Ethan Jewett › Comments

"I really like what JAX-RS does. My point was just that it is giving you a set of tools for dealing with HTTP (or at least the REST-relevant parts of HTTP) in a relatively sane way in Java. That's excellent. The fact that all the JAX-RS examples are REST-ful is nice too. However, JAX-RS would be just as helpful in building your old-school RPC-like API in HTTP. It doesn't really force RESTful-ness, nor should it. Thanks for the pointers to Atmosphere. I stumbled across it a couple of hours after posting this and it has been very helpful to look at. Unfortunately it doesn't look suitable for use in an API definition, as I'm not seeing specific documentation of it's Comet/push implementation in terms of the specific HTTP requests and response formats required. Definitely something to keep an eye on though." - Ethan Jewett

"Indeed, that would be a mistake. However I have never seen an actual example of such a mistake linked from a blog containing a complaint about mixing up translators and authors in Google Book Search. Much less an attempt at analysis of the pervasiveness of these mistakes as compared to similar mistakes in library metadata. Perhaps I've just been very unlucky in the blogs I've read." - Ethan Jewett

"Very interesting, and thanks for coming through with more detail so quickly. I look forward to hearing about the fundamental reasons you think you are seeing this performance multiplier on these systems. I'd also be interested in hearing about how this setup compares when the Amazon EC2 filesystem is stripped over multiple EBS virtual disks (exactly how much work and expense would it take to get EC2 to a similar level of performance, if it's even possible?), but given that you're providing a turn-key accelerator solution, I think this is a very fair and very impressive comparison." - Ethan Jewett

"Very interesting, and thanks for coming through with more detail so quickly. I look forward to hearing about the fundamental reasons you think you are seeing this performance multiplier on these systems. I'd also be interested in hearing about how this setup compares when the Amazon EC2 filesystem is stripped over multiple EBS virtual disks (exactly how much work and expense would it take to get EC2 to a similar level of performance, if it's even possible?), but given that you're providing a turn-key accelerator solution, I think this is a very fair and very impressive comparison." - Ethan Jewett

"Rod, thanks for the response. I haven't been fair, as this is a really good looking offering regardless of how much better the performance is than an EC2 setup with similar software. I know that Joyent is creating more of these types of bundled offerings, which I think is pretty great. I look forward to seeing what is coming up in the pipeline (and those benchmark details ;-)." - Ethan Jewett

"I agree, this is not a helpful metric. It should either not be offered or should be backed up with data. If the explanation of the benchmarking process is not available, then why not wait to make the claim? Based on the marketing page it looks like you may have been using EC2 local storage instead of EBS attached drives. It is my understanding that the EC2 local storage is significantly slower than EBS and that EBS is more similar to Joyent's storage services. Hopefully the benchmark is an apples-to-apples comparison, but without data I don't see why I should believe it is." - Ethan Jewett

"I agree, this is not a helpful metric. It should either not be offered or should be backed up with data. If the explanation of the benchmarking process is not available, then why not wait to make the claim? Based on the marketing page it looks like you may have been using EC2 local storage instead of EBS attached drives. It is my understanding that the EC2 local storage is significantly slower than EBS and that EBS is more similar to Joyent's storage services. Hopefully the benchmark is an apples-to-apples comparison, but without data I don't see why I should believe it is." - Ethan Jewett

"Rod, thanks for the response. I haven't been fair, as this is a really good looking offering regardless of how much better the performance is than an EC2 setup with similar software. I know that Joyent is creating more of these types of bundled offerings, which I think is pretty great. I look forward to seeing what is coming up in the pipeline (and those benchmark details ;-)." - Ethan Jewett

Awwwww - Ethan Jewett

"Thank you! I would be delighted to continue this conversation. Unfortunately as soon as I posted this work started to heat up, so I haven't been able to do much more on it. I think the next steps are to clean up the API to the request (in the javascript) and get some working examples cooked up. One thing that I'm very encouraged by is that javascript handlers should be relatively transferable between services like scriptlets.org, this one, and other similar services. Hoorah for interoperability. What I'd really like to see is some type of "scriptlets" API (you know, Rack/WSGI-style?) so that these handlers are fairly portable between engines. If you'd like to work on that together, or just continue to discuss the best way to do this, I'd be delighted!" - Ethan Jewett

Just for the record: "Lie detectors" make me angry. - Ethan Jewett

"Thanks! I'm not very familiar with how long-polling works. I assume that we need to communicate to the server that it needs to keep the connection open for some period of time. There are two ways I can think of communicating this need without creating a separate API resource. You could use an extra parameter in the GET request to tell the server that you wanted to long-poll, or to specify some sort of time-out (?timeout=5min). This isn't very RESTful since this parameter isn't really an attribute of the resource. You could also use the HTTP If-Modified-Since header to specify a time a few minutes in the future. This would require client and server clocks to be synced up, and the server would have to be smart enough to figure out that future=long-polling. Yes, I stole both of these ideas from the Twitter API (http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+AP......). I'd be interested in if there are other options." - Ethan Jewett

"Right, the fact that I'm not an expert at this stuff shows, doesn't it? :-) You and Richard are exactly right that it's "DELETE" and "PUT" instead of "DESTROY" and "UPDATE". I'll make the change." - Ethan Jewett

This is probably the most appealing part of national healthcare for young people - it removes some of the risk from otherwise healthy decisions, like changing jobs or trying to start your own company, or writing the next great American novel. - Ethan Jewett

I've been saying for a while that there's no way I'm buying a car until I can get a reasonable full-electric range. There's still no way I'm buying a car, but wow, cool. - Ethan Jewett

