Move Over Taylor Swift, Occipital Brings Real-Time Panorama Creation to the iPhone |
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Posted on: July 31, 2010
Sponsor
Previously, my favorite option for creating panoramas on my iPhone has been an app called AutoStitch. To make panoramas in AutoStitch, I have to first snap a series of pictures, making sure to leave enough overlap for each image to fit together with the next. Then I would fire up the app, select the right pictures, and wait about 30-60 seconds for the app to complete the stitching process. With 360 Panorama, the time it takes to create a panoramic image is significantly reduced. Once the app loads, simply hold the phone up in the position you wish to begin the panorama, tap the screen, rotate the view either left of right and tap the "Save" button to store the panorama. Panoramas are created right before your eyes in real-time as you pan side-to-side, eliminating the uploading and waiting time in other apps. "Literally every single frame is used. Behind the scenes, our computer vision-based system is processing every frame and calculating precisely how much you moved," says Reddy. "The vision system is extremely fast and precise, and there's nothing like it on the iPhone period -- panorama or otherwise." So how well does the app actually work? As for capturing and saving panoramas, the app works as advertised - at least on the iPhone 4 where gyroscopic readings help the app better determine movement. The speed and ease at which it can create panoramas is the selling-point of this app, and is the only area in which it beats apps like AutoStitch. The overall quality and resolution of the images, however, doesn't come close that seen from AutoStitch. The example below is a 360-degree panorama captured in front of my house. Upon closer inspection, we can see vertical lines representing the various images captured by the app. Additionally, the app realigned the start and end points of the panorama (just right of the tree) to the middle of the image, causing a jarring overlap. On other attempts, the app misjudged where the images should begin and end, causing a large black void to fill the middle of the image.
The resolution of the images created with 360 Panorama is also much smaller than those that can be created using an app like AutoStitch. The above 360-degree shot is 2048 pixels wide at full resolution while this AutoStitch panorama of less than 90 degrees I made a few weeks ago is 3222 pixels wide. AutoStitch also includes several handy features which 360 Panorama lacks - namely the ability to crop images. Users will need a third-party app to crop their images from 360, and will also be missing features like export settings and AutoStitch's advanced exposure blending. The verdict for 360 Panorama is a bit of a toss-up. If you want the speed and ease of creating panoramas with the steady wave of a hand, then this is definitely an app you need to try out. But if you want higher quality and resolution from your panoramas, then you might be better off sticking with an app like AutoStitch. Discuss
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Data Centers Suited For Dr. Evil and Servers, Too |
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Posted on: July 31, 2010
But data centers can have a certain style as illustrated in a recent post on Data Center Knowledge, which put together a collection that shows a level of creativity in how data centers are being designed. Rob Snevely is the author of Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology. He says the primary function of building a data center is in the detailed mechanical process of laying out the building for maximum density and equipment loads. Sponsor But he also says design philosophies are being applied to data centers that fit with the modern times of the 21st century. Here are a few that stand out: "The Spy Who Loved Me" Bunker On the city streets, people go about their day, unsuspecting that deep below the asphalt lies a bunker where Dr. Evil would feel right at home. It's the data center for Banhof, one of Sweden's largest ISPs. The features of this subterranean data center are a bit quirky. It includes greenhouses, waterfalls and German submarine engines. Your data is safe here. It is designed to withstand the force of a hydrogen bomb. Unusual? Yes. The architect started with the view that rock has its own symbolic representation of life. Space-themed conference room? Sweet.
Which Came First: Chickens or Computers?
And here we thought data centers were just big boring buildings. Discuss
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Official BI 11g Launch Page |
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Posted on: July 31, 2010 The Launch page for BI 11g can be found here |
Google Places API Could Do For Check-ins What Google Maps Did For Maps |
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Posted on: July 31, 2010
Making this data as free and easy to use as Google Maps is today could create a foundation for new location-savvy apps to bloom throughout the mobile web, with far less overhead than such apps have to wrestle with today in order to provide a rich user experience. One catch? All these apps will have to be integrated with Google's Adsense. Sponsor Also available: rating information from the same business review sites that appear in Google Maps search results. So show me the best-rated coffee shop within a mile of me that's described as dog-friendly in user reviews. That would be awesome. How it Might Be Used
Those kinds of examples are less likely to be implemented at first, since the first developers being allowed access to the API are people building check-in apps. But the possibilities beyond checking in are many and diverse. Just as Google Maps made it easy for any developer to add a map and display location, the Places API could make it easy for any developer to search up to date information about any location for their application. At least that's what seems to be possible. The Terms of Service favoring search and prohibiting caching may prove frustratingly prohibitive. That data may be free, but it will come at the expense of integrating with Google's Adsense platform. "Note that in order to be issued credentials for this service," the API documentation reads, "you must provide a valid Adsense publisher id that matches the Google account with which you are currently logged in." That's pretty smart of Google and maybe a little nefarious, but someone's got to pay the bills. Why is Location so Hot?Why is location becoming such a hot commodity? From one perspective, the proliferation of smartphones and the development of easy-to-use, compelling applications like Foursquare and MyTown are making it easier than ever for consumers to publish and leverage information about their location. Consumers want to do that for a variety of reasons, from recording their travel history to letting family know where they are to bragging about the hip places they hang out. For developers, location data is a whole new world to pivot on when looking at feeds of user activity data. Our online activity has to date gone on in the placeless ether. Applications could offer features, highlight content or make recommendations based on things like our interests and social connections - but now any of that and more can be sorted by location. That's a very potent column to add to any spreadsheet, too. We're just beginning to see what all the recombinations of these types of data can look like. It's an exciting new location-based world, and much of it may be powered by the Google Places API. Discuss
