I like this phrase

2007-12-17T15:43:00.000-08:00

As an entrepreneur, you need to be a revenue animal and a cash bastard.

Tailrank probe

2007-12-09T21:27:00.000-08:00

tailrank.com, hiring?

Paper on Amazon's Dynamo

2007-10-03T10:20:00.000-07:00

I'm surprised that their paper doesn't mention Memcached. It seems like a large oversight!

Helping out OAuth

2007-09-26T22:50:00.000-07:00

I've offered to help write the Java implementation of the new OAuth spec, and Sharpcast has let me take this on as a 10% project. I hope to use it in our upcoming web apis.

Adam Inside(tm)

2007-09-18T08:55:00.000-07:00

Today Corel announced their new MediaOne product, which includes Sharpcast. This allows Corel customers to easily sync, backup and share their photo collections.

I'm especially proud because I was the principal author of the Sharpcast SDK that Corel used for the integration. It's not easy to integrate with another company's software, so I'd like to especially thank the Corel team for their great work, and everyone at Sharpcast who helped, tested, vetted and sweated with me.

More on threads

2007-08-13T11:31:00.000-07:00

To offer a third analogy, a folk definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and to expect the results to be different. By this definition, we in fact require that programmers of multithreaded systems be insane. Were they sane, they could not understand their programs.

Increasing Ruby's Net::BufferedIO buffer size

2007-06-22T16:11:00.000-07:00

Reading bytes from Net::HTTP seems really slow, around 1Mb/s for a close host. Not many people seem to have complained about this, but I found some insight from Headius and monkey-patched Net::BufferedIO::rbuf_fill. Changing the read buffer size from 1k to 32k brought the throughput up to 24Mb/s.


module Net
  class BufferedIO
    def rbuf_fill
      timeout(@read_timeout) { @rbuf << @io.sysread(32768) }
    end
  end
end

Documenting code

2007-06-14T21:50:00.000-07:00

It’s said that code should be written for people to read, so it follows that documentation is written for no one to read.

State

2007-04-02T09:45:00.001-07:00

State is the primary reason people fear computers—stateful things can be broken.

Yahoo, you suck

2007-03-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

Wow Yahoo, if I don't log in for four months, you deactivate my account. You suck. To get it back I have to read your dumb upgrade-to-Mail-Plus message.

But hey, I did reactivate my account, so you got a few ad impressions from me.

Funny Java quote

2007-03-14T10:26:00.000-07:00

"Functional programming is Java version 42, seriously."

Dear Starbucks

2006-12-26T22:27:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed the first cup of espresso but I was puzzled what a "personal cup" was when I asked for my second espresso. I found out that what I guess is called an "unpersonal cup" is a to-go cup, and an actual cup made of ceramic material is a "personal cup". I like the personal touch when I'm sitting there.

Why don't you have silverware? It's rather messy to eat your fairly delicious coffee cake from the strange half paper bag it comes in. I can't really fold the edge over and take it with me, it's too small. Sorry about the crumbs.

Bad Blogger error

2006-08-27T01:13:00.000-07:00

"001 java.io.IOException: No space left on deviceblog/18/40/0/arosien/archives/2006_08_01_arosien_archive.html"

Oops.

Rails Blob

2006-08-27T01:12:00.000-07:00

Rails Blob is a hilarious blog about Ruby and Rails.

Starfish: not yet MapReduce

2006-08-21T10:33:00.000-07:00

Lucas Carlson writes about using his Starfish library to do MapReduce. He's not really doing MapReduce, but I like his Starfish library.

I mention this because I wrote a basic MapReduce library in Ruby at Sharpcast. Perhaps I can use Starfish as a good distributed processing abstraction.

Here's the ubiquitous word-frequency program using my MapReduce:


worker :word_count do
       # [filename,line] => list([word,1])
       map :reads => :text, :writes => :yaml do |filename,string|
               string.split.each {|w| emit_intermediate(w, 1)}
       end

       # [word,counts] => list([word,freq])
       reduce :reads => :yaml, :writes => :yaml do |word,counts|
               sum = counts.inject(0) {|sum,v| sum + v}
               emit word, sum
       end
end

I'll see if I can open-source it.

Facebook: you are not REST

2006-08-15T18:39:00.000-07:00

Facebook claims their API is REST... umm, no.

