James' World » i18n http://www.jebriggs.com/blog Observations by a Programmer of Silicon Valley and Beyond Sun, 05 Feb 2012 10:40:22 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Happy New Year 2012 from Bali with Angry Birds and Beer http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2012/01/happy-new-year-2012-from-bali-with-angry-birds-and-beer/ http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2012/01/happy-new-year-2012-from-bali-with-angry-birds-and-beer/#comments Sun, 01 Jan 2012 07:01:37 +0000 Administrator http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2012/01/ Continue reading →]]> Happy New Year 2012 from Bali, with Angry Birds and beer! :)

Traditionally, New Year’s in Bali is celebrated with a fireworks display near Kuta Beach. And lots of beer.

Bintang Beer comes in 2 bottle sizes, the 330 mL “Pint” shown above, and the 620 mL “Bremer” typically carried in each hand by Australian tourists – “Just in case, mate.” The brewer is advised by Heineken.

Bintang means “star” in Bahasa Indonesia.

Angry Birds is a cultural phenomenon in Southeast Asia, with t-shirts, backpacks and plush toys featured at many stores.

wikipedia: Pint

]]> http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2012/01/happy-new-year-2012-from-bali-with-angry-birds-and-beer/feed/ 0 QR Code Links http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2011/11/qr-code-links/ http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2011/11/qr-code-links/#comments Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:09:05 +0000 Administrator http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2011/11/ Continue reading →]]> LV QRcodeOriginally designed by Toyota Japan for factory use, QR codes are 2-dimensional barcodes commonly used in advertising.

cnn.com: 23 of the coolest QR codes
cnn.com: Does anybody actually use QR codes?
QRcodify.com
Perl Module GD::Barcode::QRcode
Successful QR Code Campaigns
msn.com: How QR codes hide privacy, security risks
theregister.co.uk: QR Codes and Spam

]]> http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2011/11/qr-code-links/feed/ 0 Netflix and Cloud IT http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2011/10/netflix-and-cloud-it/ http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2011/10/netflix-and-cloud-it/#comments Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:05:29 +0000 Administrator http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2011/10/ Continue reading →]]>


I recently did some technical consulting for Netflix.

I can say that they are really, truly committed to cloud IT, per their public pronouncements. Most large companies are still just dipping a toe in the water, so it’s significant that Netflix took the plunge head-first.

They’re Java-centric and mainly use Open Source, with the notable exception of Perforce. :)

The following public links explain Netflix’s engineering philosophy.

Netflix Tech Blog Github Twitter
Adrian Cockcraft’s Slideshare Presentations Twitter
Joe Sondow’s Netflix Cloud Tools Keynote HTML Twitter

Sid Anand’s Practical Cloud Computing Blog Twitter
ASF Cassandra JIRA
Netflix overtakes Bittorrent as traffic champ

AWS Forums: unusual ELB activity not from my domain
Jason Brown: Cassandra from the trenches: migrating Netflix

]]> http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2011/10/netflix-and-cloud-it/feed/ 0 OSCON 2011, Portland http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2011/07/oscon-2011-portland/ http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2011/07/oscon-2011-portland/#comments Sun, 31 Jul 2011 06:03:21 +0000 Administrator http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/?p=3735 Continue reading →]]> Once again, the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) was held in Portland, Oregon.

It was held in parallel at the Oregon Convention Center with the O’Reilly OSdata and OSjava Conferences at the beginning of the week, and then later a knitting conference.

The conferences were well-managed, as usual. Great economy: lots of job notices and recruiting appeals. There was some chatter about Tim’s anti-harassment blog post.

Executive Summary:

  • HTML5/CSS3/AppCache are what should have been available 20 years ago, and are significant improvements that allow both desktop and mobile development in HTML. Although the HTML5 video tag gets a lot of press, HTML5 includes equally important forms improvements.
  • DNSSEC is complex and new signatures should be generated every 30 days or less (to reduce replay attacks by limiting the signature validity period), which is a burden on companies without a full-time DNS hostmaster. Third-party DNS hosting companies are salivating over DNSSEC.
  • MySQL long-term stewardship is still in question, with Oracle hemorrhaging MySQL developers and closing access to their bugs database, but MontyProgram and Percona maintaining strong forks.

Here’s my notes on some of the tutorials and talks I attended:

Monday

HTML5 & CSS3: The Good Enough Parts
Estelle Weyl, Standardista.com
Slides

- transform-origin is key to snowflake demo looking realistic, easy to use
- background resets everything, so use individual properties
- background-position – use all 4 values
- background-size auto contain cover, handy for iPhones
- text-overflow: ellipsis
- minimal HTML5 document:

<!doctype html5>
<meta charset=utf8>
<title></title>

(head and body are implied)
- or even send tags in server headers
- changed most elements
- <i lang=”"> useful to style
- small tag useful for legal smallprint, since there’s no copyright metatag yet
- html5shim
- Modernizr
- HTML5 Boilerplate – good way to learn HTML5 and CSS3
- tabindex=”-1″ allows JS to set focus and not bother user otherwise
- spellcheck=”true” | “false”
- itemtype=”http://data-vocabulary.org/Person”
- new input types
- placeholder, pattern, required, spellcheck, validate
- a@b is deliverable for internal email servers. hmm.
- meter, progress, output widgets
- HTML5Rocks
- button generator at css3button.net
- Voronoi diagram demo
- aquarium.js
- web workers

Monday Lunch

Benjamin, Ubuntu
- loves CloudFlare
- likes Linode
- nimbula

Talked to an open mapping data fellow about various projects. Google ToS is scary when it comes to that kind of data.

