What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]

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20060206 Monday February 06, 2006

PHP Best Practices, Frameworks and Tools

I've annoyed PHP enthusiasts, friends and colleagues alike, with my distaste for PHP. There's nothing intrinsically bad, buggy or poorly performing about PHP per se. It's real simple: a lot of PHP code that I've had to pick up the hood on is a mess and is susceptible to worlds of instability and bugs. The common symptoms I see are mixing business logic, undeclared variables and globals, display code and SQL all scrambled up along with a complete absence of automated tests -- an intractable mess as soon as you want to refactor it. Sorry, my PHP-loving friends, it's nothing personal. I've used PHP longer than most of you. In 1995 or thereabouts it was a refreshing change from Perl CGI's with "print" statements. But now, I frankly don't get all of the zealous passion that PHP proponents have. I'm sure some of the suggestions I've heard ("turn off globals in php.ini", "read Sterling Hughes", "buy PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice", etc) are all good. I'm sure there are PEAR contributions that are legible and well factored (though, there are those that are not). But all of that misses the point. I'm confident that I or someone else could eventually derive a tool set that meets a rigorous standard for maintainable code. What concerns me are the prevalent practices and establishing best practices. I want to work with the someone else to establish them.

OK. So if it were upto me to establish best practices with PHP, what would I do?

Well, for one, I'd insist on using PHP classes with clear API's. I hate seeing PHP code with a long list of require_once statements, all of which can bring new functions and globals into the current scope. When files are used as grab-bags of functionality, when you're asking yourself "Which included file provided this function or that function? Rewind to read the source code and remember it..." you're in a World of Hurt. Better to define a class, instantiate it or call its static methods. I've been accused of writing PHP code that looks like Java. Well, I'm not sure if that's a disparagement but I think it was intended to be. Thank you very much!

I think PHP has an equivalent to Perl's "use strict" pragma. Gotta have it. Also, I think PHP 5 has exceptions. Gotta have that, too.

I'd use frameworks to encourage a separation of concerns. Either use an existing one or invent one if none of them are upto the task. On my list of things to look into:

The Web Application Component Toolkit project has a somewhat overwhelming list of PHP MVC frameworks. I'm concerned when I see pre-ambles along the lines of "the goal of this project is to port struts to php..." That sounds like a bad idea. Strut's reliance on inheritance and an awkward XML configuration grammar isn't really something to aspire to... I think the Ruby on Rails folks got it right: convention over configuration.

I'd insist on unit testing. I don't know anybody using PhpUnit but I'm willing to be convinced that it's good. Tracing without random writes to error_log (or worse) is also a must-have, proper use of log4php is probably the ticket.

What am I missing? What are the best practices when programming with PHP? Any experts with these topics, come talk to me. Technorati is hiring.

( Feb 06 2006, 09:14:36 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060205 Sunday February 05, 2006

Web Two Dot Overload

The past few weeks have seen such a saturation of new services, it's mind boggling. The flickr and delicious acquisitions clearly stoked a yodling frenzy (y!a think?). Ya know, it seemed like in months past there were new services every few weeks or so: digg, reddit, memeorandum, personalbee, topix, tailrank, squidoo and on and on and on. But lately, it's hourly.

Now it's megtite, 30boxes, dabble, newroo, wink, tinfinger, podserve and chuquet. Goddamit, TechCrunch has a form to submit your very own web 2.0 venture for coverage. And of course, everyone's variously buzzword compliant with tags, feeds and ajax. Bubble 1.0 was a lot of fun but the sudden thud at the end kinda smarted, didn't it?

pours a glass of two buck chuck
  OK, I'm back.

I'm not diss'ing any of these services, there are a lot of really good ideas out there (nor OTOH am I endorsing any). But can they just take a few days off so we can get some work done? How about a moratorium? No more web 2.0 service launches for 48 hours, please! The funny thing is when the content is all self-referential (to the extent that the subject matter is the same or yet-another-new-service); when the services are capturing our artifacts and our artifacts are talking about them... the top story on megtite right now is coComment, on chuquet it's there along with dabble. It's what happens when you point the mic at the P.A. system.

Please, take a few days off. Go skiing or whale watching or something. Or go old school: content is king! e-commerce! woohoo!