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Twitter Annotations Not Coming Soon, After All |
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Posted on: July 31, 2010
At Chirp it was said that the Annotations feature would launch in the second or third quarter of this year. Now the company's developer advocate, Taylor Singletary, said today on the Twitter developers list that it's not going to work out that way. "We haven't yet announced a release date," he said in response to an inquiry, "and it's still a ways in the future while we tackle some other projects." Sponsor We've got an inquiry in with Twitter asking what that means, but it seems clear that the company is slammed with technical challenges, has other priorities and wrongly estimated the roadmap for this very important part of the platform. (Update: see below.) Here's how Annotations will work. It will allow publishing software to mark-up tweets with any kind of characteristic or namespace (local weather when and where a twit did tweet, for example) and any kind of value - cloudy with a chance of meatballs, for example. Twitter messages are fairly rich with metadata already and incredibly easy to analyze and build on top of, but Annotations would open that up so far the sky's the limit. It's worth mentioning that Twitter's unveiling of Annotations at Chirp happened around the same time as, and was widely compared with, Facebook's launching of personalized content widgets and tentacles expanding all over the web, among other things. Facebook shipped its announced project, for better or for worse. Twitter is BusyIn another email on the same list today, Singletary said that the processing of white-listing applications to ping Twitter's servers with a production-level frequency was clogged with backlog, growing more critical in its evaluations and being re-evaluated. A whole world of independent developers, empowered with the ability to read and write data, will inevitably build cooler things than even the smartest company in the world.
Meanwhile, Twitter launched an official recommendation feature today that's frankly, not nearly as exciting as the kinds of recommendation capabilities that independent developers have built (see Mr.Tweet or Twellow, for example). Hopefully the API for this feature will be turned into more fabulous things. A whole world of independent developers, empowered with the ability to read and write data, will inevitably build cooler things than even the smartest company in the world. It's one of those laws like a room full of monkeys and typewriters. And it's the core value proposition of Annotations, too.
It's one of those laws like a room full of monkeys and typewriters. And it's the core value proposition of Annotations, too. Numerous advertising technologies have been rolled out since Chirp as well. Annotations is a hugely ambitious strategy, and the squabbling over namespaces and standards was one that Twitter said it was going to let the market work out on its own. That made some people quite unhappy. We've asked Twitter for clarification on the revised Annotations roadmap and will update this post with the company's response. Update: A Twitter spokesperson responded to our inquiry and said that yes, Annotations will launch. "We'll still launch Annotations. The team that was working on Annotations is currently focused on our number one priority, which is site stability." No doubt Annotations could themselves pose scalability challenges. They could at least blow our minds, if not a series of related servers. Below is an image of what each Tweet looks like under the hood right now, before annotations. (Click for full size view.) Each of those fields is powerful, but inflexible and defined by the company. Imagine a new one that's open to being defined however a publishing tool sees fit. That's the vision behind Annotations.
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PHP command line progress bar |
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Posted on: July 31, 2010 Was just looking through some code and came across this function I wrote some time ago. If you do a lot of your processing scripts in PHP like we do, you probably need to know what is going on sometimes. So, I made a progress bar for use on the cli. I thought I would share it. ; Here is a video of it in action. And the code can be found here. http://brian.moonspot.net/php-progress-bar Post Link |
links for 2010-07-30 |
Posted on: July 30, 2010
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BI11g - New Features - Custom Groups |
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Posted on: July 30, 2010 One of the features I was looking forward to in 11g was the enhanced ability of OBI to interpret multi-dimensional data. ; This is the feature that would help welcome the Essbase users, seamlessly into the OBIEE world as well. ; The real world interpretation of data as hierarchies can be easily represented and analyzed in this new version pretty effectively. In this note I will document the neat feature of creating a custom hierarchy in the presentation layer. Yes!! You heard it right, presentation layer. Using the new grouping mechanism you can custom build groups on the fly and use it for analysis. Before we look into individual features, below is the welcome screen of OBIEE. It is a very unified, intuitive view of actions. You can expect this same user experience from all products including ODI 11g that have adopted Weblogic as its platform. All the products are integrated with the fusion middleware all the more closely integrated providing a seamless integration in likes of functionality, security, manageability or user experience.  You will see all recently accessed objects are already listed for convenience. Also towards the left of the screen all most likely actions that the user may carry out is listed as well.  The actions can be accessed via the quick access bar or the menu. Again you will see the layout of the menu itself. Actions are grouped together to provide a better UI.  Now that you have decided you are going to create an answers request, the next logical step is to select the Subject area on which to base the request. This is the next menu item that comes up for your input.  This is the Answers creation screen. Again the options like results and prompts are visible as tabs.  Here we see a predefined Hierarchy that is created at design time ie at the repository level.  ;  Note the difference in the Pivot table that is been created. It truly represents a multi dimensionality of the incoming data which was not the case in the previous versions. Now that we have created a very simple request, we will proceed to create our own hierarchy.  We will create a custom group called "My Products" and included a set of members from the available set of values from the Products hierarchy    Now you see a new group with its corresponding fact values.  