First, every request uses HTTP method POST. -1 points.

Second, every request has a method=something, where something is some operation. REST is not RPC. Have you heard of resources and representations? -1 points.

Sorry Facebook. And flickr. And all the rest of you. Kudos to Google who somewhat understands this.

Ruby tutorial code

2006-08-11T15:53:00.000-07:00

I gave a little talk about Ruby to folks here at Sharpcast and thought I'd share the handout I prepared. It covers most of the basics of Ruby.

#!/bin/env ruby
# Ruby basics by Adam S. Rosien.  2-Aug-2006.

# Comments are prefixed by #

# Everything is an object.  No primitives.  nil is even an object.
#
# Methods are modeled as messages.  This is known as "duck" typing:
# "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck."
# Interfaces are kind of moot; you just send a message and see if it responds.
# Method don't require parenthesis unless needed for an ambiguity.
#
# Some naming conventions:
#   ClassNames
#   method_names and variable_names
#   methods_asking_question? return true or false
#   slightly_dangerous_method! that might have side-effects
1.to_s             # '1'
'foo'.nil?         # false
nil.nil?           # true
' foo '.strip!     # modifies string in place, removing leading/trailing spaces

# What's an object's class?
'foo'.class              # String
'foo'.class.class        # Class
'foo'.class.class.class  # Class

# Traverse the class hierarchy.
String.superclass  # Object
Object.superclass  # nil

# Symbols: objects used to represent unique names in the intepreter.
asym = :sym

# Other reflection: You can query an object about messages and send them, i.e., make a method call.
'foo'.respond_to? :asdf    # false
'foo'.respond_to? :length  # true
'foo'.send :length         # 3

# Basic types
i = 500
f = 500.1
s = 'I want my MTV on channel 9.'
# Use double quotes and #{} to expand template.
s = "I want my MTV on channel #{i}." # "I want my MTV on channel 500"

# Arrays
array = [1, 2, 3]
array.size  # 3
array[1]    # 2

# Hashes, i.e., maps
hash = { 'foo' => 'bar', 'baz' => 999 }
hash['foo']  # 'bar'
hash['baz']  # 999
hash[1234]   # nil

# Classes
class Foo
        # Define a class method.
        def Foo.all_the_time
                "Foo all the time!"
        end

        # Called when object is created.
        def initialize
                # Instance variables are prefixed with '@'.
                @bar = 'bar'
        end

        # Define a method named bar that returns the value of the instance variable @bar.
        def bar
                # No 'return' needed.  Methods return the value of the last expression.
                @bar
        end
end

# Objects are created by calling 'new' on their class.
foo = Foo.new

# Instance method.
foo.bar  # 'bar'

# Class method.
Foo.all_the_time  # 'Foo all the time!"

# You can define a method on an individual object!  (Known as "singleton method")
def foo.baz
        'baz'
end
foo.baz  # 'baz'

# You can even add or change methods on any other class!  (This can be a good thing.)
class String
        # self is equivalent to 'this' in Java or C++.
        # to_s returns the string representation of an object.
        def wiggly
                "~~~#{self.to_s}~~~"
        end
end
"ruby".wiggly  # '~~~ruby~~~'

# If an object doesn't respond to a message, the 'method_missing' method is called.
# You can override this method in your classes for magical behavior.
class Foo
        # sym is the name of the method called, args is an array of arguments.
        def method_missing sym, *args
                puts "I can't #{sym}!"
        end
end

Foo.new.throw_ninja_stars  # "I can't throw_ninja_stars!"

# Inheritance
class Bar < Foo
end

# Blocks: the most useful feature of Ruby.
# A block is passed to a method which may 'yield' values to it.

# The each method of an array takes a block, and yields each element of the array to it.
# Using braces block syntax.
array.each {|elem| puts elem }  # 1
                                # 2
                                # 3

# Using do-end block syntax.
array.each do |elem|
        puts elem
end  # 1
     # 2
     # 3

# Defining a method that takes a block:
class Foo
        # Yield the value of @bar to the block three times.
        def bar_three_times
                yield @bar
                yield @bar
                yield @bar
        end
end
Foo.new.bar_three_times {|bar| puts bar}  # bar
                                          # bar
                                          # bar