( Feb 05 2006, 09:44:39 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060201 Wednesday February 01, 2006

Large Heap Sizes and OOM

Note to self: If you're getting OutOfMemoryError's, bumping up the heap size may actually make the problem worse. Usually, OOM means you've exceeded the JVM's capacity... so you set -Xms and -Xmx to a higher strata of memory allocation. Well, at least I thought that was the conventional wisdom. Having cranked it up to 1850M to open very large data structures, OOM's were still bringing down the house. OK, spread the work around in smaller chunks across multiple JVMs. But it still bombs out. It turns out that you have to be very particular about giving the JVM a lot of heap up front. This set of posts seems to peg it. I'd figured that nailing a big heap allocation was how I'd prevent OOM'ing. Looks like it's time for me to bone up on JVM tuning. I should probably dig into 64-bit Java while I'm at it.

( Feb 01 2006, 11:57:15 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060129 Sunday January 29, 2006

The Ironies of Blogger

Off and on, I've been using a blog on blogger as a link blog and for other "quickies" to post. Tonight, I was closing some browser tabs with stuff I'd been reading about BerkeleyDB (JE) and went to post them here with ecto.

Strangely, ecto was giving me errors, so I check its console: 

Response:
Your post has been saved as a draft instead of published. You must go to Blogger.com to publish your post. To prevent these errors in the future, request a review at:
http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?blogID=ABCDE
Sorry for the inconvenience
Bizarre! So, I go to the "unlock-blog" URL and get this:

Inconvenience?! The links are to this page that outlines how feeble their anti-spam measures are. They don't have spam-prevention robots, who are they kidding? Will Robinson had a robot. Want to get me started on inconvenience?

The irony here is that it's relatively trivial to produce a list of recently created spam blogs from the blogspot service merely by watching the publish activities on any given day. I do it all of the time. There's a massive amount of spam on that service that percolates up from some simple correlations. And Technorati's index is subsequently scrubbed often on that account. It's a little inconvient. Yet the blogspot people continue to rely on the "Flag As Objectionable" button as their main weapon. Get a clue! Look how trivial to game that system is; I'll surmise that I got googlebowled (bloggerbowled would be more apt) by some dingleberry black hats. Very inconvenient. Given the rampant fraud going on within blogger, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see.

Google is pretty much operating an open-relay, the blogosphere's equivalent of an SMTP spam-mill, because they lack the imagination to watch their own numbers and their spam rolls out unabated. This has been a ballooning problem for at least a year and a half. It's actually kinda inconvenient. Don't think they haven't been advised. Long before maverick-man coined the term "splog" I'd been sending my friends at the big G data on the extent of their problems. They know.

Dudes, go down the hall and ask the smart people at gmail how they do it. Now I have to go through the blogspot captcha gate instead of using ecto to post on their platform, hardly worth the bother.

Enough of the ironies and inconveniences. On the subject of ecto, please think kind thoughts for Adriaan. I am.

( Jan 29 2006, 11:20:57 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060127 Friday January 27, 2006

Beware the Tiger 10.4.4 Update

I finally succumbed to Apple's pleas to update Tiger on my powerbook to 10.4.4. Maven was dumping hotspot errors and Eclipse was misbehaving, so an update seemed in order. Well, when the system came up, my menu bar items (clock, battery status, wifi status, speaker volume, etc) were gone! The network settings were goofed up and I had this profound flash of regret that I hadn't done a backup before doing the update.

Thankfully, Mike Hoover and davidx (co-horts at Technorati) were on hand to assist and dig up the following factoid:

Apparently, this doesn't work for everybody though -- so beware!

( Jan 27 2006, 11:39:48 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060126 Thursday January 26, 2006

Test Dependencies versus Short Test Cycles

A lightweight build system should be able to run a project's test harness quickly so that developers can validate their work and promptly move on to the next thing. Each test should, in theory, stand alone and not require the outcome of prior tests. But if testing the application requires setting up a lot of data to run against, the can run into a fundamental conflict with the practical. How does it go? "The difference between theory and practice is different in theory and in practice."

Recently I've been developing a caching subsystem that should support fixed size LRU's, expiration and so forth. I'd rather re-use the data that I already have in the other test's data set -- there are existing tests that exercise the data writer and reader classes. For my cache manager class, I started off the testing with a simple test case that creates a synthetic entity, a mock object, and validates that it can store and fetch as well as store and lazily expire the object. Great, that was easy!

