Posts Tagged: web

opinion — 1 Comment
2
Apr 08

Twitter better than RSS?

I created today two twitterfeed bots — dzone, which feeds on DZone frontpage and redditprog, which feeds on Reddit Programming. The reason for this, is while I want to be in the stream of news, I don’t want them to accumulate.

What does this mean? TwitterFeed will just check the feed every half an hour and repost it to twitter. However, I’m not subscribed to Twitter via RSS. The only way I get Twitter updates is through Google Talk IM. Which means, that I get updates only when I’m online and they never accumulate in Google Reader (I tend to just delete all entries in a category if it goes over 30).

Getting updates in realtime means that you can also sort through them immediately, which is usually much easier than delaying until later and doing all-at-once. This helps cope with the amount of information I go through every day. I just wish that every news site would provide a twitter bot by default…

P.S. You can follow downgrade via a twitterfeed bot as well.

creative — No Comments
30
Mar 08

TinyURL a nuisance?

Although TinyURL is mostly useful it also has one very annoying minus. Indexing services like Google or Technocrati cannot resolve links through it, therefore all those links go unaccounted (or at least you can’t find them anyhow). Add to this that popular services like Twitter will automatically route the links through TinyURL and it’s a right nuisance. Can’t such services come up with a way for Google to track them?

review — 1 Comment
22
Mar 08

Mozilla Prism gets an overhaul

Although two weeks late, I finally noticed that Mozilla Prism has been updated. Mozilla Prism is a “One Site Browser”, which is to say a browser started from your desktop tied to one particular web site. I have been using it since the first release, mainly to separate the Google Mail, Reader and Calendar windows from the rest of my browsing experience.

The new version is a significant reworking of Prism. First of all you no longer have to install a 6.6 Mb application in addition to Firefox. Now you can just download a 500 Kb Firefox extension, which will start Prism as a particular Firefox profile. And you can create the desktop shortcuts to your web site in one click using “Tools -> Convert Website to Application”.

Secondly Prism will finally pick up the favicons that the website is using and use it both as shortcut icon and (drumroll!) the application window icon! Before you had to download the icons manually and it still would use the Prism icon in the taskbar, which made it much harder to distinguish the windows. Having the GMail icon in the taskbar is just what I’ve been waiting for. Now, if only it would change on new mail…

However, no matter the changes, I’m still stuck with a major annoyance — no Firefox shortcuts work. And since half the sites on Internet do not optimize for 1680×1050, my first reaction in Firefox is often Ctrl+, to increase the font size. Well, hopefully they hit it in the next release, you hear that, Mozilla?

P.S. I’m making this post from my nifty dow.ngra.de admin browser app, now where do I find an icon for that?…

report — 2 Comments
12
Mar 08

QCon London 2008: Amazon Web Services

Amazon web services is an offering to host your data and software at Amazon with massive virtualization and an interface over web services.

The first part of the talk is about S3 file hosting, which is done through a Firefox plugin (which I mistook for FireFTP first). You can upload files, assign ACLs, get the URL for publishing and pay proportionally to storage used, requests done and bandwidth used (all three have assigned fees). Nothing technically fancy, but cool nevertheless.

The next part is about EC2, which is a virtual server on-the-fly renting. You basically store a (special) disk image on the S3 service and then boot from it a number of virtual servers. You get root access to your servers and pay per hour of use. You can add/remove servers both programmatically and from a Firefox extension.

The next part is about SQS, which is a queuing communication service. Basically the main use for that is for communication among the EC2 servers to enable scaled processing.

The last part is SimpleDB, which is a simplified database service. Basically provides a fully indexed collections of key-values pairs (multiple values!). It’s kinda like a flat JSON (one object per row, values can be arrays). Provides a simple query language (isn’t this very similar to CouchDB???). Useful for services that don’t need too complex queries.

In the end a quick overview of payment services. One cool thing is that you can use DevPay to charge your users for the services hosted on S3/EC2. Nice stuff, but only applicable in the US in the foreseeable future.

Lastly I asked whether there is any load balancing provided by Amazon, but turned out that you need to set up your own and add a registration call to the server instance startup.

Generally the talk focuses on the business side, whereas I’d like to know how do they actually implement the services.

Uncategorized — No Comments
9
Mar 08

CouchDB built on Erlang

CouchDB: The interesting thing is that CouchDB automatically provides the REST front end that you tend to build on top of Java object stores like JBoss Cache or Coherence — An even more interesting thing is that it’s built on Erlang. This project gets more interesting every time I hear about it — it binds a REST API to your data and behavior, it is automatically replicated with no SPOF and it is built on the best massive concurrency platform available at the moment! Now I just have to check it out myself (and refresh my very rusty Erlang skills).

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