"This approach should be used only if the previous methods are not feasible and you already are providing OpenSearch.
No changes are required on the front-end. This approach may enable site owners to leverage existing databases. Since search results need to render quickly, OpenSearch may not work well for certain applications." - DeWitt Clinton
I would *love* for someone at Yahoo to explain that one. : ) - DeWitt Clinton
Though I do love that they say: "Note that the name DataRSS is a bit unfortunate, since DataRSS XML can be embedded in a variety of feed formats, such as Atom and RSS." You think they would have just used a different name. - DeWitt Clinton
That's definitely something to make you scratch your head. hmm. oh ya, it's yahoo! - Jason Wehmhoener
But I should add, I think SearchMonkey rocks. And I will try to back up that statement as soon as I figure out what SearchMonkey is. - DeWitt Clinton
I noticed while trying to debug horrible response times, even though my ping times were okay. Why doesn't someone start a non-evil version of OpenDNS? - DeWitt Clinton
The symptom was this: % host www.google.com
www.google.com is an alias for google.navigation.opendns.com.
google.navigation.opendns.com has address 208.67.219.231
google.navigation.opendns.com has address 208.67.219.230 - DeWitt Clinton
And I'm upping my offer to FriendFeed. I'll now pay $2 per newline character. Seriously guys, you're leaving money on the table. - DeWitt Clinton
To clarify, the new part was the "Enable OpenDNS proxy" feature that they quietly turned on to once again steal traffic. - DeWitt Clinton
I'm frustrated because I had already gone into the OpenDNS settings and disabled all traffic redirection and logging functionality. That they would change that without asking permission via an opt in is inappropriate. If a client resolves www.domain.com, they should always get the IP that domain.com offers, unless the user explicitly and knowingly opts in to something different. It is wrong when ISPs do tricks like this, and OpenDNS shouldn't either. - DeWitt Clinton
"Google Doctype is an open encyclopedia and reference library. Written by web developers, for web developers. It includes articles on web security, JavaScript DOM manipulation, CSS tips and tricks, and more." - DeWitt Clinton
"Google has built its business here, on the open web, and we want to help you build here too. To that end, we are happy to announce the formation of an encyclopedia for web developers, by web developers: Google Doctype." - DeWitt Clinton
An early preview for FriendFeeders. Googlers and former Googlers should feel right at home here. - DeWitt Clinton
The remarkable thing to me is that I was able to implement this with only 104 lines of source, 213 lines of tests, and 331 lines of documentation. Think about what those ratios (and total size) would be to implement the same functionality in say, Java or C++. Heck, it even includes an implementation (and tests) of a stable heap-based, synchronized priority queue (15 lines of code). - DeWitt Clinton
Interesting. How does the model compare to the Deferreds concept in Twisted? - Vlado Handziski
@vlahan - I hadn't looked at the Deferred model in Twisted before, but if it makes sense I can converge this API toward theirs. I'll spend some time with Twisted and see. Thanks! - DeWitt Clinton
Cool. Maybe we will soon see support for Twisted in App Engine :) - Vlado Handziski
Wow. That's the first time I've seen Dion this fired up (publicly). Having people this passionate in your camp is not something that can be bought at any price; which makes it that much more important to stop and listen to them. - DeWitt Clinton
posted a message
“Maybe a few of us should get together and produce a "gilmore gang" style round table for technical people?”