Monday Afternoon

Moose is Perl: A Guide to the New Revolution
Ricardo Signes, Pobox.com
Slides

- detailed talk about Moose features and syntax
- chatted with other folks at break time about topics like CSS::Inliner and Mojolicious web framework (with minimal dependencies) by Sebastian Riedel.

Tuesday Afternoon

Three For Five – Functional HTML5 & CSS3 for Designers & Developers
Jason VanLue, Envy Labs and CodeSchools.com

- good training session with fun sample – a beer menu created from 1 photo (CSS3 text scaling and rotation) and HTML5/CSS3 styled text
- training class is available online for $75 (also jQuery and 2 Rails classes)


3-for-5 Beer Menu
Click to Enlarge

Tuesday Night


Puppet Labs Logo

- went to Puppet Labs office for CloudCamp lightning talks, which started about 90 minutes late
- nice office, typical start-up look across from a small park. Comfy little meeting rooms with leather sofas a la Netflix.
- about 5 lightning talks total, 2 were sales pitches, 2 had 40 slides crammed into 5 minutes. ick.
- Puppet Labs CEO gave a good talk on optimizing Puppet for a client with 10,000+ nodes. Converted XML::RPC to REST, which doubled performance from 500 to 1,000 qps (I talked to Randy Ray about that, and he wasn’t surprised and that would be the case on simple requests), did some more work and maxed out at 2,500 qps. Enabling SSL did not slow down requests.
- got too crowded for me, and also fire department, who manned the exits and counted people as they entered and left.

Puppet Labs Office
Photo credit: Jacob Helwig

Wednesday

Creating a Scalable JavaScript Application Architecture
Nicholas Zakas, NCZConsulting
Slides

An AJAX client only cares about getting the data it wants, not response codes, etc.

Use layered JavaScript client architecture:

- sandbox
- application
- library (Dojo, YUI, MooTools, etc. )

www.nczonline.net
@slicknet
Author of “High Performance JavaScript”

Wednesday Lunch

I talked to Ben Golub, CEO of Gluster.

- 80% business, 20% scientific
- users include box.net, Pandora.com
- written in C
- minimum is 2 nodes for replication
- lots of people use it in EC2
- office located in Sunnyvale.

Wednesday Afternoon

HTML5: All about Web Forms
Estelle Weyl, standardista.com

- use label tag with forms to ease navigation for end-users
- use placeholder attribute, better for screenreaders than JS coding
- multiple autofocus defaults to last one in HTML5
- type=”text” is default, so tel, email, etc. degrades on all browsers back to text
- form element can disassociate parent form, useful for AJAX multiform pages
- input types good for mobile devices to show useful soft keyboard for url or email input types
- numeric step options
- test date and numeric input types for usability. Scrolling birthdays or zip codes is painful
- still need JS
- Opera is first with new UI features but last with artistic design, so currently has hideous tooltip appearance
- list and datalist like exploded select. Include select for IE backward compatibility
- meter, progress and output UI elements
- input type=text x-webkit-speech, now on Google homepage

HTML5 in Your Pocket: Application Cache and Local Storage
Scott Davis, ThirstyHead.com

- 4 million Macs, 32 million iDevices in last quarter
- Basecamp Mobile
- “Dive into HTML5″ by Mark Pilgrim online
- cookies should be called thimbles, only 4k
- HTML5 localstorage supported in IE8, FF 3.5, so practically all
- 5 MB, QUOTA_EXCEEDED_ERR, can’t increase now
- StatCounter browser stats
- gist 350433: Storage polyfill using window.name and cookies
- no version of IE or FF support web SQL and they probably won’t, FF for philosophical reasons
- cache manifest
- genManifest bookmarklet
- FF about:cache and Firebug are handy to see caches
- appcache has no expiry date
- date stamping manifest file causes re-download
- 404 causes none to be saved
- treat appcache as only slightly more secure than cookies, which are round-tripped
- webplication
- still sandboxed from local file access, could use node.js or signed app
- See W3C HTML5 offline

Profiling and Detecting Bottlenecks in Software
Bryan Call, Yahoo!/Apache Committer
PowerPoint .pptx

- usual savings (machines, moving parts, get smart)
- top, htop
- vmstat, dstat
- time cmd
- Boost logging does small writes, allocates memory when it gets behind, causing both IO and memory pressure
- profilers like oprofile and google profile cause 1% to 8% slowdown
- valgrind’s callgrind much more resources
- oprofile has script to convert output to kcachegrind
- opcontrol –deinit
- sysctl nmi_watchdog off
- opcontrol –no-vmlinux
- opcontrol –daemon
- google profiler userland, LD_PRELOAD
- env CPUPROFILE=/tmp/mybin.prof /usr/local/bin/my_binary_compiled_with_libprofiler_so
- caching: don’t do the same work twice
- choose the correct algorithms and data structures: dqueue vs. List, hash vs. trees, locks vs. r/w locks, bloom filter
- reuse memory, stack vs. heap, tcmalloc
- make fewer system calls (larger reads and writes)
- faster hardware, bonded NICs, SSDs, RAID, CPU, more cores
- read How to Profile Apache Traffic Server
- bootchart
- http_load now uses epoll
- he made ab multi-core

From kernel.txt: “nmi_watchdog: Enables/Disables the NMI watchdog on x86 systems. When the value is non-zero the NMI watchdog is enabled and will continuously test all online cpus to determine whether or not they are still functioning properly. Currently, passing “nmi_watchdog=” parameter at boot time is required for this function to work. If LAPIC NMI watchdog method is in use (nmi_watchdog=2 kernel parameter), the NMI watchdog shares registers with oprofile. By disabling the NMI watchdog, oprofile may have more registers to utilize.”