"These are excellent points, but it only gets at half of the equation. As I see it, the two main questions when working on my personal workflow are effectiveness and flexibility. My impression is that when people are thinking about their workflows there is far too much emphasis on the stability of the platform (which is your point, and a good one) because of an inflated estimate of the costs associated with a workflow change. The basic question is this: Is a change to my workflow that takes X hours to execute worthwhile? The way a lot of people think about this question is by asking "Do I have X hours to spend on this or would I rather spend it on something else?" The question people should be asking contains another variable - the number of hours they will save overall through this change. Let's call this number of hours "Y". The question is: "Do I have X-Y hours to spend on this or would I rather spend it on something else?" When the number of hours saved (Y) becomes greater than the..." - Ethan Jewett

"Looks to me like they are describing using a GET request to the API to load some JSON into the browser. I don't think this will work for POST requests, so the friend deletion probably won't work. I assume they don't use XMLHttpRequest because the cross-site request will fail, as it should. I don't think this is really a huge deal. It probably does raise a valid concern about privacy using HTTP basic authentication on an API in general, since one could use this to access the status messages of a user with a non-public timeline. If I understand OAuth (and I've had a bad week on that front), it would help with this problem because the javascript on the non-Twitter site wouldn't have access to the proper token value to access the API. However, Twitter would have to stop allowing Basic authentication for the API entirely to avoid what we see in this example and I don't see that happening in the near future." - Ethan Jewett

"Looks to me like they are describing using a GET request to the API to load some JSON into the browser. I don't think this will work for POST requests, so the friend deletion probably won't work. I assume they don't use XMLHttpRequest because the cross-site request will fail, as it should. I don't think this is really a huge deal. It probably does raise a valid concern about privacy using HTTP basic authentication on an API in general, since one could use this to access the status messages of a user with a non-public timeline. If I understand OAuth (and I've had a bad week on that front), it would help with this problem because the javascript on the non-Twitter site wouldn't have access to the proper token value to access the API. However, Twitter would have to stop allowing Basic authentication for the API entirely to avoid what we see in this example and I don't see that happening in the near future." - Ethan Jewett

"I'd just ask that you make it optional by providing a feed for full posts, a feed for Reader shared items, and a combined feed. Advertise whichever one you want, but make an option available" - Ethan Jewett

"I'd just ask that you make it optional by providing a feed for full posts, a feed for Reader shared items, and a combined feed. Advertise whichever one you want, but make an option available :-)" - Ethan Jewett

If your gatekeepers (recruiters, HR, managers, etc.) are making decisions on the basis of unflattering photos on social networking sites, then you're doing it wrong. - Ethan Jewett

Woodlawn Tap write-up in NYTimes - Contains a notable anecdote in which a Nobel prize winner berates an annoying student. - Ethan Jewett

Javascript port of the Gruff graphing library for Ruby. I was fiddling with this for a while. It's always nice to see someone do this work better than I could have! - Ethan Jewett

Ahem, just testing out the notes feature. Is this thing on? - Ethan Jewett

"One question for Ear-a-round is whether it can be made cheaper than fencing. At $600 a cow, that is not obviously yet so. Dr Rus, however, is working on getting the price of the hardware down to the $100 that farmers will pay. Meanwhile Dr Anderson is about to start working out how many cows actually need to be fitted with Ear-a-rounds to control an entire herd. He hopes that, by identifying a herd’s leaders and fitting out them alone, this number can be reduced to a handful." - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

Paul - lol "just like people." so there are cow "influentials?" - Karim

that sucks ... - Jonathan Greene from Alert Thingy

I got blacklisted by my previous ISP for breaching an 80gb download limit, described in the smallest of the small print. *Clearly articulated* usage policies, limits and penalties can only be a good thing for consumer. - Andrew Terry

Newest! - Benjamin Golub

I sort "All items" by auto. I put my favorite feeds in a folder and sort that folder by oldest. I sort the other folders by newest. Sorting everything by oldest can be a problem if you have 1000+ unread items; you'll never catch up with the latest updates unless you spend most of your time hitting "J". - Eddie Awad

"Jake, This is certainly a true observation, but I think it’s worth keeping in mind that while a CS degree is probably the most structured and predictable way of learning to have the software design discipline to do the things Chris mentions, it’s not the only way. Self-study and critique through mentorship is another route, but one that takes significant motivation and a drive to “get it done right” rather than just “get it done.” The later is certainly the predominant approach in a lot of software today (web-based, desktop, and even enterprise!!), and that could be attributed to lack of CS training, but it’s more likely attributable to the way that commitment to quality is distributed itself along the continuum from slouch to guru. Come to think of it, if “get it done right” isn’t your focus, a CS degree probably won’t help you a ton. Even experienced developers will encounter situations demanding unfamiliar approaches, and at that point you’ve got to be willing to put in the work to..." - Ethan Jewett

"Craig, I'm planning on using eventtrack at some upcoming company events. It looks like it will be just what the doctor ordered. Keep up the good work :-) Ethan" - Ethan Jewett

"Great write-up. I’m a tad late to the party here, but I figure better late than never. My impression of the reason we have different approaches is that we’re trying to implement in an environment that may make untenable demands on the software deployed within it. Interoperability and openness often clash with security concerns and politics. Describing my (currently) favored approach of using external tools in conjunction with open internal tools as ‘on the down low’ is correct in a sense: I think developing prototypes outside of the institutional framework around the development process can be a powerful approach to introducing internal tools and (most importantly) triggering conversations. This doesn’t mean that the development and the tools are secret and unsupported. In fact, the goal of conversation requires that the existence of tools be shared and that we be willing to discuss the tools. Example: External widgets on internal wikis raise information security issues around..." - Ethan Jewett