Topics could include "why scaling Twitter is actually a hard problem", "data portability in practice, not catchphrases", "open protocols require more than press releases", "the future of distributed source control", "distributed data storage in the cloud", "the paradigm of visible source vs. java-to-javascript compilation", "syndication vs federation as a means of decentralizing the social graph", "dsl's vs gpl's", etc, etc. - DeWitt Clinton
Some people I'd want to hear from (that I don't work with): Simon Willison, Alex Russell, Brian Aker, Adrian Holovaty, Eran Hammer-Lahav, Miguel de Icaza, Cal Henderson, Ned Batchelder, Charles Nutter, David Eppstein... And plenty that I do work with: Russ Cox, Steve Yegge, Mihai Parparita, Mark Pilgrim, Chris DiBona, Kevin Marks, Cedric Beust, Brad Fitzpatrick, Ian Hickson, Bruce Johnson, Aaron Boodman. And of course, basically the whole FF team. - DeWitt Clinton
This would be absolutely awesome. What do we need to do to make this happen? - Adewale Oshineye
Do it! Just leave some room in the audience for those of us who'd love to watch such an event. - Erica Baker
@ade - Let's get Dion Almaer to moderate it. - DeWitt Clinton
We could also add more non-american technical people to that list. The last.fm guys for instance would be very interesting. As would the team at the Guardian newspaper. Add in some people from the non-anglophone world and we'd have a roundtable equivalent of Software Engineering Radio: http://www.se-radio.net/ but with a lot more reach. - Adewale Oshineye
Dion would be a great moderator and he's already got podcasting experience. Ideally people could write in to suggest topics and panel members for future episodes. For instance I would love to listen to a discussion on Music/Web2.0/music discovery which featured people from last.fm, the guy behind the hype machine: hypem.com and somebody technical from Pandora - Adewale Oshineye
If you do the music thing you've got to get the guy from Sun... Paul Lamere: http://blogs.sun.com/plamere/. But you should start with Twitter - anything to shut people who don't know what they are talking about up. - Nick Lothian
Instead of doing something just about Twitter how about a session on the difficulties of scaling a micro-blogging/messaging system. You would absolutely need to have Yahoo's Eran Hammer-Lahav. His articles on the subject are amongst the few that show any genuine insight into the problem. It would also be interesting to get some of the LShift guys behind RabbitMQ involved. They could talk about low-latency high scalability messaging in the financial world. Then just add Reza Behforooz from the GTalk team. - Adewale Oshineye
"Tonight at Campfire One at the Googleplex, Google Inc. will announce a preview release of Google Friend Connect, a service that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors." - DeWitt Clinton
Whoa! that sounds almost exactly like Project SocialSite. I'll take that as validation of a good idea ;-) - Dave Johnson
posted a message
“Tried to understand what this "inbox zero" thing is, but I didn't have time to read all 25 (!?) articles about it on 43 Folders. So instead I just did a "Select All" and "Archive". I feel fine.”
Sunday at 10:18 pm
Productivity advice is apparently for people with far more time than me. : / - DeWitt Clinton
Ben, an engineer on the Google Code team, SVN contributor, and co-author of the Subversion book, talks about merge tracking in Subversion 1.5. - DeWitt Clinton
"I've ported the Processing visualization language to JavaScript, using the Canvas element." Mind boggling. I first saw Processing at foo camp a few years ago and remember thinking that the natural environment for it was the browser. Via Simon. - DeWitt Clinton
Interesting difference in metrics. Alexa reports today (May 7th) that "April 19, 2008 [was] the date that Facebook overtook Myspace as the #1 social networking site on the Web."
Which is funny, because just yesterday (May 6th), Hitwise reported that "MySpace Received 74 Percent of U.S Social Networking Visits for April 2008". (See http://www.hitwise.com/press-c...)
Compete.com also says MySpace has the edge by a margin of over 2-1. (See http://siteanalytics.compete.c...)
Not to pick on Alexa, but those numbers aren't even close to matching up. - DeWitt Clinton
@DeWitt You're probably American, because you can't seem understand that there's a market outside of the USA. MySpace probably gets most of the US social networking traffic, but Alexa reports outside US traffic, too. - sebmos
@seb -- Good point. I was wondering that myself right after I posted it. I agree that that this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison, especially since the Hitwise stats are explicitly US only. Though the oft-cited Le Monde graphic (http://medias.lemonde.fr/mmpub...) seems to give other networks the edge world-wide as well. - DeWitt Clinton
Oh, and @seb, you must be Austrian because you assume that Americans are ignorant about the world beyond its borders. You're right of course, but that's not the point. : ) - DeWitt Clinton
Well, sadly Americans (at least the start-ups) _are_ ignorant about the world beyond their borders. If it wasn't that way, more start-ups from the Valley would try to get to Europe, where the market is much less mature and there is less competition. But why did you think I'm Austrian? (I mean I am, but there's no info about that on my FriendFeed-profile...) - sebmos
@seb did you forget which networks you joined in facebook or do all austrians forget that there's more to the web than friendfeed profiles? - Elias Torres
posted a message
“I give up on posting links or comments without any indication of where they are going to be truncated.”