CoffeeScript: A New Hope for JavaScript
Scott Davis, ThirstyHead.com

- trainer, author, worked on Comcast/Time Warner TVs which mostly use WebKit
- little language that compiles into JS
- JS V8 headless, like node.js
- PhantomJS is headless HTML, handy for testing
- Google GWT compiles Java to JS
- “transpiler”
- install node.js
- install npm
- npm install -g coffeescript
- –tokens, –nodes like java p
- immediately invoked function expression IIFE
- coffeescript: string interpolation #{name}, “”"
- objects with left-hand spacing like python

Thursday

DNSSEC @ Mozilla
Shyam Mani, Mozilla Corporation
Slides

- BIND 9.7 is nice for DNSSEC
- Keys are everything, protect them. Have a backup plan.
- Cisco core routers by default don’t expect large DNS transfers:

policy-map global policy class inspection_default inspect dns maximum-length 4096

- DS was live, no signed zones
- watch log levels, can be chatty and quickly fill disk with logs
- DNSSEC has no immediate benefit to end-users, since resolvers don’t honor it
- their logs show 1000:1 dns vs dnssec queries for last 6 months, but growing
- IOS Firewall DNSSEC

Ask Google Engineers Anything
Chris DiBona, Google

- 55 Google employees attending OSCON this year
- mostly end-user questions about Google+ circles and API
- or running Go on android
- or why does my telco not do firmware releases for my smartphone
- or not happy with Google search results this month
- I asked about original reason for GFS. Originally, the hardware was really that flaky, and Google even actively bought bulk refurbed computers and RAM, sometimes off the back of a truck. Got a gopher plushie in return.
- also some good feedback complaints: google groups UI inadequate for managing 350 groups in an Education scenario
- inadequate data import tools for non-profit users of groups, mentioned by a religious charity.

How Not to Design Like a Developer: Open Source Can Look Good Too!
Chrissie Brodigan, Mozilla/Firefox

- KPI vs. git (different goals)
- @sirupsen
- story about the downloads map graphic for FF 4 – a developer silently removed social button graphics, limiting participation of wider audience. Marketing needs to explain why and how other staff fit into outreach programs.
- hang out on #projectdesign
- design contests are a good way to get them to come out of the woodwork
- designers hang out on twitter, not irc
- programmers should avoid big red buttons that scare users, and improve accessibility
- Inkscape, Blender, HTML and CSS are some Open Source tools for design mockups
- do AB testing or survey users
- designers want to be martyrs, so be careful they don’t offer more than you are willing to accept (start with 1 icon rather than the whole set)
- take a look at graphics libre for icons
- Quitestrong.com 5 girls who do design

Gearman BOF
Brian Aker

- Gearman polls, beanstalk busy waits
- nice to have feature to give up to another thread
- monitor projects handle launching of workers
- Gearman has durable and non-durable queues
- is a superset of the crap you handrolled. Most of the homegrown apps peak at 50% to 60% of Gearman’s features
- Gearman is production ready, but the postgresql driver less so because of fewer test cases and Brian’s lesser familiarity
- setup ntp and use Gearman coalescence for redundant cron servers
- can inspect queue
- agnostic to backend
- 99designs.com looking at this, same use case as original developer
- I still think that if you already have a database app, adding a status column gets you a lot of Gearman functionality without one more moving part.

MariaDB BOF
Monty Widenius, MontyProgram AB

- Monty mentioned that the latest release of MariaDB 5.3-beta has faster replication from group commit and performance improvements on the master, which also help the slave. Also subqueries and joins work much better.
- Monty talked about his Aria storage engine, which is a replacement for MyISAM that has both transaction and non-transaction modes. It’s intended for users who want the space savings of MyISAM. Over time it may compete with InnoDB.
- Monty’s responsibility is to convince Percona to merge into 1 source base sometime
- it’s estimated that although Oracle still has the InnoDB team, they may only have 1 general MySQL server programmer left.
- he explained that MontyProgram developers work 50% on feature requests from end-users, and 50% Open Source-related. So paid requests for 1 week of work really need to cover 2 weeks of developer time for that model to work. Typically a medium-sized change is roughly $12,000 and includes development, testing and documentation.
- Zmanda got FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK NO CHECKPOINT for a beer, though. :) Monty was able to find a code path that could be locked to prevent Aria and MyISAM from writing anything during the backup.
- I sponsored WL#232 for USD$100 to add a SHUTDOWN statement to MySQL
- Monty explained that MERGE tables may be a better choice than MySQL partitions for logging applications.
- attendees from MontyProgram, SkySQL, Percona, DeNA

AskMonty: MySQL “Wishlist” Session from an online travel agency
MySQL Manual 5.5: FLUSH Syntax

Perl Lightning Talks
Hosted by Geoff Avery

- a talk on why arrogant community members telling others that “they need a thick skin” is unhelpful
- a talk by a young Perl community member on getting commit access, and how others can get the spirit and contribute
- Larry did several talks, mostly encouraging backporting Perl6 features to Perl5 it seemed, perhaps as a replacement to going Moose
- nice song on the importance of public libraries, which face shutdown due to economic budgeting problems in Australia and USA
- nice comedy juggling act comparing programming languages. Perl6 was omitted as “nothing has been updated in 5 or 6 years”, prompting Larry to say that he was happy he has a thick skin. See above. :)
- afterward, I talked to a booking.com rep about why a European company needed to actively recruit in USA and world-wide. He said that European developers are happy working where they are now, and it’s easier to recruit in places with mobile workforces like the USA. He would like to hire a couple developers per week to meet their development schedule.

