Labnotes

Jul 8th, 2008
REST in the front, RPC in the back

Let’s see. We’ve got the newly released Protocol Buffers, courtesy of Google. I’m guessing to counter-weight Facebook’s Thrift? Guess who else has RPC? Hadoop, of Yahoo fame. And so does Cisco, with Etch.

What do all four have in common? A thirst for bandwidth and big networks for one. Also, a keen interest in social software networking. Yes, Cisco too.

Waiting for the MySpace shoe to drop.

I don’t know if the interest in social networking is indicative or just a coincidence, but if you like to explore the soft (as in human) side of software, I’d start there. It might tell us more about this renewed interest than any discussion over network fallacies and architecture styles.

Continue reading REST in the front, RPC in the back

Posted by Assaf Filed in general 2 Comments »
Jul 6th, 2008
Overhea(r)d

I love corporate speak.

Mostly for entertainment purposes, but I’ll admit that occasionally, I have to use it myself. I’d like to think I learned from the best.

To share, I’d like to some of the best non-offensive, non-committal, non-admittance, non-informative quotes that pass through my feed reader. Have fun.

“… includes stability enhancements that should take care of problems causing the applications to quit when launched.”

I wonder what metric you would use to measure stability of an application that doesn’t even run. MTBF of zero is a very hard value to work with statistically. Too many div-by-z.

“… trying to stay true to our initial goal which was to lay the core foundation for a multiple-release strategy for building out …”

Can you guess which company that is?

“The iPhone 3G bundles released June 27 are not the only price plans available to customers, they are the high value plans that allow Rogers customers to use the device to its fullest and offer considerable savings over separate voice and data plans that exist in market today.”

Here, “high value” and “savings”, refer $30/month for a measly 300MB data plan. Caller ID would be an extra $7.

Posted by Assaf Filed in general 2 Comments »
Jul 6th, 2008
Removing unnecessaries

Jack Shedd writes an excellent blog, (Via John Gruber), and once again brings the point of unnecessary debris:

So many sites these days are filled with what can only be called “debris”. Useless remnants of other sites: things of no real use, yet there anyway. The right-hand columns and after-article white-space has turned into a free-for-all of features that may as well be advertising banners. Blogrolls and ISBN numbers; Scrobbler feeds and Twitters; Share This or Rate This.

…

You don’t need to know which web browser I support, or what blog-network I’m apart of. You don’t need me to point you to a social-bookmarking site, because chances are, you know them already. And if not, Google is always right there. You don’t need know what song I just listened to, because hopefully you have your own soundtrack. And I don’t think knowing what book I last read is of any real use to you unless I write a lengthy review and tell you what I thought of it.

Here it’s still a work in progress, but the new template already has less unnecessaries than the old one, and I’m planning on removing more unnecessaries in the next few weeks.

Posted by Assaf Filed in general No Comments »
Jul 6th, 2008
Smart spam and new comment policy

Akismet has protected your site from 492,588 spam comments already.

At the moment, my blog lists 44 comments identified as spam for me to review, collected over the past couple of weeks. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the times when it would ask me to review hundreds of spam comments a day. Akismet must be doing something right.

So are spammers.

Of these 44, a bunch of comments look like this:

Thanks assaf.. Thats well done work. We appreciate hard work

This:

I totally agree - I used to spend a lot of time going over code I had written that had so many mistakes in it - not that were clearly moticeable, but if I’d taken a good look through then I would’ve notice the mistakes. It proves that taking the time to check things always comes good in the end.

And this:

Will this plugin work with the lastest wordpress version?

Continue reading Smart spam and new comment policy

Posted by Assaf Filed in general 18 Comments »
Jul 6th, 2008
Random images

Continue reading Random images

Posted by Assaf Filed in general No Comments »
Jul 3rd, 2008
Rounded Corners 206 - TGIF (almost)

At least it feels like Friday, so let’s wrap up the week with some humor. Have a happy 4th of July!

Who is godwin, i dont see his or her comment? Head over to FriendFeed, for a discussion of identi.ca, a Twitter clone, and why it wasn’t top on TechMeme. It’s overly meta, but Gabe’s summary makes it worth reading.