"When you adopt a syndication-oriented architecture, small pieces can be loosely joined, or they can be more tightly coupled. But the underlying publish/subscribe mechanism doesn’t determine that choice." Jon Udell was one of the first people to embrace and start thinking deeply about OpenSearch. Here he discusses whether it should be called "federation" or something else. Personally I've always called it "search syndication", in the light-weight fashion of the RSS (and later Atom) formats that it builds upon. Jon concludes with "I’ve been using the word syndication instead. But now I suspect that’s the wrong word too. I want to convey that we can create small pieces, that they can be loosely joined, and that important network effects will emerge." - DeWitt Clinton
Worth observing that nearly all of the streams that feed into FriendFeed are quite clearly syndication mechanisms, rather than negotiated data exchanges or read/write interactions, and yet here we've seen a clear example of the "important network effects" that can emerge. - DeWitt Clinton
posted a message
“Monetization idea for FriendFeed: I'd pay a dollar for newline support in FriendFeed comments. Per newline.”
"Now, the present Google era. Google has the genetic and cultural advantage of being born in an open source world, with a business model that is aligned with rather than antagonistic to open source. It reflects in how they conduct their ecosystem initiatives. Google Gears comes with one of the most liberal open source licenses (BSD license), and we at Zoho particularly appreciate the support provided by Google’s open source teams. In our extensive interaction with them, we could tell how they truly get the value of openness. That openness is going to be the underpinning of the Google era of computing – I hope they never forget that!" - DeWitt Clinton
That this is coming from the CEO of Zoho, technically a competitor to Google in the hosted application space, is both flattering and humbling. - DeWitt Clinton
Stephen Meschkat's javascript templating engine. - DeWitt Clinton
"Template processing is the staple pattern for separation of data and presentation in web applications. But it usually works on one page at a time, which is inadequate for incremental, asynchronous page updates typical of Ajax applications." - DeWitt Clinton
Features include: "incremental processing — every processing operation produces valid output, and differential processing — output text is again a template. It also fixes other undesirable properties of standard template processing: Wellformed output is guaranteed. Escaped by default. Templates are intelligible: input template is valid output. And, of course: Pure javascript, HTML, browser side processing." - DeWitt Clinton
"With the new OpenSearch-based federation capability in Search Server 2008, you can integrate any external search service that can expose results as an RSS feed. In this podcast Jon Udell discusses search federation with Richard Riley and Keller Smith." - DeWitt Clinton
Found via @carnage4life. Silly del.icio.us truncated my note right before the via attribution. - DeWitt Clinton
"This document provides a brief and very technical introduction to the basics of implementing programming languages using the COLA environment." Via lambda the ultimate. - DeWitt Clinton
A very clear example of COLA in use. Definitely worth reading, though admittedly COLA looks deceptively simple as the source language is a tape-based context-free DFA, which lends itself to elegant parsers and AST generation no matter what the implementation. Need to find a non-trivial example... - DeWitt Clinton
Where does Simon come up with this stuff? - DeWitt Clinton
Heh. Just read skimmed a lot of it. Yes, took about 10 minutes to cover everything from "Chapter 4. Design Patterns" to "Chapter 8. Tactical AI" to "Chapter 14. Outdoors Algorithms" to "Chapter 19. Particle Systems". A few pages per chapter. Needless to say, not that deep. : ) - DeWitt Clinton
Reminds me that I should post my recent CS reading list. - DeWitt Clinton
From the FAQ at http://www.adobe.com/openscree...: "Publication of an unrestricted SWF file format has long been requested by the Adobe Flash developer community." Not bad, but opening up the file format is not the same as opening up the runtime... Still digging. - DeWitt Clinton
"Trademarks: Adobe, ActionScript, Flash, Flash Media Server, and Flash Player are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated and may be registered in the United States or in other jurisdictions including internationally. Other product names, logos, designs, titles, words, or phrases mentioned within this publication may be trademarks, service marks, or trade names of Adobe Systems Incorporated or other entities and may be registered in certain jurisdictions including internationally. No right or license is granted to any Adobe trademark." - DeWitt Clinton
Still haven't found a link to a separate license, though I imagine there has to be one, because there is nothing about granting a copyright license, trademark license, allowing for derivative works, or patent non-assertion in there. Yes, I actually pay attention to this stuff. It's a weird hobby of mine. - DeWitt Clinton
As far as I can tell, so far they've published documentation on the SWF and FLV/F4V formats, but haven't (yet?) release either under a license that grants rights to use or create derivative works from the formats. I'll keep looking. - DeWitt Clinton