# Useful methods that take blocks.
[1,2,3].map {|elem| elem + 1}            # [2,3,4]
[1,2,3].find_all {|elem| elem % 2 == 0}  # [2]
[1,2,3].reject {|elem| elem % 2 == 0}    # [1,3]
[3,1,6,3,6,4,8].sort.uniq                # [1,3,4,6,8]
['foosieseses', 'barsieses', 'bazzies'].sort_by {|elem| elem.length} # ["bazzies", "barsieses", "foosieseses"]

# Inject takes an initial value for an accumulator, passing the accumulator and element to the block.
# The accumulator is set to the value the block returns.
[1,2,3].inject(0) {|sum, elem| sum + elem}    # 6
[2,3,4].inject(1) {|prod, elem| prod * elem}  # 24

{'a' => 1, 'b' => 2}.each_pair {|k,v| puts "#{k} = #{v}"}  # a = 1
                                                           # b = 2
# Metaprogramming: powerful mojo.  Code that writes code.
# Why?  So you don't have to.

# It's a pain to have to write getters and setters for instance variables.
# Ruby defines helper class methods to do this for you.
class Foo
        attr_reader :bar    # Defines method 'bar' that returns @bar.
        attr_writer :bar    # Defines method 'bar=' that sets @bar to a value.
        attr_accessor :bar  # Reader and writer.
end
f = Foo.new
f.bar  # 'bar'
f.bar = 'foo'
f.bar  # 'foo'

# How might these kinds of methods be written?
class Bar
        # The *syms says that there are a variable number of method arguments,
        # so just turn them into an array.
        def Bar.attr_reader *syms
                syms.each do |sym|
                        # Evaluate this string as ruby in the context of the current class.
                        class_eval "def #{sym}; @#{sym}; end"
                end
        end

        def initialize
                @asdf = 'asdf'
                @ghij = 'ghij'
        end

        attr_reader :asdf, :ghij
end
b = Bar.new
b.asdf  # 'asdf'

# You can also evaluate a string as ruby in the context of an instance, rather than a class.
b.instance_eval "asdf"  # 'asdf'

Roma or Gibu?

2006-07-20T18:53:00.000-07:00

Who might win the share a picture contest? You make the call.

Gibu taunts.

Roma's email is rj ha ve ri atttttt sharpcast dottt com if you want to share with her.

Mine is adam@rosien.net of course!

Share a picture with whomever you like.

We're, umm, cool!

2006-07-19T11:08:00.000-07:00

Sharpcast is Komando.com's cool site of the day: http://www.komando.com/toolbox.aspx?mode=print&id=1943

Review Sharpcast Photos on Download.com

2006-07-17T17:48:00.000-07:00

If you've tried Sharpcast Photos, you can review it on Download.com.

Walt likes us, maybe you will too

2006-07-12T19:48:00.000-07:00

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB115275297896005247-lMyQjAxMDE2NTEyMjcxNTIyWj.html

Sharpcast Beta

2006-07-06T09:32:00.000-07:00

By the way, we're in beta! Desktop, web, and now mobile.

Finished the Aubrey/Maturin series

2006-07-06T00:11:00.000-07:00

I finished Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin series this July 4th weekend, closed book number 20(!) and felt a lump in my throat. It was such a pleasure to read. I highly recommend it.

It's one thing where the characters age during the course of a book; it's another where they grow older slowly book after book, each continuing to face their own challenges and failures. If anything, the books teach a lively persistence in the face of a changing life and world full of hard knocks.

I'll try to slow down and just think now, take a break from reading. I hope to have some Sharpcast API stuff out to the world this summer.

Splunk is cool

2006-06-09T09:23:00.000-07:00

Splunk looks really cool. We're doing a lot of operational work now that we've got real users, and everyone ends up doing something like they do anyway, but not as well.

Blogger response time is so slow!

2006-06-08T13:52:00.000-07:00

WTF!

We're in alpha!

2006-05-25T10:02:00.000-07:00

http://www.sharpcast.com

Hype and comments

2006-05-22T21:15:00.000-07:00

A comment in Gibu's blog:

Enought blogging and constant hyping, how about launching this product that is apparently no different than www.vizrea.com?

Thanks for the criticism. Really, we're working on it; it's difficult to pull off. Come in for a demo and we'll try to change your mind.