http://blogs.oracle.com/bimadeez/2010/07/bi11g_-_new_features_-_custom_groups.html
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The Truth About Legacy Technology |
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Posted on: July 30, 2010
As people who live in and among the very latest of technology, I think it's a necessary corrective to examine how we use legacy technologies. So, I asked the most first-adopty people I could find, my fellow ReadWriteWeb staffers. What "old fashioned" technology did they employ every day? Some of them did not respond, as they were immersed in a virtual reality safari or traveling in time. But here's some backtalk from those who did. Sponsor Marshall Kirkpatrick, Co-Editor and VP of Content Development Fireplace; bicycle; iPhone 3G (just kidding, kinda); shovel instead of tiller and gardening at home instead of Food Inc.; text editor instead of word processor; Wi-Fi instead of wireless card; printed newspapers and magazines because they are cool; books; dirty scowl instead of brain-piercing laser beam I'm not going to say anything about the chickens. Adrianne Jeffries, Evening News Writer The most prominent example that comes to mind is handwriting. Pens, pencils and paper are still often more efficient for me than laptops, computers or mobile devices. Examples: grocery lists, writing while field reporting, writing passive-aggressive notes to roommates, sometimes directions to a place. It's possible to write up to 300 words per minute using shorthand, which I am studying. So cool I think I'm going to pass out. The world record for shorthand is 350 words per minute and the world record for typing only 212.
If you go into a hardware store, most hand tools have a sexy, modern version. (Just check out the framing hammers.) But it's frippery added on to something that hasn't changed in hundreds of years. I own my great x 4 grandfather's homemade woodworking plane. It's identical to wooden planes available today. Same goes for hand saws. I have my great x 2 grandfather's hand saw - you could have bought it in a store today. It's technology that has reached a kind of perfection. There's no way to improve on it; it's functionality in its purest form. That's a powerful idea, the perfection of a technology. I have a lot of cognitive dissonance about paper vs. digital readers. I wrote a little about it. "The best reason to read books and magazines on paper is because they are not on computers...I did spend the better part of today reading off of screens, and I doubt I'll ever be able to get away from screen reading. But I've got to say, at least at this point in space-time, print is looking better than ever." Although the functionality of e-readers is undeniable and the possibilities are interesting, today I picked up "Listen to the Warm" at St. Vinnie's and it smelled like...victory. Audrey Waters, News Writer, Startup and Cloud Channels The Post-it. Also, I prefer a fountain pen. If you have a beer with Audrey, you will eventually hear about Post-its. I still prefer a bar of soap to those body wash/poof combos. Ha! If you have a beer with Sarah, you will eventually hear about soap bars. No, I don't know. We live on different oceans. But I like to think when she's hammered she goes on a rant about the "poof" as a sign of the End Times. Richard MacManus, Founder and Editor-in-Chief I still use a paper notebook most of the time. I have a paper diary to complement Google Calendar and probably use the former more. I read paper books. I go to the library (it's a big building with books in it). Always a smart-ass this guy. A building is a building with... Wait, what now? It should surprise no one that a bunch of people who, whatever else they do or seem to be, are in the final analysis writers, would, when it comes to legacy tech, trend heavily toward pens and paper. Technology is not electronics (although electronics is technology.) Technology is us, doing and it has as much of a foundation in our lives as language, religion, philosophy or music. That connection is so important, in every part of our lives. A connection to what we do, to another person, to family, to a community, to the great men and women of the past who inspire us. We recognize that technology didn't start with AOL, or with Amiga, or even with the Babbage engine. It started when the first hairbag picked up a rock and broke the end off a coconut or twisted a stick off a sapling and dug out some termites. And it won't end until we do. Pantheon photo by Andrew Wales
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Forget Technical Terms - Whoever Gets the Most Developers Wins...Period |
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Posted on: July 30, 2010
But what do developers want the most? They want the cloud to be simple to use. They want it to be as as easy to get your data in as easy it is to get the data out. And they want it to be secure. Evans Data survey took a look at the whole gamut of issues related to cloud computing in an annual survey, and its conclusions focus on the dichotomies between private and public clouds. Sponsor Google and IBM share a common denominator. Both apply the basic principles of open source to their cloud computing efforts. That makes it easy for developers to work with the platforms. This brings up a certain issue we have with the terms used for cloud computing. It does not matter if one cloud is public and another is private. It's about getting the most developers. To do that you need to open up. Period. ReadWriteWeb views cloud computing as a network of platforms that serve as individual ecosystems. In the Future of the Cloud, we discard the notion of public and private clouds to focus more on emerging platforms. Future of the Cloud: Cloud Platform APIs are the Business of Computing
View more documents from ReadWriteWeb. From the report by Mike Kirkwood: "As an industry, we are emerging from a phase of infrastructure cloud computing that has been driven by server virtualization and scaling compute. Now we are moving to the next phase of cloud platforms where higher order jobs such as collaboration and communication services are the drivers. In this phase the action will be in how the cloud scales the work done by people, and in how an always-on, always-available infrastructure supports applications that both cut expense and generate revenue. Google is attracting developers as well as any cloud provider. The proof is in the API calls it gets. According to Programmable Web, Google is tops in the API billionaire's club.