]]> http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2011/07/oscon-2011-portland/feed/ 0 Google Translate API Programming Notes http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2011/04/google-translate-api-programming-notes/ http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2011/04/google-translate-api-programming-notes/#comments Sat, 23 Apr 2011 21:41:47 +0000 Administrator http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/?p=3033 Continue reading →]]> I decided to try out the Google Translate API (v1), part of the Google Language API Family this weekend.

The Google Translate API supports various housekeeping functions plus 2 main features:

  1. language detection
  2. language translation.

Although machine translation does not generally provide a high quality, polished result for arbitrary input, it can still be useful for more limited requirements.

For this project, I had 11 existing translations (Google Translate supports 56 languages) for a web site that needed a small incremental update of 65 short strings, and could compare the Google Translate results with a human-translated corpus for most of the languages.

Conveniently, the new strings included day and month names, which is easy for machine translation to get right. :)

The most important thing to do is to first read the Google Translate TOS first. There are several limitations and requirements:

  • you should register for an API key, provide a referer URL for the project, and provide the IP address of the requesting host
  • “powered by Google” must be displayed in any human-readable UI that relies on Google Translate
  • the maximum allowable input is 5,000 characters
  • Automated requests are prohibited; all requests must be made as a result of an end-user action.
  • All websites or apps which use Google APIs must be free of charge.

As a practical matter, you should detect a TOS error and stop submitting API requests, ie. responseDetails is ‘Suspected Terms of Service Abuse. Please see http://code.google.com/apis/errors‘.

JSON and REST are supported, so any programming language can be used. Google provides code samples in JavaScript, Flash, Java, PHP, Python and Perl. UTF-8 is the character set used.

I used the Perl sample code, fixed the string concat bug (!) in the first line, and enhanced it to comply with the TOS.

I found that no API key is needed if translation requests are throttled by 10 seconds each.

Also, you may submit input embedded in HTML, but the output translation can reorder the HTML tags, in some cases changing the final appearance. I noticed that anchor and strong elements were re-ordered in my results.

wikipedia: Machine translation
CLDR – Unicode Common Locale Data Repository
GeoNames.de – Languages of the World
Perl CPAN Module DateTime::Format::CLDR
Apertium Machine Translator API
Google to close Translation API service

]]> http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2011/04/google-translate-api-programming-notes/feed/ 0 IMUG: Translation Tools in the Cloud: TermWiki & ReviewIT http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2011/01/imug-translation-tools-in-the-cloud-termwiki-reviewit/ http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2011/01/imug-translation-tools-in-the-cloud-termwiki-reviewit/#comments Fri, 14 Jan 2011 05:44:56 +0000 Administrator http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/?p=2835 Uwe Muegge and Matt Arney from CSOFT gave a talk on their TermWiki & ReviewIT localization tools at IMUG tonite.

I watched the lecture via Adobe Connect webcast, which worked fairly smoothly.

Thanks again to Adobe for hosting the meeting.

]]> http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2011/01/imug-translation-tools-in-the-cloud-termwiki-reviewit/feed/ 0 FileMaker Pro 11 Notes http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2010/11/filemaker-pro-11-notes/ http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2010/11/filemaker-pro-11-notes/#comments Mon, 01 Nov 2010 18:05:22 +0000 Administrator http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/?p=2446 Continue reading →]]> I recently had the opportunity to review a medium-sized database application written in FileMaker.

General History

FileMaker is a non-SQL RDBMS that can be aptly described as a “Desktop Database.” It stores an entire database in a single file, including data, scripts and layouts (FileMaker views), though you can link to multiple FileMaker database files.

It originated in 1982, is somewhat cross-platform (Windows and Mac clients, Mac servers) and has advanced Japanese support.

Apple/Claris purchased FileMaker around 1990.

Current FileMaker 11 Versions and Retail Pricing

Version Price Notes
FileMaker Pro 11 $299.00/user named Pro, but not so much.
FileMaker Pro 11 Advanced $499.00/user includes Step debugger
FileMaker Server 11 (Mac-only) $999.00 requires FileMaker Pro or Advanced, sharing with 250 users.
FileMaker Server 11 Advanced (Mac-only) $2,999.00 requires FileMaker Pro or Advanced, adds ODBC and Web publishing, sharing with unlimited users.
Bento 3 $49.00/user Personal version of FileMaker with limited features.

Note that there are a variety of academic, volume, site and annual discounts.

Programming Language

FileMaker uses the Step scripting language … meaning programming with a sequence of menu clicks. Scripts cannot be saved as external files or imported from text files in general, though complex steps can be pasted into an input box, one at a time. You can also use ^A, ^C and ^V to copy an existing Step script to another script.

There is a 3rd-party editor you can try, FmPro Script Diff.

Experienced programmers would consider the lack of a real programming language to be a major weakness, on par with also not parsing SQL.

Filemaker Pro 11 Advanced has a debugger.

Interesting Features

One can always learn something new by looking at different products.

