Poor poor myspace...
Email sent to me today...
A whole new class of Google+ jokes has sprung up....
A whole new class of Google+ jokes has sprung up....
Originally shared by Anil Dash
Your moms so fat, she huddle all by herself.
Welcome aboard Google+!
Welcome aboard Google+!
Invites are still flowing out, so pay attention to your inbox (and hopefully not your spam folder!)
Hope you'll take the plunge into Google+ -- It has a lot of the Vox vibe that I miss so much!
Hope you'll take the plunge into Google+ -- It has a lot of the Vox vibe that I miss so much!
Also I'm doing connected sites work (try connecting your yahoo/live account!) there's a lot of cool stuff we can do together. Just let me know at [email protected]
Opensocial...
I'm at the San Francisco office today putting the socialism back into Social Standards.
From 1-5pm see talks about OpenSocial and OpenSocial v2.0. It's in Duboce Tech talk.. Then at 5 there's a reception with beer, wine, snaks and *10* vendors demoing OpenSocial apps and containers.
And.... If you want to volunteer to register attendees I can hook you up with a snazzy t-shirt with the v2 logo!
Following
A better follower email might make all the difference to the people that complain that ES is spam.
Here's the flickr follower email. Nice and concise, it illustrates the asymmetrical nature of the relationship and provides some useful information. Furthermore there are two calls-to-action that reinforce the viral loop, specifically asking you to check out the _contacts_ of the person.
Making the Internet Better - Google Edition
I've been very fortunate in my career. I've had many opportunities and been successful in making the Internet a better place for end-users and developers. From the early days of Gopher to the mainstreaming of open-source at Red Hat to the rise of blogging at Six Apart and on to forming the social web with Opensocial -- I've been a part of many game-changing technologies first hand. It's one of the most satisfying parts of my work.
That's why I'm happy to announce that I'm joining Google today. My gut tells me that this is the right company, the right team, and the right time to contribute to and help define another major change that betters the internet and the entire world.
The decision to work for Google did not come easy. My time at LinkedIn has been truly amazing. The people are smart, the technology is stellar and the opportunities to learn and contribute are limitless. In the past year and half the company doubled in size while the Platform team launched dozens of great new products and enhancements. I'm especially proud of the small parts that I played in helping launch LinkedIn's open developer program and am equally excited about a number of future projects that will launch in the near future. I cherish the friendships and knowledge gained and will miss everyone there greatly.
I look forward to the exciting things that I'll be able to accomplish soon. Here's to the next evolution and revolution!
paul.vox.com lives here now...
I just completed exporting my Vox to Typepad. Quite a trip down memory lane; back to the golden age of blogging. I'm thinking kind thoughts for Six Apart right now -- I know this can't be an easy transition they're going through.
Fedora 12, Dracut, dmraid, mdadm, oh my!
It appears that Fedora 12 moved to a new boot init system called dracut. Sadly due to a number of odd circumstances this has caused me much pain. Here's my basic config
- /boot and / on /dev/sda
- /var and /home on a partitioned software raid on /dev/sd{cd}
After an yum-based upgrade to Fedora 12 I rebooted. We get to the point where we initialize the software raid and boom. failure. I'd seen this before, partitioned raid has always had some trouble in fedora. Previously I had to modify the rc.sysinit script to reset the raid partitions, so I tried that again, moving that init to later in the boot sequence. Reboot and yes, it works..
However then I noticed some odd things. I was only getting a single drive in my mirrored RAID. Further investigation revealed that I had a device dm-1 instead of sdc or sdd listed in /proc/mdstat... Uh oh..
Looking more closely it appears that my drives were getting set up by dmraid as a fake-raid mirror:
# dmraid -r
/dev/sdd: sil, "sil_aiabafajfgba", mirror, ok, 488395120 sectors, data@ 0
/dev/sdc: sil, "sil_aiabafajfgba", mirror, ok, 488395120 sectors, data@ 0
I tried adding the nodmraid option to grub.conf but then the new dracut system started an infinite spew of messages generated by this mdadm error message string (lifted from Assemble.c)
fprintf(stderr, Name ": WARNING %s and %s appear"
" to have very similar superblocks.\n"
" If they are really different, "
"please --zero the superblock on one\n"
" If they are the same or overlap,"
" please remove one from %s.\n",
devices[best[i]].devname, devname,
inargv ? "the list" :
"the\n DEVICE list in mdadm.conf"
Drats! the mirrored fake raid had already mangled my second drive by duplicating the superblock! Plus since all this was going on in dracut I couldn't fix it. So I removed the nodmraid option in grub during boot and dug a little deeper. I found that I could keep dracut from doing all this nonsense by adding the following kernel options:
rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM nodmraid
This allows for a minimal boot without dmraid or mdadm. After that I was dropped into single user mode with the dupe superblock message. To fix this required zeroing the superblock of sdd
mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/sdd1
And then rebooting (again!)