IBM is developing an ecosystem that includes RightScale and Kaavo for deploying applications and workloads. Navajo Systems provides an additional layer of security. Silanis is used for e-signatures. VMLogix allows for manual, functional, and compatibility testing. AppFirst provides performance monitoring. And SOASTA CloudTest helps deliver load and performance testing. Forget the technical terms. They will go away. The ideas are what matters, and those ideas will drive the innovation. Ideas are what excites developers. What also matters are the people: attract developers through what you provide them, not by bandying about terms that in the long run no one really cares about. But not everyone agrees. We asked on Twitter what people thought of technical terms like IaaS and PaaS. Eric Delattre said cloud is actually the term that needs to go: "@alexwilliams @rww the opposite, use IaaS, PaaS, SaaS instead of Cloud!" Discuss
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Apple Patents Travel, Hotel and Fashion Applications |
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Posted on: July 30, 2010
The patent applications were uncovered this morning by wireless news site Unwired, which called the development "scary" and equated Apple to a patent troll. If granted, these apps would allow Apple to patent ways in which mobile applications function, including everything from mobile boarding passes to store locator functions. Sponsor Here's what each app would do: TravelThe travel application would help users make reservations, create an itinerary, view airport guides and information, use mobile boarding passes, check-in to flights remotely, access in-flight services, send and receive automatic arrival notifications and browse and send travel guides and promotions. The app would also have built-in social networking to aid in finding nearby friends or others in the vicinity interested in socializing.
HotelsThe hotel application would allow a user to check in and check out via the app, order hotel services (e.g. making reservations at the spa, ordering or pre-ordering room service, scheduling wake up calls, etc.) book tickets for nearby attractions, schedule reminders and control room settings even when away from the room (think AC, audio/video equipment, etc.). The app could also be used as a universal remote control for the hotel room's TV and video equipment and could suggest programming choices based on stored user profile information.
ShoppingThe mobile shopping application focuses on connecting users to high fashion. The app would send invitations and reminders regarding fashion events, display fashion ads, allow the user to browse through inventory of stores, offer a store locator function, recommend items and check for availability, and display ratings and reviews for stores. Social networking is incorporated into this app, too, allowing friends to provide feedback on fashion items. The app could also provide details on items snapped using the phone's camera.
Why is Apple Competing with Its Developers?While on the one hand, the above applications sound fantastic and certainly like things we would want to use, the fact that the patents are coming from Apple and not some enterprising startup is somewhat unsettling. It's not unusual for Apple (or any company) to patent its ideas, but most of Apple's previous patents have been for technology improvements, like using wireless sensors as heart rate monitors, tracking sports in real-time, allowing iPhones to "socially network" with each other when in proximity with one another or modifications to the iPhone's homescreen. Apple has not been in the habit of patenting actual mobile applications. What does this mean for companies already building applications similar to these? For example, OpenWays, which has already built mobile applications that allow smartphones to work as hotel room keys or Socialight which can be used to build a "virtual hotel concierge" service, among other things? What of the fact that multiple airlines already have their own mobile boarding pass applications? What of the universal remote apps like FLPR, Bobby, L5 and RedEye, to name just a few? And the list could go on and on. Does Apple want to compete with these developers with its own native apps or does it just want license this technology to others building related services? Are these patents defensive maneuvers to block Google from providing services like these on its Android mobile operating system? News like this is one of the reasons why so many in the technology industry are so vehemently against the idea of software patents. Foundry Group's managing director Brad Feld, for example, recently called the litigation surrounding patents "a massive tax on and retardant of innovation." Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady agreed, saying "it is not reasonable to expect that the current patent system, nor even one designed to improve or replace it, will ever be able to accurately determine what might be considered legitimately patentable from the overwhelming volume of innovations in software." Philosophical arguments aside, given Apple's cryptic ways and its behavior when dealing with competition (see: Adobe, AdMob, Flurry Analytics), the idea of Apple venturing into its developers' playing field is one that could greatly affect the innovation in mobile applications for years to come. Discuss
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YouTube wants your 15 minutes of fame |
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Posted on: July 30, 2010 Good news for everyone out there who's ever thought to themselves: "A 10-minute video of my cat eating ribs on the kitchen floor is just too short." |
Why Facebook Questions Could Be Zuckerberg's Dream Come True |
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Posted on: July 29, 2010
A few million people have been given access this afternoon to Facebook Questions, a social Question & Answer feature built under the leadership of Blake Ross, co-creator of the Firefox browser years ago and now an employee at Facebook. Questions may come closer than anything else has yet to founder Mark Zuckerberg's vision of Facebook as a connector of people around the world, a force for empathy and world peace. I think it's going to be a very important and enjoyable part of the site. Sponsor  It might be tempting to assume that Facebook Questions is going to end up a cesspool of idiocy, harshness and partisan tyranny of the majority. But look at it this way: The most successful social software company in the history of the world hired the creator of the Firefox browser who worked for months to build an effective Q&A service and you think it's going to turn into a YouTube dumb-fest? That's not the outcome I'd bet my money on. The most successful social software company in the history of the world hired the creator of the Firefox browser who worked for months to build an effective Q&A service and you think it's going to turn into a YouTube dumb-fest? That's not the outcome I'd bet my money on. Scale, social software smarts and real identities have the potential to add up to something really magical. Company founder Mark Zuckerberg, wrong as he is about many things like privacy, has said that his goal with Facebook is to build empathy and connection between different people all around the world. If he was in it for the money, he would have taken Yahoo's $1 billion offer years ago and run. That goal of cultural change may very well be served better by Questions than by any other Facebook feature to date.