FileMaker’s interesting features include:

  • QuickStart databases – 31 simple but polished sample apps for typical business and personal mgmt.
  • Query By Example using a blank layout form
  • QuickFind search across many fields
  • FileMaker clone feature – copy of app minus data records
  • FileMaker snapshot links – like a bookmark of your active database settings that can be sent to other people
  • layout editor/grid control built-in (comparable to dBase in the 80′s)
  • web browser built-in to layout editor

Disappointments

FileMaker’s disappointments include:

  • weak scripting language (Step scripting)
  • global fields (work columns) are often needed and tend to co-mingle with data
  • no SQL parser, just ODBC support for external data sources
  • occasionally awkward navigation, ie. no way to go directly from Table View to Layout View
  • requires layout to be created before changing data (no default table mode layout)
  • layouts are static and require re-editing after new fields are added to tables
  • FileMaker 11 has color charts, but they’re more suitable for on-screen visualization than publication
  • Step debugger should be included in all versions, not just Advanced
  • simple database apps are really easy to create and maintain, but moderately advanced database apps are really hard and require a FileMaker consultant.
  • updates tend to be very incremental, seldom worth price of upgrade (FileMaker 11 still uses FileMaker 7 database format .fp7)

Recommendations

FileMaker has a lot of shortcomings compared to other databases that support SQL natively.

Here’s some situations where I can recommend FileMaker if there’s a software budget:

  • existing FileMaker apps are working fine and little enhancement programming is expected in the future
  • the existing userbase is happy and knowledgeable with FileMaker
  • the QuickStart apps are adequate for administrative functions without any customization.

I would not recommend FileMaker where:

  • extensive programming is required, since Step scripting is not really programming, and there is no built-in script text editor.
  • version control of programs is required, since Step scripts cannot be exported or imported.
  • partner database links are required, since other databases are more well-known in the enterprise
  • SQL is the standard query language, since there’s no native SQL parser, just ODBC support.
  • there’s limited software budget or license management administration available.
  • future migration is expected to a SQL RDBMS product, since there really is no migration path for FileMaker Step scripts, layouts, reports or charts, or non-trivial schemas, although you can try a 3rd-party tool, FmPro Migrator.

If you really need a “Desktop Database”, recent versions of Microsoft Office include an increasingly reliable version of Microsoft Office Access database included in the licence price as an alternative “Desktop Database.”

Microsoft Access databases can be more easily migrated to Microsoft SQL Server (or MySQL with Bullzip Access to MySQL) later, if so desired.

Otherwise, bite the bullet and use an RDBMS like MySQL, PostgreSQL or Oracle and budget to do programming in Perl or PHP.

wikipedia: FileMaker
filemakermagazine.com: Snapshot Launcher
wiki.postgresql.org: Porting from FileMaker Pro to PostgreSQL (2001)
dev.mysql.com: FileMaker to MySQL Migration
FileMaker 11 ODBC and JDBC Guide
applelinks.com: Bento 3 Review

]]> http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2010/11/filemaker-pro-11-notes/feed/ 0 HTTP to HTTPS and CDN Transitions in Web Browsers and Email Clients http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2010/09/http-to-https-transitions-in-web-browsers-and-email-clients/ http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2010/09/http-to-https-transitions-in-web-browsers-and-email-clients/#comments Wed, 01 Sep 2010 08:36:04 +0000 Administrator http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/?p=2322 Continue reading →]]> It’s easy for front-end designers and server-side engineers to create web sites that don’t play well when SSL and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are added to the site.

Fortunately it’s also easy to solve that by understanding how to design HTML and site structure in advance to support those.

One of the most helpful things that can be done is to have well-defined URLs for HTML, images, CSS and JavaScript in the following scenarios:

  • homepage content rooted under /, like ., images, css and js respectively
  • admin site content rooted under /app, like ., images, css and js
  • CDNs where you may store content in the future, such as a network-local proxy, Amazon, Akamai or Limelight. Generally a remote URL is overlaid onto the homepage or admin site structures listed above.

If you have localized content, each of the subdirectories above may be subdivided by ISO language code also.

Generally HTML and URLs intended for web browsers and email clients needs to be considered separately:

  • web browsers handle relative URLs well
  • email clients do not handle relative URLs as well as browsers, if at all. For example, not using an absolute URL or not specifying the scheme (ie. //domain.com) will cause problems in most email clients.
  • in both cases, HTTP servers can use URL rewriting if necessary to make changes after the design is done.

Relative URLs not only help with HTTP to HTTPS transitions, but also in creating developer sandboxes, and test and QA servers.

Try to make as many links as possible relative in your HTML as possible if you’re planning on using SSL or test servers in the future. Fixing the links later can be expensive as it requires testing the entire site again for broken links.

By having reserved directory paths for images, css and html, it’s possible to set far-future expiry times to improve cacheability of those assets. However, the filename may not be reused, so new version of images need to receive a new filename or else caches will continue serving the old content.

And by having a URL available for items that could be served from a CDN, it’s possible to configure your CMS to be CDN-aware from Day One and avoid site changes and testing later. One of the first things I check when evaluating CMS programs these days is how I would easily be able to change serving images from a local web server to a remote CDN.

]]> http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2010/09/http-to-https-transitions-in-web-browsers-and-email-clients/feed/ 0 IMUG: How Google Built a Strong & Robust I18N Organization in Four Years http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2010/08/imug-how-google-built-a-strong-robust-i18n-organization-in-four-years/ http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2010/08/imug-how-google-built-a-strong-robust-i18n-organization-in-four-years/#comments Fri, 20 Aug 2010 09:00:16 +0000 Administrator http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/?p=2281 Continue reading →]]> At IMUG tonite Manish Bhargava from Google reprised his talk on “How Google Built a Strong & Robust I18N Organization in Four Years”, previously presented at the WorldWare Conference. Manish is the product manager for Google’s 40 language initiative.