What about the case of putting a lot of objects in the cache and expiring the oldest entries? What about putting a lot of objects in the cache and test fetching them while the expiration thread is concurrently removing expired entries? Testing the multi-threaded behavior is already a sufficient PITA, having to synthesize a legion of mock objects means more code to maintain -- elsewhere in the build system I have classes that the tests verify can access legions of objects, why not use that? The best code is the code that you don't have to maintain.

<sigh />
I want to be agile, I want to reuse and maintain less code and I want the test harness to run quickly. Is that too much to ask?

My take on this is that agile methodologies are composed of a set practices and principles that promote (among other things) flexible, confident and collaborative development. Working in a small startup, as I do at Technorati, all three are vital to our technical execution. I have a dogma about confidence:

confidence
Testing is where the rubber meets the road. Making a change and then putting your finger to the wind will not suffice. Internal improvement of the implementations, refactoring, are a thrice-hourly activity. Test driven development (TDD) is essential to confidently refactoring (internal implementations) and making alterations to the external interface. Serving this principle is a vital practice: automation. If testing consists of a finger to the wind, a manual process of walking through different client scenarios, it won't get done or it won't get done with sufficient thoroughness and the quality is guaranteed to lapse. Testing should come first (or, failing that, as early as possible), be automated and performed often, continuously. If tests are laborious and time consuming, guess what? People won't run them. And then you're back in wing-and-a-prayers-ville.

Lately I've been favoring maven for build management (complete with all of it's project lifecycle goodies). Maven gives me less build code to maintain (less build.xml stuff). However, one thing that's really jumped in my way is that in the project.xml file, there's only one way and one place to define how to run the tests. This is a problem that highlights one of the key tensions with TDD: from a purist standpoint, that's correct; there should be one test harness that runs each test case in isolation of the rest. But in my experience, projects usually have different levels of capability and integration that require a choice, either:

  1. the tests require their own data setup and teardown cycles, which my require a lot of time consuming data re-initialization ("drop the database tables if they exist", "create the database tables", "populate the database tables", "do stuff with the data")

    2. OR
  2. tests can be run in a predictable order with different known data states along the way
The latter is widely frowned upon by the TDD purists. But purity ain't gonna pay the bills. I reached a point where I had to kick the proverbial dogma under the proverbial karma.

I ended up writing an ant test runner that maven invokes after the database is setup. Each set of tests that transitions the data to a known state lays the ground work for the next set of tests. Perhaps I'd feel differently about it if I had more success with DBUnit or had a mock-object generator that could materialize classes pre-populated with desired data states. In the meantime, my test harness runs three times faster and there's less build plumbing (which is code) to maintain had I adhered to the TDD dogma.

( Jan 26 2006, 06:58:22 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060125 Wednesday January 25, 2006

HTML in the Real World

Google has a study of how HTML is really being used out in the wild. They've posted their results, Web Authoring Statistics

December 2005 we did an analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: it's all in there.
A billion documents sampled, nice!

I think this is a demonstration of Google's expanding interest in grokking the semantics of that are latent in document structures. The results are broken down by

That's pretty good coverage!

I'd love to see how the data changes over time. I suspect parts of the web are becoming more orderly (web 2.0 applications are likely using well formed document structures) while the web as a whole is probably atrophying (the vast installation base of crappy or misconfigured tools are likely the preponderant generators of markup). I'm anticipating a lot of interesting data emerging as the ascendance of microformats continues. Goog, looking forward to follow-up surveys!

( Jan 25 2006, 06:37:29 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060117 Tuesday January 17, 2006

Transparent Division of JDBC Reads and Writes in MySQL

To scale the SQL query load on a database, it's a common practice to do writes to the master but query replication slaves for reads. If you're not sure what that's about and you have a pressing need to scale your MySQL query load, then stop what you're doing and buy Jeremy Zawodny's book High Performance MySQL.

If you've used MySQL replication and written application code that dispatches INSERTS, UPDATES and DELETES to the master while sending SELECTS to the slaves (exception for transactional operations where those have to go to the master), you know how it can add another wrinkle of complexity. Well, apparently there's been a little help in the MySQL JDBC driver for a while and I'm just learning of it now. The ReplicationConnection class in the MySQL Connector/J jar (as of v3.1.7) provides the dispatching pretty transparently.