Facebook as Empathy EngineWhy do people listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio? Because they are idiots, right? Wrong, according to Grant Fisher, a grad student at St. Mary's University School of Law in Texas. Fisher offered a lengthy, intelligent, insightful and sympathetic answer to that question on Facebook today and his answer has been voted to the top of the question's page. Fisher says people listen to Limbaugh because he has decades of experience researching politics, because he articulates to conservatives what (he believes) liberals are thinking and to liberals what (some) conservatives are thinking and because many people believe he has a good track record of predicting what's going to happen in politics. And because he's entertaining. That's a good, informative answer and one that has already changed my shallow thinking about Rush Limbaugh fans. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I would pass judgement on a huge group of people so thoughtlessly and callously, but I know I'm not alone. And neither is Fisher alone in offering a high-quality answer to a controversial question on Facebook.  There are going to be some very interesting questions and answers about peace in the Middle East, the Pro Life vs Pro Choice debate, drug policy, race, gender, the environment - you name it. Because Facebook Questions are open to the whole world and because answers are voted on, we're going to learn a whole lot about other peoples' perspectives. Most of the Facebook newsfeed is filled with Farmville updates, baby pictures and misspelled drunken rambling. That will never bring me closer to the personal thoughts of a woman in Indonesia, a young boy in Egypt or a Canadian Mounty who rides through the snow-covered hills on a horse all day, thinking about why on earth people listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio. But the public, voted-on Questions feature will. Early users of the service are offering long, thoughtful answers. That will change in time, but answers that aren't helpful will not be voted up. Will obnoxious partisan answers be voted to the top in a tyranny of the majority? Even if such an answer were to be at the top, the next one below it would likely be more informative, empathetic and useful. Facebook engineer Beau Hartshorne has also said on the site that users will be demoted if they ask questions that are really assertions. There will be individual Questions that get nothing but terrible answers - but in aggregate, due to the scale of the humanity doing the voting, I think the Questions experience will be on balance strong. I think we're going to see some really good discussions on Facebook. These conversations aren't going to be like YouTube. They aren't going to be like Wikipedia. They aren't going to be like Yahoo Answers, with millions of questions asked again and again, with no legacy knowledge retained and developed over time. They are going to be like Stack Overflow, and those are some really good conversations. People will have their hearts and minds changed about controversial matters after using a well-designed social Q&A feature on a sprawling world-wide social network like Facebook. This will be a net win for the human experience. I don't think that's an exaggeration at all. I think millions of people will end up spending hours browsing through Facebook Questions, learning things. I think it's going to be great. As soon as they fix it and make it work better. Discuss
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Turn-key, Customizable WordPress Hosting & Maintenance Now Offered by WP Engine |
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Posted on: July 29, 2010
For $50 a month, the service will offer premium support, automatic security upgrades, recommended plug-in curation and some original software. Scalability durring traffic spikes is one of the company's biggest sales propositions. Sponsor The WP Engine team includes Jason Cohen, co-host of the excellant startup resource site Answers.OnStartups, Austin-based journeyman developer Cullen Wilson and Aaron Brazell (Technosailor), author of the WordPress Bible and a geek with PHP under his nails. The company is working with Ben Metcalfe, a former BBC engineer well-known in Silicon Valley for being sharp-whited and plainspoken, as an advisor. The service begins sending out invites tonight. Whether there is in fact such a large potential market ready to pay $50 per month that an invite system is needed remains to be seen. There may very well be. The company says that hip, load sensitive startups InfoChimps and Balsamiq are already using its service to host their blogs. Metcalfe says he believes there is a world full of real estate and law firm offices that use WordPress for their small company sites but are not sufficiently served by WordPress.com or by expensive contractors hired to do spot programming jobs as necessary. See also competitor Page.ly. Discuss
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Memcached: What is it and what does it do? |
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Posted on: July 29, 2010 I spoke at CodeWorks in Atlanta, GA this week. ; I totally dropped the ball promoting it on my blog. ; It was a neat venue. ; Rather than a large conference they are doing a traveling show. ; Seven cities in 14 days. ; Many of the presenters are working in every city. ; Crazy. ; I was just in Atlanta. ; It is close to home and easy for me to get to. I spoke about memcached. ; I tried to dig a bit deeper into how memcached works. ; On the mailing list we get a lot of new people that make assumptions about memcached. ; Most talks I have seen focus on why caching is good, how to use memcached, the performance gain. ; I kind of assumed everyone knew that stuff already. ; I guess you could say I gave a talk that was the real FAQs of the project. Here are the slides. ; Derick Rethans took video of the talk. ; When he gets that online I will add it to this post.
