Battleship running in hi5.
Human, Dustcake, Engineer
Doing my best to make the world a little better every day.
❤️ J9
news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lindner
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OpenSocial Roundup
At hi5 we've been busy busy busy getting OpenSocial up and running. We released our developer sandbox, and are rapidly implementing features. So check out the following URLs
Also, here's a copy of my response to Tim O'Reilly's blog post:
OpenSocial: It's the data, stupid
Hi folks,
Good comments all around. However I'd like to posit that data access is _not_ the problem. We've had universal standards for years now with little uptake. Tribe.net, Typepad, LiveJournal and others have supported FOAF for many, many years, which encompasses the OpenSocial Person and Friends APIs. Not much has come of that -- there isn't a large enough base there to get people interested.
Now you have a broad industry consensus on a single way to provide all of the above plus activity stream data. You have a rich client platform that allows you to crack open that data and use it in interesting ways, and finally you have a common standard for social networks to interact with each other based on the REST api.
So Patrick's statement at the Web 2.0 Expo is correct, a app running inside a container only allows you to see what that container shows you. However that does not mean that a container could not contain friend references to external social networks via it's own federation mechanism. Movable Type 4.0 has shown that you can support any OpenID login in a single system, there's no reason to believe that social networks could not leverage OAuth to do the same.
And here's a final point to consider -- you have Myspace opening up to developers. That's huge. That alone is going to draw more developer attention to this problem than much of the oh-so academic discussions of the past few years.
I suggest people that _want_ OpenSocial to solve all the social graph ills get involved on the API mailing list and make sure that those elements are addressed as OpenSocial evolves.
There's a tremendous amount of momentum. Let's not waste this chance.
Found in Hi5 Lunch Room
Update: On the back we find the fine, fine web site http://
Skins, Updates, More
Just caught up 10 days worth of Neighborhood posts. I now have Vox fatigue combined with Vox guilt. I didn't even read comments, for shame :( After this post I'll need to check on the 'ol LiveJournal Friends page. Don't even ask about the umpteem BlogLines blogs stuck at 200 posts...
Hi5 has a new Skins system that actually can make profile pages look good. I had some input early on and made sure Vox and the SixApart styles were part of the inspiration. It's coming out really well and we've received over 200 submissions. Check out the snazzy new profile page? Designers can check out the specs page.
Embeds are evil. They mess up divs and tables and are often pasted in haphazardly. Amit came up with an amazing solution. Use JTidy to clean up the user submitted content. Tags match and broken html goes bye-bye!
Now back to the super-secret Hi5 Project Funk.
PostgreSQL & Hi5 - Users Group Meeting
We had a great turnout at the latest PostgreSQL users group meetup -- around 35 people showed. (Oh and not the group of stylish "Hi5 folk" you see to the right :)
Ram and I went over the PostgreSQL based DB architecture we use at Hi5 after the obligatory pizza feed. Quite an interesting crowd, some newbies, and some old hands.
My best line of the night was in response to a question asking us when we were going to use a specific feature -- my answer was that there were more people in the room than there were employees at Hi5. :)
The complete presentation is online for the curious.
Luxxury - "Sweet and Vicious"
Baron von Luxxury is an old co-worker of mine from the Red Hat days selling ads for redhat.com. Check out the cute kitty in the youtube vid above.
I can't forget the time we accidentally ran run-of-network ads and you found banner ads for Dennys and some online Hair-Net website running next to Linux content.
Or the wonderful partnership with Keen.com to provide amateur linux support over the phone. I hear that they're mostly psychics and phone sex these days.
In any case check out Luxxury when you can get the chance. They play all over the Bay Area at times.
Getting Things Done with Thinking Rock
So about 2 months ago I took the plunge and reorganized my time management around in the form of David Allen's Getting Things Done. I had seen the 43 Folders blog way back when, and I had toyed with the idea, but I was so mired in work not to mention the 1200 messages in my inbox find time to make a lasting change.
Well, I finally did it and oh boy does it feel good. All inboxes down to single digits, a consolidated todo list with context and other information, and squeezing in all those little tasks that used to stress me out.
The best part of this, and probably the only reason I was successful was some insanely great software called Thinking Rock. It's a cross-platform Java App that implements GTD to the letter. It's so much better than shoehorning GTD concepts into Outlook or Palm, which aren't really set up for them.
The best thing is there are no priorities in this system. You only care about Context (where you do something) and what the next action is for a given project. It really helps me stay on top of things and keep my head clear. Plus it exposed me to pocketmods, which are foldup sheets of paper that substitute for a PDA. So now I've got my little scraps of paper to carry around, and all my thinking rock software on a USB key and I'm very happy.
I just wish I had taken the plunge into GTD years and years ago. (Of course if I could time travel I'd send this software along with a pallet of Red Bull to myself in college :)
Speaking of midwest college days -- the Thinking Rock name does remind me of a certain beer flavored water:
Sock Puppets
Even better than the "Hatch Eats Kittens" ad Patty Posted: Sock Puppet ads for District 6 in San Francisco!