When the state of the readOnly flag is flipped on the ReplicationConnection, it changes the connection accordingly. It will even load balance across multiple slaves. Where a normal JDBC connection to a MySQL database might look like this 

Class.forName("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver");
Connection conn = DriverManager.
    getConnection("jdbc:mysql://localhost/test", "scott", "tiger");
You'd connect with ReplicationDriver this way 
ReplicationDriver driver = new ReplicationDriver();
Connection conn =
    driver.connect("jdbc:mysql://master,slave1,slave2,slave3/test", props);
conn.setReadOnly(false);
// do stuff on the master
conn.setReadOnly(true);
// now do SELECTs on the slaves
and ReplicationDriver handles all of the magic of dispatching. The full deal is in the Connector/J docs, I was just pleased to finally find it!

I know of similar efforts in Perl like DBD::Multiplex and Class::DBI::Replication but I haven't had time or opportunity. Brad Fitzpatrick has discussed how LiveJournal handles connection management (there was a slide mentioning this at OSCON last August). LiveJournal definitely takes advantage of using MySQL as a distributed database but I haven't dug into LJ's code looking for it either. In the ebb and flow of my use Perl, it is definitely ebbing these days.

( Jan 17 2006, 11:42:09 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060115 Sunday January 15, 2006

Surfacing Microformats in Firefox

Calvin Yu has published his Tails Firefox Extension that will surface the microformats on a page, looks good! The plugin shows the hCals and hCards in a page, he's got a nice screenshot of the hCard renderings. Adding contacts (like Smartzilla) and events would be nice but the plugin could just point at the gateways for contacts and events on Technorati. BTW, for Firefox you can one-click install Technorati search in the browser search box on the Technorati Tools page.

( Jan 15 2006, 04:29:28 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060114 Saturday January 14, 2006

Distributed Conversations with Microformats

Last summer, Ryan King and Eran Globen blogged about citeVia and citeRel as a means of denoting conversation semantics between blog posts. A good summary and subsequent brainstorming is on the Microformats wiki. The blogosphere is currently rich with implicit distributed conversations. A little explicit microformat boost is, IMNSHO, exactly what's needed to nail the coffin in a lot of the crufty old centralized group systems (like Yahoo!'s and Google's). The future of virtual community is here and it is in conversing with blog posts.

There's a lot of discussion of primary citations and secondary props ("Via") but there's not as much on reply-to semantics except for in a few of Eran's posts. Isn't reply-to central to a conversation? Citations are more bibliographic (like when you're linking for a definition, a quote or to identify a source). On the other hand, conversations are about exchanged replies. This is as old as the Internet. Email clients put Reply-to headers in messages when you reply to them. RFC 850 defined it for NNTP over twenty years ago. Reply-to has been the binding for conversations for years, why stop now? That doesn't mean not to use cite and via, those are cool too but they're orthogonal to conversing and more pertinent to definition, quotation and source identification. I'm not entirely sure how I'd like to use via since it's kinda like citing a cite -- maybe it's not necessary at all. If you think of a via as a degenerative quote, then use quote. For instance, I think this makes sense (but then, I had a few glasses of wine earlier... I might not feel the same way in the morning): 

I might agree that <a href="http://theryanking.com/blog/archives/2006/01/08/blogging-while-adult/" rel="reply-to">negative sarcasm</a>
happens (and worse) wherever there is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymity" rel="cite">anonymity</a> it is one of an inductively provable 
aspect of human nature. Countless discussion boards have failed (and continue to) due to participant anonymity. However, it's also important to weigh 
in with the benefits of anonymity, would citizens of censored and oppressed societies be able to  engage in progressive debate without it? 
Take a look at the Global Voices' <blockquote cite="http://joi.ito.com/archives/2005/05/23/second_draft_of_anonymous_blogging_guide.html">
<a href="http://cyber.law.harvard.eduglobalvoices/?p=179" rel="cite">Anonymous Blogging Guide</a</blockquote>.
Wine bottle is corked now. Does that make sense?

( Jan 14 2006, 01:44:44 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


Better, Faster Technorati Blog Embed

Willie Dixon was built for comfort, Technorati embeds were built for speed!