Memcached:
What is it and what does it do?
http://brian.moonspot.net/what-is-memcached
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View more documents from Brian Moon.
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4chan is Hiring - Unless It's a Prank |
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Posted on: July 29, 2010
Canvas has yet to be publicly defined, but the jobs page on the the White Album-ish placeholder site hints at it in describing the type of people they're looking for. Sponsor "Ideal candidates are heavy users of online communities who want to invent new and better ways for people to hang out and collaborate online. We're working on a product that takes forums and re-imagines them for an era of increasingly sophisticated users and browsers."
4chan was started in 2003 by the then-15 year old Christopher Poole, as a place to talk and post about Japanese anime. But in the intervening years it's become the largest image-based bulletin board in the U.S. It also launched such celebrated and decried memes like Rickrolling and lolcats. (If you by any chance don't know what those things are, don't look them up. You'll start up another wave and that will only encourage them.) Given the radically anonymous nature of the site - anyone can post under any, or no, name - and the mischievousness of its users (who tried to exile teen singer Justin Bieber to North Korea), the roll-out of a funded website might seem out of character. But people grow up, perhaps. That's what my mommy tells me anyway. And venture capitalist Andreesen Horowitz must think so, as they were big investors in the $625,000 the startup's raised, according to WebNewser. Their rigorous interview process includes you sending them your "links to public projects, your GitHub, open source contributions, whatever you have." (I've sent them a mannequin filled with stoat paste and a recording of my harmonica interp of Satie's "Gymnopedies." I presume that's what they're looking for.) After that, there's probably a fair bit of ID checking and some sort of obstacle course along with a variant of the Spanish Prisoner. I don't know. What do you want? I'm old. You kids get off my lawn. Discuss
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Forking PHP! |
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Posted on: July 29, 2010 We use PHP everywhere in our stack. For us, it makes sense because we have hired a great staff of PHP developers. So, we leverage that talent by using PHP everywhere we can. One place where people seem to stumble with PHP is with long running PHP processes or parallel processing. The pcntl extension gives you the ability to fork PHP processes and run lots of children like many other unix daemons might. We use this for various things. Most notably, we use it run Gearman worker processes. While at the OReilly Open Sourc Convention in 2009, we were asked about how we pulled this off. So, we are releasing the two scripts that handle the forking and some instructions on how we use them. This is not a detailed post about long running PHP scripts. ; Maybe I can get to the dos and don'ts of that another time. ; But, these are the scripts we use to manage long running processes. ; They work great for us on Linux. ; They will not run on Windows at all. ; We also never had any trouble running them on Mac OS X. The first script, prefork.php, is for forking a given function from a given file and running n children that will execute that function. There can be a startup function that is run before any forking begins and a shutdown function to run when all the children have died. The second script, prefork_class.php, uses a class with defined methods instead of relying on the command line for function names. This script has the added benefit of having functions that can be run just before each fork and after each fork. This allows the parent process to farm work out to each child by changing the variables that will be present when the child starts up. This is the script we use for managing our Gearman workers. We have a class that controls how many workers are started and what functions they provide. I may release a generic class that does that soon. Right now it is tied to our code library structure pretty tightly. We have also included two examples. They are simple, but do work to show you how the scripts work. You can download the code from the dealnews.com developers' page. UPDATE: I have released a Gearman Worker Manager on Github. http://brian.moonspot.net/php-fork Post Link |
RIM Buys BlackPad.com, Readies New BlackBerry Slider - But Can It Still Compete? |
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Posted on: July 29, 2010
Meanwhile, Reuters reports that RIM is likely to announce the launch of the BlackBerry Torch 9800, a device RIM hopes will compete with the iPhone, at an event with AT&T on Tuesday New York City. Sponsor BlackBerry Cool provides a scan of an invitation to the event:
Engadget released images of the 9800 in June. The new device will run the BlackBerry6 OS we covered here previously. The 9800 is expected to be released exclusively by AT&T - an odd move for a device competing with the iPhone, considering the the iPhone's exclusivity to AT&T has long been considered a major detriment to Apple's device. However, Verizon, RIM's partner for its previous iPhone competitor,The Storm, has hitched its wagon to the success of Android. The Storm's sales were reportedly lackluster. Reuters, citing RIM's declining market share, this week suggested the end of the BlackBerry era may be upon us. Even in the area of enterprise security, where RIM has dominated Apple and Google, RIM is slipping in influence. Both companies have rolled out improved security features in recent months, and enterprises are accepting the devices. In an interview with InfoWorld, Intel CIO Diane Bryant says there are 9,000 employee-owned phones now in use at Intel, and the vast majority of them are iPhones. The BlackBerry tablet, called BlackPad or not, will like enter a competitive enterprise marketplace. The iPad already had a respectable showing in the enterprise, and Cisco and HP have both announced enterprise-centric tablets. Discuss
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Posted on: July 28, 2010 ????????? ???????????????????????Oracle Enterprise Contents Management 11g???'??????? ??????Oracle Universal Content Management 11g???Oracle Universal Records Management 11g???Oracle Imaging and Process Management 11g?????2010?3????????Oracle Information Rights Management 11g????????????? ???????????????????ECM??????? |