Server configuration, #2

2006-05-17T18:54:00.000-07:00

Capistrano looks good. Simple, clean. Perhaps I'll try it out when I have a bit more time.

Is that the only URL? The Rails wiki is rather empty about this tool.

Server configuration

2006-05-16T11:38:00.000-07:00

Server configuration is a pain, especially for distributed systems. My problem? I want n A processes running on m boxes talking to p B processes on q boxes, where a m-box can also be a q-box. One issue is each process needs to use its own ports and other processes need to know those ports.

There are so many ways to have one level of indirection, but all require a central bootstrap/lookup.

I suppose something like zeroconf would help, as each process would broadcast its info to the others, but is that too heavyweight?

I looked briefly at Puppet since I'm on a Ruby kick, but it seems too abstract. Why should I have to define a class/object system inside a domain-specific language inside Ruby, when I have Ruby itself? What I mean is, I don't think systems configuration engineers think in terms of inheritance, they think in terms of processes and ports and configuration strings and policies. I get a bad feeling whenever there is a keyword 'class' intended for downstream users.

Too many things

2006-05-12T10:44:00.000-07:00

Recompiling for 64-bit architecture.
Performance testing.
Installing application monitoring system at the data center. (wishing centos had a newer Ruby; have to install via rpm ick)
Bug-a-thon #2.
Company going to MI-III.
Going to Santa Cruz for birthday #31.

Lines of code

2006-05-10T10:39:00.000-07:00

I wanted to know if I have been productive, so I looked at the lines of code I've been writing for the monitoring system. Here it is:

339 Metrics.rb
62 ScMetrics.rb
42 sc_poller.rb
194 webmetrics.rb
637 total

The web site (using Camping) is still less than 200 lines. sc_poller.rb gets metrics from machines. Metrics.rb is a little large, but contains the code generation code and generous comments in case I get hit by a bus and someone needs to read Ruby for the first time. ScMetrics.rb is where I use the code generation and contains the graph definitions; it's the file that tells me how productive I am, since if I want to add a new kind of graph I should only have to add a new definition to this file. 62 lines isn't bad for 10 graph definitions.

Today is Bug-a-thon day

2006-05-09T14:23:00.000-07:00

Today is a Sharpcast Bug-a-thon day, where we take a release candidate and play with it, that is, we try to break it.

I'm anxious to see how all the pieces--desktop, mobile, and web--fit together for this release, and of course what kind of graphs my monitoring system pumps out when we're using the app simultaneously.

Grokking Ruby metaprogramming

2006-05-08T17:34:00.000-07:00

I finally grok metaprogramming in Ruby and am happily generating methods into my subclasses. The trick I had to realize is that I need to view the generated methods as template methods available to "normal" methods. For example, if I have a graph method, it can call a generated filter method to filter what to graph. My monitoring system for the backend of Sharpcast is so much cleaner now.

Another way of describing Ruby metaprogramming--one of many styles--is that you avoid the cost of overriding methods in subclasses by generating the methods you want from the base class into the subclass.

One reason I like my job

2006-05-06T19:25:00.000-07:00

This week I've been writing monitoring and analysis tools in Ruby, adding features and fixing bugs in C++, and reviewing Java APIs. Being able to code in the most appropriate language, using the features of those particular languages, is one reason I really like my job at Sharpcast.

Camping and microframeworks

2006-05-04T10:48:00.000-07:00

I'm loving Camping, a web framework that's 4k in size written in Ruby. I just learned it yesterday. All I need is a simple dynamic web site and I can wrote the whole thing in--let me look--146 lines with comments.

It's great because it's set up to be URL/controller-friendly. What do I mean by that? Most web frameworks force you into some limited URL scheme. Especially Java servlet containers. But I love the REST style and want my URLs to name resources, not actions. (Use HTTP people!)

Boiled down to the actual program, this means that URLs need to map to model objects, the M in MVC. In Camping, you do this:

class Provider < R(/(\d+)/)    
 def get provider_id        
   provider = Provider.find provider_id        
   # do something with provider object    
 end
end

This says the URL /3 maps to a Provider object with id 3.

In Java I created an interface called ResourceMapping that mapped between URLs and a Map of objects. I haven't found a Java web framework that provides this kind of emphasis on resources.

Yay, graphs!