Once past this things started working somewhat normally. To get my raid mirrored again I did the normal thing:
# mdadm --manage /dev/md_d0 --add /dev/sdd1
To get rid of the false-positive fake raid setup I found that you can do this with the dmraid tool itself:
[root@mirth ~]# dmraid -E -r /dev/sdd
Do you really want to erase "sil" ondisk metadata on /dev/sdd ? [y/n] :y
[root@mirth ~]# dmraid -E -r /dev/sdc
Do you really want to erase "sil" ondisk metadata on /dev/sdc ? [y/n] :y
The really odd thing about this whole incident is that I never had these drives in a fake raid setup before.
In any case, hope this helps the few other people who might have this same problem.
Gopher on MTV
I dug this little gem out of the archives. Enjoy!
Gopher World Tour T-Shirt on MTV
Email Clients Full Circle
In the beginning I used elm to read my mail. This was somewhat radical, especially as I worked with the team that created POPMail for the mac and Minuet for the PC, and everyone else moved to pine. Then came Mutt -- happy days -- I was able to slice and dice email with amazing speed.
A couple of years ago I converted over to Mail.app -- mostly because of the contacts and calendar integrations, and the fact that I could merge personal email and corp email accounts. In the intervening time I had to move to comcast, which meant running my own imap server proved more difficult than it was worth, so I moved to Google Apps for Your Domain, all of a sudden my personal domain is running Gmail, and I discovered it has key bindings.
All of a sudden it's mutt deja-vu. navigation with vi j/k keys? yes. Single window view (inbox/message)? yes again. Tagging messages? yes. Blazingly fast? you bet. The only thing I miss is keystroke filtering of messages.
That's one reason why I see things like Google Wave working out so well, I might be late to the gmail party, but plenty of folks have been using this as their primary mode of communication for a long long time.
Tomcat and SSL Accelerators
Using an SSL Accelerator like a Netscaler is really useful, you can offload a lot of work to a device that supports this in hardware and can use SSL session affinity to send requests to the same backend. In the simplest setup the SSL Accelerator accepts the request and proxies it to your internal set of hosts running on port 80.
However, code that generates redirects and URLs works poorly because the servletRequest.getScheme(), getSecure() and getServerPort() will return http/false/80 for SSL and non-SSL connections.
One way to solve this is listen on multiple ports. Create a Connection on 80 and 443, but do not run SSL on either port. Then for the 443 port you configure it with secure="true" and scheme="https". This is suboptimal however as then you have to manage yet another server pool in your load balancer and you end up sending twice the health checks. Not so good.
You might try to solve this by using a ServletFilter. You can use an HttpServletRequestWrapper instance to change the scheme/port/and secure flag. Sadly this doesn't work, because of the way tomcat implements HttpServletResponse, it uses the original request object to ascertain the scheme/secure flag/port. Overriding these will allow application logic to see the updated values. You get into trouble when you call encodeRedirectURL() or sendRedirect() with non-absolute URLs.
Lucky for us Tomcat supports a way to inject code into the connection handling phase via Valves. A valve can query and alter the Catalina and Coyote request objects before the first filter is run.
To make your Valve work you'll need to configure your load balancer to send a special header when SSL is in use. On the Netscaler this can be done by setting owa_support on. With that enabled the http header Front-End-Https: On is sent for requests that use SSL.
Once we have these pieces in place the Valve is fairly straightforward:
import java.io.IOException;
import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import org.apache.catalina.connector.Request;
import org.apache.catalina.connector.Response;
import org.apache.catalina.valves.ValveBase;public class NetscalerSSLValve extends ValveBase {
@Override
public void invoke(Request req, Response resp) throws IOException, ServletException {
if ("On".equals(req.getHeader("Front-End-Https"))) {
req.setSecure(true);
req.getCoyoteRequest().scheme().setString("https");
req.getCoyoteRequest().setServerPort(443);
}
if ( getNext() != null ) {
getNext().invoke(req, resp);
}
}
}
Compile this, stick it in the tomcat lib directory, add an entry in your server.xml and away you go.
July Update of InApps Plaform Imminent
Hi folks, just a quick note to let you know that we're about to refresh the InApps platform with some new features and fixes. I'm sure Taylor's probably let you know this already, but some things to be aware of:
* isOwner, isViewer in json-rpc requests are not present unless true. This reduces the size of the rpc responses significantly.
* Data-Pipelining and Opensocial templates have much greater functionality.
* content-rewrite feature is available and can be used to consolidate css/javascript in your gadget.
More info to come...
Paul
Google I/O Today
Speaking at "Meet the Containers", "Shindig 101" and "OpenSocial Fireside Chat".
All at Moscone West, check it out!
The Mysteries of Java Character Set Performance
"Two Characters Sets? Seems like plenty!"