Here's an inside tip: if you are a Technorati member and you claimed your blog a while ago, you can likely optimize how your Technorati embed is served and thus speed up how fast your page renders. Go to your account page for your first claimed blog (or go through them all one by one and click Configure Blog). Does the blog embed code match what's in your template? Load your blog page and View Source to compare. The old school embed code looked like this: 

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://technorati.com/embed/[BLOG-CLAIM-ID].js"> </script>
What you'll find on your account page is this: 
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://embed.technorati.com/embed/[BLOG-CLAIM-ID].js"> </script>
How is this an optimization? Why should you bother updating your blog template from the old to the new style? It's faster! We optimized serving the blog embeds with some additional infrastructure not too long ago. The old way works (built for comfort) but the new one works better (built for speed)!

( Jan 14 2006, 12:23:30 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060113 Friday January 13, 2006

Technorati Is Hiring

Technorati is hiring engineers for the website. You should be expert with PHP (including OO constructs, PEAR libraries, templating and application frameworks -- what works and what doesn't), savvy with XHTML and CSS -- be ready with referencable URLs to demonstrate, experienced with web 2.0 services (i.e. even if you don't blog you podcast or addictively use technorati, flickr, del.icio.us, digg, reddit, rollyo, squiddoo, etc) as well as having programmed in at least one language other than PHP and Javascript. Lotsa bonus points for using microformats and Ruby on Rails!

This position is full time, requires US work eligibility and is on-site (San Francisco, 3rd and Brannan). So, is it you? Check out the job listing and send your resume!

( Jan 13 2006, 01:35:28 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060111 Wednesday January 11, 2006

Google Earth on Mac OS X

I'd played around on a Windows box with Google Earth a bit last summer and was both enamored with technology and saddened by the absence of Mac OS X support. Well, happy days are here again: a Mac version is out now!

The satellite definitely took new pictures of my neck of the woods, last time I'd checked you could see our car in the driveway of our house. Now there's a long shadow over it like they shot the picture very early in the morning, can't see the car but you can see the garbage cans (well, the resolution isn't that good, they look like little blips).

Thanks, G!

( Jan 11 2006, 08:48:32 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060110 Tuesday January 10, 2006

Ramblings on the Tension between Simplicity and Extensibility

There is widespread frustration with standards that try to boil the ocean of software problems that are out there to solve. Tim Bray has a sound advice:

If you're going to be designing a new XML language, first of all, consider not doing it.
In his discussion of Minimalism vs. Completeness he quotes Gall's Law:
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
The tendency to inflate standards is similar to software development featuritus. I'm oft heard to utter the refrain, "Let's practice getting above the atmosphere before shooting for the moon." The scope of what is "complete" is likely to change 20% along the way towards getting there. The basic idea is to aim for sufficiency, not completeness; simplicity and extensibility are usually divergent. Part of the engineering art is to find as much of both as possible.

On the flip side, where completeness is an explicit upfront goal, there are internal tensions there as well. Either building for as many of the anticipated needs as possible or a profound commitment to refactoring has to be reckoned with. The danger of only implementing the simplist thing without a commitment to refactoring is that expediency tends to lead people, particularly if they haven't solved that type of problem before, to do the easy but counter-productive thing: taking short cuts, cutting and pasting and hard coding random magic doodads. As long as there is a commitment to refactoring, software atrophy can be combatted. Reducing duplication, separating concerns and coding to interfaces enables software to grow without declining in comprehensibility. Throw in a little test-driven development and you've got a lot of the standard shtick for agility.

Even though there's a project at work that I've been working on mostly solo, it's built for agility. The build system is relatively minimal thanks to maven. The core APIs and service interfaces (which favors simplicity: REST) are unit tested and the whole thing is monitored under CruiseControl to keep it all honest. This actually saved us the other day when a collaborator needed additional data included in the API's return values. He did the simplest thing (good) but I promptly got an email from CruiseControl that the build was broken. I reviewed his check-in and refactored it by moving the code that was put in-line in the method and moving it do it's own. I wrote a test for the method that fetches the additional data. And then wrote one for the original method's responses to include the additional data. The original method then acquired a flag to indicate whether the responses should be dressed up with this additional data; not all clients need it and it requires a round-trip to another data repository, making it a parameter makes sense since the applications that don't need it are performance sensitive. Afterwards, the code enjoyed additional benefits in that the caching had granularity that matched the distibution of the data sources. Getting the next mail from CruiseControl that it was happy with the build was very gratifying. I need to test-infect my colleagues so they learn to enjoy the same pavlovian response.

Anyway. I'm short on sleep and long on rambles this morning.