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Posted on: July 28, 2010
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Google Docs Adds Translation for 53 Languages |
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Posted on: July 28, 2010
Its latest effort brings translation to Google Docs, making translation even simpler. Sponsor Rather than cutting and pasting text from Google Docs into Google Translate, users now can translate their documents within the editor into any one of 53 languages. The translation is quick and opens the translated in a new tab, which offers to replace the original document or copy the translation into a new document. Amusingly, Google-created browser Chrome immediately offered to translate the doc back into another language, recognizing that much of the text was not in the default English. Auto-translation became a part of Chrome last March and helps to illustrate just how integrated translation is becoming at Google. At this rate, it's becoming more and more believable that Google will offer real-time translation on mobile phones within a few years' time. Discuss
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Posted on: July 28, 2010 ?????????????????????????????????????????????? ??????????????????Premier Support?????????????????????????????Premier Support??????????Premier Support?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????'???????? 2010/08/31??'??????????BEA?????????????
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E-Readers Bring The World's Library to Rural Africa |
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Posted on: July 28, 2010
"Books to All" is the motto of this non-profit spearheaded by David Risher, who led Amazon's Product Development for five years. Sponsor In March, Worldreader finished their Phase 1 trial, using 20 Kindle-brand e-readers in the village of Ayenyah, Ghana. Results were good. "During this trial, we found that the Kindle e-reader and digital books helped new readers learn to read, got the kids reading more, and gave access to hundreds of thousands of books, in less time and at lower cost than printed books." Project Gutenberg alone offers 30,000 free e-book titles. So, with each e-reader the group brings to a student, it may well be justified in claiming it also brings that student "the world's library."
"The infrastructure already in place for mobile phones supports e-readers: Low-power Kindles successfully charged from solar-powered car batteries in an hour, we were able to download books via the satellite internet link in 45 seconds, and there was cell phone coverage in the village." Worldreader.org's Susan Moody Prieto wrote to tell us the organization's next steps. "We have approval from the Ghana Ministry of Education to do a larger trial in October (336 Kindles) in 4 schools. We will be measuring the results very closely: seeing how e-readers affect reading habits and ultimately to what degree they can improve literacy. And then we will roll out on a larger scale from then on: moving into more countries in Africa and Latin America. We are also working with local publishers to digitize books that otherwise would get left behind as more books go digital." She said the organization, despite their connection to Amazon, is "e-reader agnostic...we are ultimately looking for the best e-reader to bring books into the developing world (and) will be actively working with manufacturers to do so." What about that? Any employees of Apple, Borders or B&N reading this? You know what to do. You can download the full 39-page report on the first phase of Worldreader.org's Ghana project here. Discuss
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When Startups Grow Out of the Cloud |
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Posted on: July 28, 2010
Facebook announced plans earlier this year to build a custom data center in Prineville, Oregon, and Twitter announced last week that it plans to build one near Salt Lake City, Utah. And web app maker 37Signals isn't building its own data center, but it did reveal last week that it will move its infrastructure from Rackspace hosting to a colocation space in a Chicago data center. Sponsor As Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook's VP of Technical Operations said at last month's Structure 2010 conference, "For a consumer web site starting today, I would absolutely run on the cloud. It allows you to focus on building your product. But if you have 10 million users, that's a pretty big check I'm writing to someone else. How much control do I have?" Data Centers Give More Flexibility, More Control?37Signals Operations Manager Mark Imbriaco explains the growth of 37Signals as such: since moving to the cloud four years ago, "we've grown from around 15 physical machines to a mixture of around 150 physical and virtual machines. We've also grown from having less than 1TB of data to on the order of 80TB of data today. Our needs have evolved a great deal as we've grown and we reached the point where it made sense for us to acquire our own hardware and manage our own datacenter infrastructure. The amount of flexibility that we have with our own environment makes it much easier for us to use some specialized equipment that meets our needs better than the solutions that Rackspace generally supports." The desire for greater flexibility and control was also given by Twitter as rationale for its new data center. According to Twitter's Engineering Blog, "Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs. Twitter will be able to define and manage to a finer grained SLA on the service as we are managing and monitoring at all layers. The data center will house a mixed-vendor environment for servers running open source OS and applications." Implication for the CloudIt isn't surprising that rapidly growing companies like Twitter and Facebook have reached a point where it pencils out to have their own data center. But what are the implications for cloud computing - something that promises infinite scalability? And more importantly perhaps, the justifications given by Twitter and 37Signals for building a data center or moving to a colocation facility are less about cost and performance than they are about sufficient controls. Are public cloud providers doing enough to offer their enterprise customers with the flexibility and control they want? Discuss
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Facebook Gives Out Free Facebook Credits to Grease the System |
