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

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20060219 Sunday February 19, 2006

The Dick Cheney Humor Train

For once in a great while we have a political todo with a real smoking gun and it has been some of the most entertaining political hoopla the blogosphere has ever seen. It's like we're under an attack of laugh bombs from the QLGF (doncha know about the Quail Liberation Guerilla Front?). I posted about the I got shot by Dick Cheney page but the conversation fodder keeps on a-coming:

In association with Zazzle.com
Zazzle
Cheney's Got A Gun (Aerosmith spoof) provides the video and soundtrack
The Bob Rivers Show - 102.5 KZOK Seattle (grr... packaging flash as a windows executable)
Dick Cheney Quail Hunt action packed game
Canned Hunting at its Cannedest
Dave Letterman's Top Ten
And no shortage of hardy hars from Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien and so forth.

I've been following this Technorati search for the blogosphere's yucks and the posts from About.com's Political Humor feed for most everything else:

And of course, there are the products:

In addition to the Ready... Fire... Aim t-shirt above, there's Dick Cheney: Reducing the burden on social security one old bird at a time and other stuff
Zazzle
I'd Rather Hunt With Dick Cheney Than Ride With Ted Kennedy and such bumper stickers, t-shirts, yadda yadda
CafePress
Yee haw!

( Feb 19 2006, 08:25:33 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060218 Saturday February 18, 2006

Is There Anybody Who Hasn't Been Shot By Dick Cheney?

The man is on a veritable rampage. It seems as though everybody is getting "mistaken" for quails, republican donors and other kinds of terrorists and paying for it big time. Here's the news on me:
ouch

Beware, Dick might be after you next. Check it out at WHAT SUCKER GOT SHOT BY THE VEEP? Fill in the form to get a keepsake of your very own.

( Feb 18 2006, 01:13:54 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060216 Thursday February 16, 2006

What Does Yahoo! Have Against Baseball?

Yahoo! has feeds, lot's of them. And they have a lot of sports feeds: NFL, NBA, NHL ... they have NASCAR but they don't have MLB? Sure, they have NCAA baseball but that doesn't count. Full coverage of baseball requires major league news. it's time for spring training to resume and they don't have MLB. What's up with that? Sure, too much hot dogs and cracker jacks are bad for you but c'mon. Are they communists or something? I bet they don't like apple pie, either.

Update
Well, they weren't apparent from those pages I looked on. But as some kind readers have advised me, there is a feed for MLB at [XML]. Thanks!

( Feb 16 2006, 11:03:34 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060214 Tuesday February 14, 2006

Google Buys Measure Map

Wow, Jeffrey Veen posted to Google Blog, the GOOG is now the proud owner of Measure Map. Congrats to the Adaptive Path folks!

( Feb 14 2006, 04:29:44 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


Oracle's "Resistance is Futile" Message to MySQL?

Five months after scooping up InnoDB, a major technology provider to MySQL AB, it looks like Larry is borging them further. MySQL users who depend on InnoDB for transaction support were no doubt shaken by that announcement but, since MySQL has other backends, there's at least some assurance there that transactional capabilities won't be completely chopped into little pieces, wrapped in a carpet and tossed into a Redwood Shores swamp; there's always other vendors, like Sleepycat and their BerkeleyDB product, right?

Bwah hah hah! Larry's got a Bloody Valentine for you now! Seems as though an undisclosed sum has been passed and another one bites the dust. This article suggests that Oracle's also set its sites on JBoss and Zend (the latter of which currently has BD2 support front and center on their home page). Mark Fluery and Larry Ellison ... that has a ring to it!

I think it's time to solve the PostgreSQL database replication problem (no, Slony is not a good answer) for once and for all, lest Larry's bloodthirst vaporize MySQL.

( Feb 14 2006, 03:55:40 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060213 Monday February 13, 2006

URL.hashCode() Busted?

I did a double take on this: 

        HashSet set = new HashSet();
        set.add(new URL("http://postsecret.blogspot.com"));
        set.add(new URL("http://dorion.blogspot.com"));
        for (Iterator it = set.iterator(); it.hasNext();) {
            System.out.println(it.next());
        }
I was expecting to get output like 
http://postsecret.blogspot.com
http://dorion.blogspot.com
or 
http://dorion.blogspot.com
http://postsecret.blogspot.com
But all that I got was 
http://postsecret.blogspot.com

Hmmm....