There are times when simple problems are mired in seemingly endless hand wringing and you have to stand up to shout JFDI. The Java software world, like RDF theorists and other parochial ivory tower clubs, seems to have a bad case of specificationitus. There are over 300 JSR's. Do we need all of those? On the other hand, great software is generally not created in a burst of a hackathon. There's no doubt that when a project has fallen into quicksand, getting all parties around a table and getting it out is an important way to clear the path. Rapid prototyping is often best accomplished in a focused push. I like prototyping to be used as a warm up exercise. If you can practice getting lift-off on a problem and you can attain high altitudes with some simple efforts, you're likelihood of making it to the moon increases.

( Jan 10 2006, 07:59:45 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060109 Monday January 09, 2006

Claim Your Blog and Put Technorati Pinging On Your Browser Bookmark Bar

A lot of people blog on platforms that don't ping for them. They could just use ecto, it'll help with the post formatting, tagging, media integration as well as pinging. One of the features for Technorati members is that the ping page will render a link to initiate a ping for each of the blogs you've claimed.

If your blog platform won't ping on your behalf, drag those links up to your bookmark bar and click them whenever you publish a new post. The world is changing all around us. When you post, you're part of that change. When you use Technorati, you can watch it change. Welcome to the Real Time Web!

( Jan 09 2006, 10:40:47 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


OOM and HotSpot Bombs

Looks like I better hasten my effort to upgrade to Roller 2.x. This (v1.1) installation hit an OutOfMemoryError a little while ago and crashed the JVM in all of its hotspot glory. I'm suspicious of the caching implementation in Roller (IIRC, it's OSCache). For a non-clustered installation, plain-old-filesystem caches JFW. For distributed caches, JFW applies to memcached. We've been using the Java clients (and Perl and Python) for memcached productively for a long time now. Interestingly, some one was inspired to write a Java port of the memcached server. Crazy! And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

( Jan 09 2006, 10:20:03 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


More Kudos

We must be doing something right. More kudos, this time from Jason Calacanis.

( Jan 09 2006, 12:46:48 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060108 Sunday January 08, 2006

Kudo's For Technorati's Anti-Spam Effort

Props from Jeremy on our anti-blog spam efforts are certainly appreciated. I know we don't have a spam-free index, however the amount of spam we keep out of the index is truly astonishing. Our ping interface is deluged with a torrent of rubbish but we do our best to scrub the nasty stuff out of our update stream. The problem defies conventional mail spam or even blog comment spam analytic techniques as the structure of blog spam is very different. Deep examination of the content and structure across a pattern of web sites is often required to distinguish it as spam but in the end, the indicators are there. Most spammers' publishing behaviors are statistical outliers by nature; the numbers speak for themselves.

We have a lot to do, on this and on many fronts but we try to pay attention to the gripes as a measure of priorities. The kudos are nice, too!

( Jan 08 2006, 08:29:31 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


Character Set Encoding Detection in Java

The levers and dials of character set encoding can be overwhelming, just looking at the matrix supported by J2SE 1.4.2 gives me vertigo. Java's encoding conversion support is simple enough, if not garrulous: 

String iso88591String = request.getParameter("q");
String utf8String = new String(iso88591String.getBytes("UTF-8"));
But what do you do if you don't know what encoding you're dealing with to begin with? It looks as though there are a couple of ways to do it: The docs for Java 1.5.0 look similar but I'm still using Java 1.4.2 (old habits die hard).

( Jan 08 2006, 04:42:53 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060107 Saturday January 07, 2006

AJP13 for Ruby on Rails?

Let's call the CGI specification what it is: a burned out and anemic teenager. While it seems kinda cool that Apache 2.2's is going to get mod_proxy_fcgi, I've long wondered about using AJP13 to interface with web application runtimes other than servlet containers.

Brian McCallister did a kick butt cut-to-the-chase preso on Ruby on Rails at ApacheCon in San Diego. I can imagine why he's gung-ho to get a FastCGI support upto date, it seems to be the the way to run RoR. But since learning that AJP13 was going to be (and now is) built in to Apache 2.2's mod_proxy framework, I've been thinking how much nicer it'd be for other application frameworks to also be able to run outside the HTTP request handling process/thread.

We have some services that run under mod_perl that I've been taking second (and third) looks at. Wouldn't it be nice to deploy that application independent of the HTTP server runtime as one can with a Java webapp? Essentially, when it's boiled down to bare metal, perhaps that's all FastCGI is but it, it... it's CGI! Isn't it just setting/getting global environment variables? STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR? Isn't that so, well, 1994? Maybe I need to think about it some more but that was my take away last time I built anything with FastCGI (admittedly, in the 1990's).