I said green, not yellow. 13 uses for dead-tree phone books:

6. Open the book flat in the middle and use for a blotter for crafts projects. Just rip off the upper pages to refresh.

For the love of children. From A List Of People Who Need To Stop Writing Software:

A Printer driver is a folder with one “.ini” file, and a couple of “.dll”s and that’s it. It is not a 50 MB download. It is not an IE Toolbar, and Side Pane. It is not half-baked photo software. It is not a splash screen when your computer starts. It is not a tray icon.

Adobe Reader 9 is out! Or how I let it recompose, install, eat up 189MB and all I got was this lousy “internal error occurred”. (Bonus point, check out the README file type)

Retrochic. From the department of everything old is still old, we bring you the server-side blink tag and Trailing-Edge Computing.

_{Picture: Is that what it takes to produce an Ubuntu release? (by ALTAIR Crea & Comparte)}

Posted by Assaf Filed in general 1 Comment »
Jul 1st, 2008
How SOA declared success

Of all the architectures to come out in recent years, I think we can all agree, SOA is the most successful of them all. Unfortunately, most other architectures are subject to hype, poor planning and execution, and the harsh reality in the field doesn’t help. All these obstacles combine to prevent IT from achieving its goals and using these architectures effectively.

Not so with SOA. It managed to transcend the limitations of legacy monolithic architectures that predate it by moving in the direction of distributed, scalable goals. Enough goals for just about anyone to declare success:

SOA is about loosely coupled system integration. Sorry, I meant to say that SOA is about enabling loosely coupled business processes. On the other hand SOA is about reuse, except that its actually not about reuse.

And that’s just the first half of the post. Read the rest, but don’t follow the links without taking some of this.

Update: If what you’re looking for are ”real-world solutions for complex problems”, try this kind of SOA instead. (via Pascal)

Posted by Assaf Filed in general No Comments »
Jun 29th, 2008
CSS Sucked my Soul

Turns out some of the float annoyances I recently experienced are easily fixed. All it took was a quick read through Anthony Short’s How to get Cross Browser Compatibility Every Time. As a rule of thumb remember to always overflow:auto your containers:

It seems that reminding the outer DIV that it’s overflow is set to ‘auto’, forces it to think “oh yeah.. I’m wrapping that thing, aren’t I?”.

Sheesh.

In more complex layouts, you’ll still have to solve the ”float drop” problem. Have a look at Faux Absolute Positioning. Interesting use of left: 100% and margin-left: -100%.

We’re not done yet. You obviously want the important content to come first in the HTML, followed by sidebars and everything else. But also for the content to appear right of the sidebar, or in-between two sidebars. Main content up front in your HTML, besides being a supposedly SEO-friendly technique also reads much better on crappy cell phone browsers. Or for that matter any browser when you’re off WiFi and into spotty cell coverage territory.

To the rescue, Matthew James Taylor’s Perfect 3 Column Liquid Layout.

Calendar says its 2008, and we still don’t have an easy way to say ”this section goes on the left column, that section is the right column. ktnxbye”

That’s all for today’s edition of CSS Sucked my Soul. Tune in next time when we explain what it takes to center an element.

Posted by Assaf Filed in general 1 Comment »
Jun 28th, 2008
This blog optimized for …

In an effort to not feel so bad that my blog renders poorly on IE, I decided to consult the oracles.

Typically, I’m not a big fan of Google Analytics. It seems to report about 1/10th of the traffic that gets captured by server side analytics. That would be just fine by me (Google has the better charts) if it was proportional, but Google seems to over/under represent some categories, I suspect due to its reliance on JavaScript.

I did turn off the other analytics package, so the only numbers I have to run with now are Google’s. Here’s the operating system break down for June 2008:

Continue reading This blog optimized for …

Posted by Assaf Filed in general No Comments »
Jun 27th, 2008
“perhaps giving away CDs isn’t the best idea after all”

A word of warning is required, however. At MacWorld we gave out roughly 5,000 discs with LiveDisc on them. We set our LiveDisc to ping our web server to allow us to count hits. Of the 5,000 discs we gave out, 5.8% were ever used. That may seem a bit low, but it gets quite depressing when converted to an absolute count: 288. Out of 5000 CDs given out, no more than 300 were used - perhaps giving away CDs isn’t the best idea after all.

LiveDiscKit looks seriously cool, and I was about to download and give it a try (open source, to boot), just because it looks fun. Then I remembered that my MabBook Air doesn’t have a DVD drive, and in over four months of ownership, I never missed it once to bother buying one. Count that as a data point.

Posted by Assaf Filed in general No Comments »