This was a fairly non-technical general talk on Google’s efforts to realize their mission statement.

What was most notable about the talk is that no mention was made of where their i18n staff came from. Google largely gained their deep Internet i18n knowledge from hiring former Netscape and IBM ICU staff. Currently the group hires based on referrals of experienced people.

It was decided to pick the 40 most natural languages as they represented 99.7% of web traffic. (To get to 100% would require 120 more languages.) Google search itself is in 113 languages, and GMail in 54, soon to be 58. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, is a strong supporter of this effort and quality of user experience is considered more important than cost of translation.

Lux-IQ: program to get feedback on international User experience and localization quality of various Google products from a network of in-market evaluators.

Example findings:

Issue type

Language/translation, interaction design, feature missing, feature bugs, visual design, data quality, other. Total.

Google translation toolkit used for ads. Machine translation. Some ad customers request translation into 50 languages for example.

Language Findits. 3 hour testing party for language-related products. Very successful.

Language console would help with finding already translated strings.

Globalization continuum

I18n prd, intl 1-stop, i18n checklist, country planningn legal, content, l10n checklist, translation, review and qa

I18n, planning, deployment

All is global, weekly pushes, 0.25 seconds for search query response

Quality is more important than cost.

High level advice alone – not effective
Deliver concrete solutions, hands-on
Adapt to product needs, constraints and priorities
Earn credibility
Success breeds success
Be persistent

Metrics: intl revenue, top10 problems
Graph of i18n api adoption

Challenges

Unicode redesign
Bidi in webapps
Broad range of environments
I18n technologies
Deep dives: android, chrome, gmail, youtube: to help critical area, new areas

40 language initiative

Take aways

I18n by design
Educate, evangelize, communicate
Design globally, implement locally
Build credibility. Success breeds success.
Retrofitting happens. C’ets la vie. Learn from it.
“Make it easy to do right, and hard to do wrong.”

3 engineers for 7 months to fix gmail

Thanks to Google for hosting.

Twitter: IMUG

# XIHA Connects Facebook and Twitter Friends with New Multilingual Translation http://tinyurl.com/2ankev2 #L10n about 3 hours ago via web

# Zynga Launches First Localized Game In China: Texas Poker. http://tinyurl.com/2fxp9tm #L10n about 3 hours ago via web

# @localization sorry didn’t see your Q (no hashtag) but their i18n team seems fairly centralized but serves all projects and offices. about 4 hours ago via web in reply to localization

# And the event is over! Thank you Manish, and thank you Andrew Swerdow & the Google i18n intergrouplet for hosting! #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Question: is there a process for self-localization of smaller language? Yes, for example Search recently translated into Hawaiian. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Question: why 40 languages? Those 40 can reach 99.7% of all internet users. Actually 42 now. ~100 more needed for remaining 0.03%. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Many questions from audience. One was how well-integrated is bug-management system? Manish summarized end-to-end process for that. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# @renatobeninatto approximately 60 attended tonight’s Google #i18n event. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web in reply to renatobeninatto

# Manish now summing up: #i18n by Design and other take-aways for any organization. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Google #i18n API adoption has grown 173% since start of the 40 language initiative. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Google has a team dedicated to #Unicode “Redesign”. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# First two points on successful #i18n: not high-level advice alone; deliver concrete solutions or even hands-on help. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# How can an #i18n team make an impact on projects from the outside? Manish offers 6 points. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Amazing how much the Web challenges but also offers opportunities in #i18n. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Interesting timeline now of Google’s Globalization process from i18n thru Planning to L10n. But I’m not going to give it away. :-) #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Apparently this internal Language FindIt program results in far less mischief than other firms’ community translation efforts. :-) #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Manish now onto Language FindIts: Googlers identifying translation & #L10n issues to improve Google products in own languages. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Interesting discussion going on with audience about MT vs. transcreation. And rule-based vs. statistical translation. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# @renatobeninatto Yes they do use Google Translator Toolkit internally for example in automated ad translation. User can then edit. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web in reply to renatobeninatto

# @renatobeninatto I found Petra, she says Hi, but she is still making me ask your question. :-) #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web in reply to renatobeninatto

# @ken_lunde yes similar to Wordware but the entrance fee was far less! :-) Very good presentation, great interaction with audience. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web in reply to ken_lunde

# Google has a program called Lux-IQ to get feedback from local market-savvy non-technical users in all 40 language markets. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# #i18n quality issues include not only basic encoding and locale issues, but also missing features important locally. #imug408 about 7 hours ago via web

# The presentation is now turning to quality issues in #i18n. #imug408 about 7 hours ago via web

# Manish is also presenting case studies, such as their experience with Google Video and Unicode (pre-YouTube). #imug408 about 7 hours ago via web

# And by the way Google is hiring #i18n engineers! #imug408 #jobs about 7 hours ago via web

# Manish has given us perspective on Google’s incredible global growth, and the start of Google’s 40-language initiative in 2007 #imug408 about 7 hours ago via web

# Manish Bhargava, Google #i18n Product Manager, is presenting. #imug408 about 7 hours ago via web

# Tonight’s IMUG event at Google kicked off 1/2 hour late, big crowd not enough badges. :-) #imug408 about 7 hours ago via web

# Going to tonight’s IMUG event @ Google? Maps, directions and more: http://www.imug.org/google/ #imug408 about 10 hours ago via web

# Shirley_Rogers Twitter Unicode Hashtags – http://bit.ly/9ciNuu about 12 hours ago via web Retweeted by i18n_mug

# 57 yes, 5 maybe RSVPs: 8 left for tonight’s 70 chairs. Will it be SRO? Google’s Manish Bhargava is an #i18n star! #imug408 about 12 hours ago via web