Beware the Falcon
If you're lucky you might spot a peregrine falcon in South Park. Sadly the camera-phone doesn't have a zoom so this stock photo will have to suffice.
After getting out of our car to walk Tommy someone was pointing behind us. There he was, sitting in a nest, with a stream of feathers from his early morning breakfast littered below. About 10 yards away a dead rat sat in the street -- desert?
Image_26.jpg
Results of our November Infrastructure Sprint planning. Total of 75 points in our backlog for the next 18 days. This planning process feels a little awkward at first, but then it just clicks and seems natural.
Life At Hi5
So far so good. On the right you'll find a leftover from the previous occupant of my space. It's been over 2 years since my last job change, so I forgot about how much work it is to get integrated into a new environment. Adding 30+ IM contacts, updating the address book, setting up the laptop, getting e-mail just so, etc.
Adding to that is jumping into a very different environment. There's lots to like and lots to learn. So far I'm getting up to speed on:
- Perforce (instead of subversion, cvs, etc.) -- looks powerful and clunky at the same time.
- Jira - this is very cool. It combines bug tracking, agile sprints, and a wiki all in one. It's mediawiki, trac, RT, and FogBugz all in one.
- SuSE SLES 9 - With the infamous ReiserFS filesystem. Give me yum over YaST anyday...
- Hyperic HQ - Nagios+Cacti+much more. Includes autodiscovery and can automatically restart services when they fail. So very nice.
- Zeus as a frontend to redundant memcaches.
- Java Resin/JSP/JDBC/Eclipse/... less said the better.
There's lots more going on here than you'd think. A bit strapped for time at the moment -- will blog more soon...
Sleestacks
At first I thought that sleestacks died off because they couldn't blog. (Their pincer claws preclude this) Then I realized that a sleestack keyboard would consist of the letter 'S'.
Maybe it was latex poisoning instead......
Maybe it was latex poisoning instead......
You Know You're in Minnesota....
This fine item was found at the Mantorville Marigold Days flea market.
For the non-scandinavians out there lutefisk is cod soaked in lye and generally smells as bad as it sounds.
Tommy - Dog Model
We had our dog Tommy photographed by Amanda Jones. She's terrific and I'm very happy with the few glimpses I got of the images as they came off the digital camera. Here's a photo of the happy puppy shot by former Six Aparter Matt Peterson:
Turns out Amanda is publishing a new book and wants to use one of the photos. It's coming out in March. How cool is that?
Bay XP Meeting Roundup 8/23/2006
BayXP (The Bay Area Extreme Programming Group) had a small meeting at the offices of ThoughtWorks here in San Francisco. The topic was interesting things learned at the Agile 2006 conference.
I found a number of items to add to my reading list, Including Refactoring Databases and Working Effectively with Legacy Code. (See Links below)
Topics of discussion from the meeting included
- Coding Dojo - how to get hang of test-first development and Pair programming.
- A lot of talk about how Rails stacks up against upteen different Java Frameworks.
- The TDD Pair Programming Game is an interesting way of pairing that seems to make sense. It's like a dance. I write a failing test, you implement, then I refactor, then you write a test, etc.
- The best name for a talk that I've seen in a long time was Crushing Fear Under the Iron Heel of Action. It explored how to deal with team dynamics in an Agile environment, mostly by saying "What's the worst thing that can happen".
- Found out about a web site called Developer Testing. Another thing to add to the RSS reader...
- There was a short talk about Code Debt. Some people are surmising that Code Debt should be publicly disclosed in a companies SEC S4 forms via Sarbanes-Oxley. One interesting quote was that code is an asset and you should maintain that asset properly because assets "increase the means of production". If you don't maintain code properly and use correct process your software becomes a liability. (Or course that begs the question of who defines the Generally Acceptable Coding Practices (GACP!)
Ease At Work
I was unfortunate enough to miss Kent Beck, one of the founders of the Extreme Programming speak recently here in San Francisco.
He asked "when was the last time you were comfortable in your skin as a programmer? ...and when did you last have that feeling at work?. " As usual Kent has hit upon some interesting psychology that really makes sense.
Here's part 1 of 8. If there's interest I'll post the other 7 segments. (Or you can find these at the Agitar website and some of it's also posted on YouTube..)
Raise your Ligh... err Cell Phone!
On a lark tuned in to the Duran Duran reunion concert tonight. Now I haven't been to an arena sized rock concert for years and years... Since when did it become customary to hold your cell-phone screen aloft instead of a lighter?
In any case, well worth watching, their music has held up pretty well.
Oh and if you want something made in this decade that's, well Duran Duran like, check out the Bay Area's own, The Lovemakers.
Thursday Tech Talk - Are You Cachable?
Join me this thursday at 4pm for yet another Six Apart engineering talk entitled:
ARE YOU CACHABLE?
Explore the fun and tortuous journey of a web request. Starting from the click on a link across the net to the deepest backend server and back to a page displayed on your screen.
We'll look at the latest state of the art in Cache control headers, caching proxies, accelerators, content distribution networks (like Akamai), Keynote metrics and more!
Included in this weeks presentation is a short film clip about how the Internet resembles the six-sigma quality dabbawallas of Mumbai.