I found what looks like AJP13 protocol support for Perl. Even though I don't read Japanese I'll infer from the context that he was/is interested in the same thing. Though whenever I see "use threads" in Perl, I fear the worst. Anyway, the likelihood of me finding myself with the time on my hands to implement AJP13 in Ruby is low; first, I still need to learn Ruby enough to get crafty.

( Jan 07 2006, 01:20:50 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


MSN bows to China

As I expected to hear about after first reading of Microsoft's policies were reported last summer, MSN has (as reported by msnbc.com) censored a Chinese blog at Beijing's request.

IMO, it behooves the Chinese speaking blogosphere outside of China to vigorously discuss this. Beijing will have to adapt or retreat into isolation, they (and the world) can't afford the latter.

( Jan 07 2006, 08:49:20 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060106 Friday January 06, 2006

Open Source Language Detection

No, not a typo. OSDL is something else. I'm interested in OSLD. I've used Language::Guess to detect languages in arbitrary text with Perl, it works pretty well. But how are folks solving the problem in Java?

It looks like Oracle has language detection as part of their "Globalization Development Kit" ... but what about open source? Sadly, the Nutch Language Identifier Plugin only supports European languages, no CJK. What are the other options?

( Jan 06 2006, 02:22:54 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060105 Thursday January 05, 2006

Regexp'ing simple XML

I ran a test to prove to myself that for simple XML documents, the best way to parse them may be to skip capital P parsing altogether and just use a plain-old regular expression pattern match.

The XML format I wanted to test is the response from the Technorati /bloginfo API. I threw together a Perl based benchmark quickly enough and here are the results: 

Benchmark: timing 10000 iterations of regexp, xpath...
    regexp:  0 wallclock secs ( 0.13 usr +  0.00 sys =  0.13 CPU) @ 76923.08/s (n=10000)
            (warning: too few iterations for a reliable count)
     xpath: 137 wallclock secs (136.17 usr +  0.04 sys = 136.21 CPU) @ 73.42/s (n=10000)
... the regexp parse was three orders of magnitude faster than the XPath parse. I'm curious now what the comparison would be for Java's regexp support versus, say, Jaxen and JDOM (which is how I usually do XPath in Java). In my dabblings with timings, Java regexp's are very fast. Apparently, Tim Bray found this as well.

Here's the Perl code: 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use XML::XPath;
use XML::XPath::XMLParser;
use XML::Parser;
use Benchmark qw(:all) ; 

my $X = new XML::Parser(ParseParamEnt => 0); # non-validating parsing, please

timethese(10000, {
    'xpath' => \&xpath,
    'regexp' => \&regexp
}); 

sub xpath {
    my $b = getBlog();
    my $parser = XML::XPath::XMLParser->new(parser => $X);
    my $root_node = $parser->parse($b);
    my $xp = XML::XPath->new(context => $root_node);
    my $nodeset = $xp->find('/tapi/document/result/weblog/author'); 
    die if ! defined($nodeset);
}

sub regexp {
    my $b = getBlog();
    my ($author) = $b =~ m{<author>(.*)</author>}sm; 
    die if ! defined($author);
}

sub getBlog {
    return q{<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- generator="Technorati API version 1.0 /bloginfo" -->
<!DOCTYPE tapi PUBLIC "-//Technorati, Inc.//DTD TAPI 0.02//EN" "http://api.technorati.com/dtd/tapi-002.xml">
<tapi version="1.0">
<document>
<result>
  <url>http://www.arachna.com/roller/page/spidaman</url>
  <weblog>
    <name>What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]</name>
    <url>http://www.arachna.com/roller/page/spidaman</url>
    <rssurl>http://www.arachna.com/roller/rss/spidaman</rssurl>
    <atomurl></atomurl>
    <inboundblogs>6</inboundblogs>
    <inboundlinks>8</inboundlinks>
    <lastupdate>2006-01-02 18:38:03</lastupdate>
    <lastupdate-unixtime>1136255883</lastupdate-unixtime>
    <created>2004-02-23 12:04:51</created>
    <created-unixtime>1077566691</created-unixtime>
    <rank>false</rank>
    <lat>0.0</lat>
    <lon>0.0</lon>
    <lang>26110</lang>
    <author>
      <username>spidaman</username>
      <firstname>Ian</firstname>
      <lastname>Kallen</lastname>
      <thumbnailpicture>http://static.technorati.com/progimages/photo.jpg?uid=11648</thumbnailpicture>
    </author>
  </weblog>
  <inboundblogs>6</inboundblogs>
  <inboundlinks>8</inboundlinks>
</result>
</document>
</tapi>
};
}