# Localization Project Manager, Net-Translators, Sunnyvale, CA. Just posted to IMUG Jobs: http://www.imug.org/jobs/ #L10n #jobs about 13 hours ago via web

# Maps and directions to tonight’s 7 PM Google #i18n event in Mountain View, CA: http://www.imug.org/google/ #imug408 about 14 hours ago via web

# IMUG cannot do webcasts from Google yet. Hope to see you all there tonight! http://tinyurl.com/2f9esas Hashtag will be #imug408 about 14 hours ago via web

# RT @ken_lunde Two font- and CJKV-related Tech Notes now live. http://tinyurl.com/23ffulg & http://tinyurl.com/yzd3hjj <–Kazuraki font! about 16 hours ago via web

# Kazuraki: Adobe’s Groundbreaking New Japanese Typeface http://tinyurl.com/2by46nn Next month’s IMUG event, @ Adobe #imug408 about 16 hours ago via web

# TONIGHT 7 PM: The Google i18n Story http://tinyurl.com/2f9esas Hashtag for this IMUG event @ Google will be #imug408 about 16 hours ago via web

# cathywissink RT @TalkStandards Nascent Web Open Font Format is getting boost thanks to W3C’s new initiatives http://bit.ly/biE85M #typography about 16 hours ago via web Retweeted by i18n_mug

]]> http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2010/08/imug-how-google-built-a-strong-robust-i18n-organization-in-four-years/feed/ 0 O’Reilly Open Source Conference 2010, Portland http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2010/07/oscon-conference-2010-portland/ http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2010/07/oscon-conference-2010-portland/#comments Fri, 23 Jul 2010 23:22:51 +0000 Administrator http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/?p=2140 Continue reading →]]> Once again, the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) was held in Portland, Oregon.

It was a good conference, and we had beautiful weather all week long.

Executive Summary

The themes promoted by the conference organizers were Cloud Computing, NoSQL, Emerging Languages (Scala, Erlang, Parrot, Go) and Android phone development.

The @oscon twitter channel was heavily used to coordinate amongst organizers and attendees. I used the TwiXtreme twitter client program on my BlackBerry.

Plug Computers were very popular in the Expo area. They are 5 watt ARM-based computers running Debian Linux that fit into a power brick-sized case and cost $99 to $129 depending on features. The Marvell booth had a few models on display, from GlobalScale (GuruPlug) and Ionics. High-end models have dual gigabit NICs, multiple USB ports, a WiFi access point and other expansion ports.

There was also continuing buzz regarding Facebook’s Flashcache SSD module (GPL v2) for linux, and also ZFS snapshots.

Tutorials

I went to the Gearman Cookbook tutorial, the first half of the Chef tutorial and some of the Cloud Summit talks.

The Gearman Cookbook tutorial was excellent. After a detailed overview of the Gearman architecture and implementations in Perl and C, a number of use cases were explored in detail, including before and after code samples. The talk was both easy to listen to as an overall survey, as well as providing immediately useful info for those wanting to deploy it.

The Chef tutorial was very detailed – too much so perhaps. I went to the first half only, since I am not planning to implement Chef soon (I use PXE and anaconda/kickstart with CentOS), and did not need that level of detail at this time. cfengine, puppet and chef are ops tools for configuring servers. Chef uses Ruby data structures for its configuration files, and has include files and other useful syntax. Basically, users can “code” server configuration, as if they were traditional apps.

I went to some of the Cloud Summit talks and BOFs, but found that anybody who has done a simple project using EC2 knew as much or more than the speakers, some I would call blowhards.

Marten Mickos, president of Eucalyptus, is refreshing in that he is always clear about being in it for the money, while also promoting Open Source.

Sessions

Some of the most memorable sessions to me were:

Introduction to MongoDB, Kristina Chodorow (MongoDB)

Kristina is the maintainer of the Perl and PHP drivers for MongoDB. She gave an overview of MongoDB, a NoSQL document store, and its command-line interface, which uses JavaScript.

Some day she will release a sharding tool for MongoDB.

Scaling SourceForge with MongoDB, Nosh Petigara (10gen), Rick Copeland (SourceForge.net / GeekNet)

Nosh and Rick gave an excellent review of incorporating MongoDB into the SourceForge site.

- SF query load is mostly read-only
- ops team benchmarked a few NoSQL candidates, and MongoDB won on performance
- original MySQL servers had 64 GB RAM. After migration to MongoDB, same server machines but only 8 GB RAM
- backup dumps are verified to be bitwise the same as masters
- have to be careful not to dump all documents in your database to the network or it will max out switches
- SF relies on first-class data centers and replication slaves, less worried about MongoDB mmap (not crash-safe)
- I personally looked at their performance numbers and site graphs (on an iPad), and the end result was impressive.

Perl Lightning Talks

As always, the Perl Lightning Talks are a highpoint of the conference.

The “cartoon” of Vincent Pit’s remarkable CPAN module(VPIT) contributions was both informative and hilarious. Vincent is a French Ph.D. candidate in advanced geometry.

Cloud BOF (3 Hours)

The Cloud BOF was disorganized, starting 30 minutes late and for some reason was subdivided into 4 audience groups. Startups and vendors trying to make a cloud sales push led the BOF, including cloud and DNS service providers.

The Health Regulations subgroup came up with a couple ways to make the Cloud palatable to regulators by using encryption on all data due to the multi-tenancy issues with sharing public VMs.