So I've been pushing Java to it's limits lately and finding some real nasty concurrency issues inside the JRE code itself. Here's one particulary ugly one -- we had 700 threads stuck here:
java.lang.Thread.State: BLOCKED (on object monitor)
at sun.nio.cs.FastCharsetProvider.charsetForName(FastCharsetProvider.java:118)
- waiting to lock <0x00002aab4cdf91b8> (a sun.nio.cs.StandardCharsets)
at java.nio.charset.Charset.lookup2(Charset.java:450)
at java.nio.charset.Charset.lookup(Charset.java:438)
at java.nio.charset.Charset.isSupported(Charset.java:480)
at java.lang.StringCoding.lookupCharset(StringCoding.java:85)
at java.lang.StringCoding.decode(StringCoding.java:165)
at java.lang.String.(String.java:516)
Digging deeper we find the lookupCharset is called all over the place. The app in question is functions as a web proxy, so it's constantly reading and writing data from web pages in a variety of character sets. The method charsetForName() uses a synchronized data structure to lookup defined character sets. (Yay serialized access....)
But wait, lookup and lookup2 provide us with a cache so we can avoid the big bad synchronized method.. Sigh, here's the implementation:
private static Charset lookup(String charsetName) {
if (charsetName == null)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Null charset name");
Object[] a;
if ((a = cache1) != null && charsetName.equals(a[0]))
return (Charset)a[1];
// We expect most programs to use one Charset repeatedly.
// We convey a hint to this effect to the VM by putting the
// level 1 cache miss code in a separate method.
return lookup2(charsetName);
}
private static Charset lookup2(String charsetName) {
Object[] a;
if ((a = cache2) != null && charsetName.equals(a[0])) {
cache2 = cache1;
cache1 = a;
return (Charset)a[1];
}
Charset cs;
if ((cs = standardProvider.charsetForName(charsetName)) != null ||
(cs = lookupExtendedCharset(charsetName)) != null ||
(cs = lookupViaProviders(charsetName)) != null)
{
cache(charsetName, cs);
return cs;
}
/* Only need to check the name if we didn't find a charset for it */
checkName(charsetName);
return null;
}
Yes, a whopping 2-entry cache!!
Also, the keys used are not canonical, so if my app asks for "UTF-8", "utf-8", and "ISO-8859-1" with regularity this 2 entry cache is worthless, every call ends up blocking in the evil thread-synchronized data structure.
Someone send them a copy of the ConcurrentHashMap doc. please.
....
Tired
Why am I so tired?
Been working hard to implement features decribed here..:
hi5 Launches New Music Applications By iLike and Qloud
No more music royalties for hi5. Cost center is now a profit center...
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.
Suggestions
This has got to be a bug....
Dear Amazon.com Customer,
We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated White Noise Critical: Text and Criticism (Viking Critical Library) by Don DeLillo have also purchased Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Jamie Bronstein. For this reason, you might like to know that Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain will be released on October 10, 2007. You can pre-order yours by following the link below.
Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Jamie Bronstein
Price: $55.00
Release Date: October 10, 2007
Found in Hi5 Lunch Room
Update: On the back we find the fine, fine web site http://www.rapsnacks.com/ (Enter if you dare!) and a bio of Romeo, a rapper I have never heard of, but my colleage Brett tells me was once a featured artist on Hi5.
Free WiFi in San Francisco
Meraki is building a free mesh network in San Francisco. This is probably the best hope for getting this type of service in the city now that the Google/Earthlink deal fell apart.
Join up!
Go to http://sf.meraki.net and help build the network. When the router comes in I'll have 7th and Howard covered with 1Mbps of donated bandwidth.
Widgets, APIs and more
I'm happy to announce that Hi5 has Widget support. Yes, I know that this is soooo last year. However there's a twist that makes it better.
We worked closely with Rock You and Slide to integrate tightly with our site, using open standards wherever possible. For example, for slideshows we created Atom Feeds for each photo album, and a feed-of-albums feed for the list of all albums. And when it came time to share profile information for horoscopes (birthday) and languages spoken we used FOAF. Thus we get partners to adopt open standards, plus the work we did for them is usable by everyone.
The only tricky part was authentication and authorization. Right now it's using our own AuthToken implementation, but it could probably be done in a better way. I looked into OpenID as a mechanism, but's way too end-user centric for this type of thing.
Coming soon we should have full Atom endpoints (both in/out with WSSE auth), OpenID provider, and a few other standards based things like XMPP vCard support. All of this is being done with an Web Services Aspect Oriented toolkit called Enunciate, which has made writing these services a very enjoyable experience.
Got yer back 6A
So I've spent a good chunk of today defending Six Apart from the cheap shots being leveled at them today. I won't link to them, they don't deserve the pagerank.
I'm particularly angered at the audacity of the bald-faced lies in some comments.
I may not be employed at Six Apart today, but I put my heart and soul into building it. I won't let a bunch of hacks harm the people still there. So, if you see anyone anywhere putting the hurt on Six Apart let me know. I'll use discourse, reason and wit to set the record straight.
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.
Hi5 Blog goes live today
We're living on the edge over here at Hi5. Our new Movable Type 4 base blog is now available at http://www.hi5networks.com/blog/
The whole company is getting involved and you'll see plenty of interesting information to come.
Also, from a technical standpoint, MT4 has proved a winner. The memcached support in Data::ObjectDriver means that we can run via plain CGI, saving a bunch of time and effort to get this up and going.
We should have 3-4 posts per week. Sadly I didn't get a chance to finish implementing userpics for MT4, but that should come shortly.