For some of the messaging infrastructure at Technorati where the messages are real simple name/value constructs, we've been passing on using XML at all. Using a designated-character-delimited format string (say, tabs) that can be rapidly transformed into a java.util.Map (or a Perl hash, a Python dictionary, yadda yadda yea) and passing messages that way buys a lot of cheap milage. We like cheap milage.

( Jan 05 2006, 11:26:28 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060104 Wednesday January 04, 2006

Technorati Cosmos Links in Roller

Now that I'm messing around with a roller implementation from within the last 7 months (migrated from Roller 0.98 to 1.1), I'm going to work on closing the gap to 2.0. Migrating all of my apps from an old (3.x) version of MySQL to 4.1.x wasn't too bad. But it appears that somewhere along the way to Roller 2.0, somewhere in the MySQL upgrade cycle perhaps, the post <-> category mappings got mangled and that was resulting in NPE's when the system tries to fetch the categories.

In the meantime, I implemented embedding cosmos links in my posts by patching WEB-INF/classes/weblog.vm (from the 1.1.2 release): 

479,486c479
< #end
< 
< #macro( showCosmosLink $entry )
<     <a href="http://technorati.com/search/$absBaseURL/page/$userName/#formatDate($plainFormat $entry.PubTime )"><img
<         src="http://static.technorati.com/pix/icn-talkbubble.gif"
<         border="0"
<         title="Links to this Post" /></a>
< #end
---
> #end
In the velocity template, I just added: 
#foreach( $entry in $entries )
    <a name="$utilities.encode($entry.anchor)" id="$utilities.encode($entry.anchor)"></a>
    <b>$entry.title</b> #showEntryText($entry)
    <span class="dateStamp">(#showTimestamp($entry.pubTime))</span>
    #showEntryPermalink( $entry )
    #showCosmosLink( $entry )
    #showCommentsPageLink( $entry )
    <br/>
    <br/>
#end
I think the POJO's and macros are different in 2.0 but I'll post a cosmos link update when I get there.

( Jan 04 2006, 07:29:26 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060101 Sunday January 01, 2006

No Vacancy

This blog had a nice long vacation but it is now occupied, again. No, I wasn't in Borneo. I wasn't kidnapped by aliens (you never can be sure though, can you?). Nor was I in the hospital. I just found myself wanting to fix my platform but always too busy to do it. So I just didn't blog at all (except for on my super secret alter-ego blogs). While my efforts at going from 0.98 to 2.0.x of Roller never seemed to work out, I did get it to a 1.1 release (hey, take a little progress if you can't get it all). Most of all, I ditched my old template and stylesheet, they were pretty long in the tooth... (I think) this seems a lot cleaner.

A lot has happened with Technorati, the blogosphere, my deep dives into various technologies and other stuff. And there's more to come. And it's a new year. And speaking of which, it's that time again.

So here are my :

I'm going to get off my butt and get my cardiovascular system working. I'm going to overcome this rotator-cuff injury I've been hoping would just get better by itself (but never has). Ten years ago, I was physically fit easily, never got fat, injuries just healed themselves and I had no lack of physical agility and stamina. It didn't seem to matter that I didn't really try to take care of myself. Well, what a difference a decade makes and it matters now.
No, I don't need a new calling plan. I need to maintain my personal relationships a bit better. Between work and being with the kiddos and my better half, most of my other relationships have suffered.
I'm going to hit it out of the park with Technorati and live happily ever after. Or something like that. Last year, much of the effort at Technorati was focused on scaling models that can keep up with the blogosphere. Maybe we're not out of the woods now but we're in much better shape now than we were a year a ago (or even the duration in my blogging lapse). In 2006, it's showtime. See that fence about 339 feet away from the plate? Watch the ball go over the fence.

OK, so maybe it's all very self centered. Yea sure, somewhere along the way I'll be working to make the world a better place, too. But first things first.

Happy 2006!

( Jan 01 2006, 10:33:29 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


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