I was in the NoSQL group, which discussed general issues and particular successes. Memcached was the clearest winner, while some people also had success with MongoDB and Redis.

My neighbor was an engineer at Postrank.com. He said that they were happy with HAProxy, but much less happy with the unpredictable IO available when running MySQL on EC2. He also said to carefully look at storage volumes available to your instance, as one is a useful tmpfs. They use AuthSMTP to get around EC2 being generally blacklisted for outbound email.

Database BOFs

MySQL BOF

The MySQL AB engineering staff has left Oracle. Monty Program AB (21 staff) has the core developers, and Percona Inc. (32 staff) has the consultants. Oracle still has some of the InnoDB programmers.

The business plan for Monty Program AB is 60% commercially-sponsored MySQL development, and 40% community-request development. Monty would like commercial users of MySQL to sponsor patches that would benefit them.

Mark mentioned that using Nehalem instructions for CRC were much faster, and that Facebook was using partitions for truncating tables instead of doing multi-record deletes. (See his blog for more details.)

One person mentioned using a commercial backup tool, R1Soft, that inserts a linux kernel module to allow filesystem snapshots. He said to carefully test backup and restore in your environment, especially for filesystems greater than 1 TB which may exceed certain block counter limits. Peter said that some of his clients had used it with varying success.

It worked for him in his environment, and the file browser allows selective file restore (he uses it to restore by priority where a system runs multiple applications.) It starts at $299 for the Standard Edition, and also has MySQL Add-on and Enterprise Editions.

PostgreSQL BOF

The PostgreSQL BOF talked about 30 or so changes that went into version 9.

One of the most exciting new features is a native replication feature, called streaming replication (block-based.) The advantage over Slony-I replication is that Slony-I is trigger-based, so has a variety of issues included inability to replicate DDL commands.

Some of the developers mimed replication events, which was rather amusing to watch. Yes, it was taped.

PostgreSQL is released under the PostgreSQL Licence, which is BSDish.

Peter Zaitsev, co-founder of Percona, organized 3 BOFs, including XtraDB, XtraBackup, Maatkit, Percona Server, Sphinx Search and Running Databases on Flash Storage.

Sphinx Search BOF

Andrew Aksyonoff, the original programmer of Sphinx Search (GPL v2), couldn’t make it to OSCON (the good excuse was that he was busy coding), so Richard Kelm (Sphinx sales/customer support honcho) and Peter filled in (Percona is a business partner with Sphinx, and many of Percona’s clients use it.)

Some of the attendees were existing users, like myself, and some from HP and other companies were looking for a large-scale search solution or alternative to Lucene.

Monty mentioned that the latest MySQL 5.1 should be used, as there have been a number of performance and reliability improvements. Full-text search is supposed to be 10x faster than 5.0, and replication is nearly bug-free by now.

Sphinx Search now has real-time index updates in version 1.1.0 beta. Another very nice feature is SQL+FS indexing.

Here is the full Sphinx 1.1.0 changelog.

Running Databases on Flash Storage BOF

The Running Databases on Flash Storage BOF had a combination of MySQL and Postgres users who have tested or used most of the SSD products: FusionIO, violin, Intel, OCZ, etc. Everybody was happy with SSD IOPS performance, but less so with cost and metadata RAM requirements with the add-in boards (FusionIO may require 4 GB RAM for metadata.)

Peter said that 20% to 30% of his clients are already using SSD – across the spectrum of vendors and models. Some are also trying “massive RAM” solutions, like Cisco servers with 384 GB RAM.

Some users had 1+ TB Postgres databases with very thorny backup and mgmt. issues. One solution was to start a snapshot, but not do the copy operation.

Expo Notes

I had an enjoyable talk with Austin Hook, who has operated the OpenBSD Store for many years. He lives near Calgary, the center of OpenBSD/OpenSSH/PF development. He mentioned that some perennial financial contributors had stopped because of the recession, so here’s the donations link.

I also talked to some reps from a Brazilian outsourcing firm, ActMinds. They currently have 400 employees across Brazil and a sales office in Philadelphia. Brazil is only 2 hours ahead of EST. They said the minimum project size is 2 developers and developer turnover a low 5%/annum. Their pricing is $35 to $45/hour.

And I had fun handling the plug computers on display at the Marvell booth. The Ionics boards are amazingly densely populated.

Discussions

I had the opportunity to talk to a long-time Portland resident who works as a computer consultant. He said that the Portland economy is not doing great, and really hasn’t done well since old-growth logging was stopped after 90% of the forests were cleared. And although hundreds of miles of fiber optic has been laid downtown, it’s not available for residential use. However, the Beaverton area does have ubiquitous FTTH.

I also talked to somebody who attended the Emerging Languages talks. He’s working on his M.Sc. in Computer Science, so found those talks fascinating.

Twitter Humor

There were some humorous tweets:

- “my MongoDB and CouchDB mugs are fighting each other.”
- “I got one MongoDB mug, but need two to safely store coffee.”

Notes

Note to self: skip the nightly parties unless you have a date. The bars are too loud to talk to anybody.

Note to the O’Reilly conference organizers: use meetup.com for the BOFs like ApacheCon does. The average audience was about 10 people, and with meetup it would be 4x that.

OSCON 2010 Slides
Tim Bray: Desperate Perl Hacker
Youtube: OSCON 2010 videos
blip.tv: OSCON2010 videos
wikipedia: Plug Computer
Jeremy Zawodny: MongoDB Early Impressions

]]> http://www.jebriggs.com/blog/2010/07/oscon-conference-2010-portland/feed/ 1