2006-05-02T11:40:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it's those little syntax errors that really bite your butt.

rrdtool

2006-05-01T16:17:00.000-07:00

I love it. I hate it. If you are an rrdtool wizard, please email me. COUNTERs are really f'd up with whatever parameters I'm using.

One-button easy

2006-04-30T12:24:00.000-07:00

The secret to success is to make everything one-button easy, then get out of the way. If you think collaborative architecture matters more, click the charts: The same Alexa plots that show MySpace and YouTube obliterating top sites reveal that Flickr, Digg and del.icio.us have plateaued with audiences barely bigger than Slate's. Photos, news, and other people's bookmarks just aren't as interesting as bootleg TV and checking out the hotties. The easier it gets to use, the less geeky the Net becomes, and the more it starts to look like real life. http://www.slate.com/id/2140635/

Yes! Real life! Mom, here's a photo of us at the beach. Friend, I'm so wasted right now. Lady-friend, here's a kiss.

New pods

2006-04-28T10:18:00.000-07:00

The pods have arrived! Soon the Sharpcast busy bees will move in from the old office next door.

Peter gets a demo

2006-04-27T10:30:00.000-07:00

Friend-of-friend Peter came by Sharpcast the other day to see a demo and met a lot of the company. He sent a nice email and I thought I'd share it. He's planning on going to Microsoft when he finishes his master's, but we tried to convince him that Sharpcast might be a better choice... :P

Hi Adam,

Thank you for the tour yesterday. The demo was awesome -- you guys really got the interaction right -- and with such minimal latency. It must be a pretty tough problem to get all of that working with such good responsiveness. To me the whole thing just makes a lot of sense and the platform definitely "feels" right.

Thanks also for introducing me to everybody. It was cool to see what the Silicon Valley startup life is like. It seemed like there was lots of excitement everywhere and that people were really into making a cool product.

Okay, well I think you guys definitely have a great idea and have just submitted my email for a beta request!

-- Peter

Sync and Syck

2006-04-27T09:47:00.000-07:00

Take a look at Syck, a YAML serializer/deserializer. I love why the lucky stiff. He sees Rails come out, so he writes his own framework that's 4k in size. He's so awesome. I want a chunky bacon t-shirt.

I'd love to plug YAML into Sharpcast's object system. Then any language could generate YAML and could be sync'd--is that the correct form of the verb?--via Sharpcast. Maybe it's one level too indirect, but it might be a nice lowest common denominator.

Event systems and journalism

2006-04-26T09:45:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a better monitoring and event system for Sharpcast's underlying platform. Per-machine metrics like the number of current connections are good, but we also want to record user events like someone creating an album or sharing a photo so we can better understand our users behavior and create a better product.

It's easier in some ways to store events as they happen, rather than query the entire database for aggregate behavior. So I need to define what an event is. Generically, events are almost exactly the classic elements of piece of journalism: who, what, where, why, when and how. For us, this translates to

Who: user id
What: the action taken and any parameters
Where: IP address
Why: (very hard to compute a user's intentions)
When: timestamp
How: client (photos desktop, photos mobile, photos web)

I'll see how this turns out.

del.icio.us as a proxy for me

2006-04-25T09:47:00.000-07:00

I'm giving myself 15 minutes to write an entry each day. This morning I was pondering what to write about, so I looked at my collected links in del.icio.us, presented in reverse chronological order, and was struck by the fact that it mirrors quite well what I'm working on at work, coupled with what I'm currently interested in.

(This is simply because I often bookmark answers to my own work questions, probably a common practice among software engineers.)

I think an excellent feature for del.icio.us would be a "tag stream", akin to David Galernter's Lifestreams, where your link tags would be clustered over time and you could get a sense of how your focus has shifted from topic to topic.

It would also be an excellent proxy for a resumé, or at least help you maintain one.

Starting to blog for work

2006-04-24T15:22:00.000-07:00

Shel Israel has been educating our executives at Sharpcast about blogs and talked us last Friday as a company. I liked his talk, mainly because I too hate marketing and blogs are a good way to market yourself and your company and be kept somewhat honest about it. I volunteered to start a blog and won a copy of Shel's book for doing so.

I want Sharpcast to succeed, so I thought I'd write short entries about my work and any other interesting things that come across my plate. I have good blog mentors in kwc and bp.

Maybe I'll read Shel's book too.