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Posted on: July 27, 2010
Facebook has been randomly giving users anywhere from 10 to 25 free Facebook Credits over recent weeks, a move the company hinted at during its f8 developer conference in April. Sponsor
Besides getting Facebook Credits in your favorite apps, do you know that there are also other ways to get them? Thanks to Plastic Jungle, Rixty, Inc., Booyah, and Games.com, get Credits by exchanging gift cards, turning in spare change, checking into locations, and entering a sweepstake. This week, be on the lookout as we feature these other ways.. Giving away small amounts of virtual currency, or "seeding", is a common practice when it comes to virtual economies and can get users comfortable with spending and using that currency. With the site shutting down its virtual "Gift Shop", credits are currently only good for playing games and making in-game purchases. Is Facebook attempting makes its users comfortable spending credits on games or, as we've posited before, is it testing the waters on expanding its credits program into other arenas, such as apps and even real-world goods? As Chris Birk wrote for ReadWriteWeb last week, "Facebook is standing at the foot of a virtual cash mountain" and "a network-wide rollout of the virtual currency application would streamline transactions online and, in effect, pave the path to the world's first global currency." With Facebook's international population exploding but banner advertising not providing a "worthwhile return on investment internationally", credits are a way to monetize the 70% of Facebook's total user base that lives outside of the U.S. The real question is, what would you feel comfortable spending your Facebook Credits on? A single Facebook Credit, at $1.99 for 20, comes out to just under 10 cents each. Facebook takes a 30% bite out of each transaction and has said that "users paying with Facebook Credits are significantly more likely to complete a purchase than the average Facebook user." Maybe this is because the transaction is easier, but perhaps it is also because of the mental disconnect between a virtual currency and real-world currency. Giving away credits may be a good way to educate users and reinforce the idea that credits aren't actually worth anything in the real world, making them that much easier to spend. As for my 20 free credits, they're likely to sit there, unspent, until Facebook comes up with something other than virtual, in-game goods that I can spend them on.
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Taylor Swift has nothing on Boulder software startup 
Available for $2.99 in the AppStore as of right now, 360 Panorama should make an obvious addition to any avid iPhone photographer's collection of camera apps. Photography is a small hobby of mine, and I'm always on the hunt for hot new camera apps for the iPhone. When Occipital co-founder Vikas Reddy told me about the company's new app, I was very excited to get my hands on it and test it out in the field.
The architectural style of a data center is not what you would think as being unique.
In the city of broad shoulders is the big gulp of data centers. And who else but Microsoft would build a data center with such scale. The Microsoft data center is 700,000 square-feet and cost a whopping $500 million. It has its own "container canyon." This is like a garage where 40-foot trucks don't move but the data does. Truly massive.
Now this is our kind of data center. Chickens need good ventilation and so do servers! So why not build a data center that looks like a chicken coop and is meant to breathe, too? 
Google has begun opening up access to a new Application Programming Interface (API) called the 
When Google first began discussing the Places API in April, we discussed as an example a pizza restaurant that edited its delivery area on Google and then made that information available to apps that pinged the API for information.
This spring at Twitter's first developer conference Chirp the big splash was a forthcoming feature called Annotations. The feature will allow publishing software to annotate Tweets with a wide open variety of metadata, which could then be read and analyzed by other software. Annotations 
We labor under two major misperceptions about technology: Technology from one point in time is better than one further in the past and anything new displaces what came before. When we actively think about these ideas, we may dismiss them. But it's my contention that these are in fact our unconscious, default positions. (These notions would no doubt be scoffed at by medieval Europeans who spent years desperately dreaming of copping a squat inside like the Romans did. But they are operant in the here-and-now.)
In a recent survey by 
Three new patent applications which just became public on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) website reveal that Apple is now patenting ideas for mobile applications. Specifically, these patents applications describe iPhone apps that would aid in making travel arrangements, booking hotels and shopping. 
Take one look at the newly launched 
A small team of high-profile developers are unveiling its new service for hosting customizable but automatically maintained WordPress publishing software installs tonight. 
Unless it's an elaborate and pointless prank - and come on, how likely is that? - 
Specifically, they are looking for a "Frontend developer/designer" and a "Tech lead - Backend developer/operations."
From 
The highly wired nature of Africa (which has much less in the way of the infrastructure that includes landlines) mean e-readers can connect. The wireless telephony that characterizes much of the content means, the group discovered, that students who've never used a computer can nonetheless quickly master the e-reader. 
Cloud computing has been a boon to tech startups, allowing them to build, launch and scale without substantial up-front investment in hardware. But at what point does the moving from the cloud to a data center make more sense - for both performance and cost?
Facebook acknowledges its credit giveaway on the site, saying "If you see a credit balance and didn't buy your own credits, then you likely received free credits directly from Facebook as a gift." An update to its TagCloud: Explorer ???? CGI Java Perl php Know U'r TWEAK GUI Blog ?????? blogger ATL Oracle VB internet explorer
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