The java.net.URL javadoc says what I'd expect "Creates an integer suitable for hash table indexing." So I tried this: 

        URL url1 = new URL("http://postsecret.blogspot.com");
        URL url2 = new URL("http://dorion.blogspot.com");
        System.out.println(url1.hashCode() + " " + url1);
        System.out.println(url2.hashCode() + " " + url2);
and got this 
1117198397 http://postsecret.blogspot.com
1117198397 http://dorion.blogspot.com
I was expecting different hashCode's. Either java.net.URL is busted or I'm blowing it and my understanding of the contract with java.lang.Object and its hashCode() method is busted.

( Feb 13 2006, 07:37:29 PM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


Pretty Fly For A White Guy

A common topic of discussion within Technorati is the audience that we serve. We strive to be of service to both the authors (bloggers) and non-bloggers (the blogosphere's newbie readers) alike as well as the advertisers who help pay us. Being generally focused on more geekly topics, I'm oft reminded that my interests are shared only amongst other "middle aged white guys talking about Ruby on Rails" (hey, I'm not that narrow!), but the blogosphere is deep and wide across topics, locales and other demographics.

Yep, even discounting the excess hype aspect, rails is cool. As a matter of fact, I'm pleasantly surprised with the easy read that Agile Web Development with Rails is. Buy it, it's a great book! Unfortunately, it's kind of an academic interest for me at this point. I actually want to reduce the number of programming languages that we're using at Technorati. While it's great to enable developers to contribute to and consume our service oriented architecture with the languages and frameworks that they are most productive in, there's also a battle against degeneration of standards and practices; the blade cuts both ways. Expertise sharing across different programming environments can be difficult and hiring the polylingual programmer is sufficiently challenging already (did I fail to mention that we're hiring?); simplify by constraining is one of the recurrent themes of AWDR's reference to "convention over configuration." In the case of programming language repertoire, less can be more. Anyway, since I'm the only one at Technorati (that I know of) with a rising enthusiasm for Rails, it's unlikely it'll be in use for work stuff anytime soon, bummer. Meantime, I'm just another white guy talking about ruby on rails... JAWGTAROR.

On the topic of who the bloggers are, it's an ever-unfolding story; Dave's State of The Blogosphere is one snapshot into it. Well, I'll be at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference's session on data oogling The Data Dump: Fun with Graphs and Charts with some more goodies. The Technorati platform has a rich set of data streams to tap, so this should be fun! See ya in San Diego!

( Feb 13 2006, 09:17:20 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


20060208 Wednesday February 08, 2006

BerkeleyDB's "Tied Hash" for Java

One of the really wonderful and evil things about Perl is the tie interface. You get a persistent hash without writing a boat load of code. With Sleepycat's BerkeleyDB Java Edition you can do something very similar.

Here's a quick re-cap: I've mentioned fiddling with BerkeleyDB-JE before with a crude "hello world" app. You can use the native code version with Perl with obscene simplicity, too. In years past, I enjoyed excellent performance with older versions of BerkeleyDB that used a class called "DB_File" -- today, the thing to use is the "BerkeleyDB" library off of CPAN (note, you need db4.x+ something for this to work). Here's a sample that writes to a BDB: 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use BerkeleyDB;
use Time::HiRes qw(gettimeofday);
use strict;

my $filename = '/var/tmp/bdbtest';
my %hash = ();
tie(%hash, 'BerkeleyDB::Hash', { -Filename => $filename, -Flags => DB_CREATE });
$hash{'539'} = "d\t" . join('',@{[gettimeofday]}) . "\tu\thttp://www.sifry.com/alerts";
$hash{'540'} = "d\t" . join('',@{[gettimeofday]}) . "\tu\thttp://epeus.blogspot.com";
$hash{'541'} = "d\t" . join('',@{[gettimeofday]}) . "\tu\thttp://http://joi.ito.com";
untie(%hash);
Yes, I'm intentionally using plain old strings, not Storable, FreezeThaw or any of that stuff.
To prove that our hash was really persistent, we might do this: 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use BerkeleyDB;
use strict;

my $filename = '/var/tmp/bdbtest';
my %hash = ();
tie(%hash, 'BerkeleyDB::Hash', { -Filename => $filename, -Flags => DB_RDONLY });
for my $bid (keys %hash) {
    my %blog = split(/\t/,$hash{$bid});
    print "$bid:\n";
    while(my($k,$v) = each(%blog)) {
        print "\t$k => $v\n";
    }
    
}
untie(%hash);
Which would render output like this: 
541:
        u => http://http://joi.ito.com
        d => 1139388034903283
539:
        u => http://www.sifry.com/alerts
        d => 1139388034902888
540:
        u => http://epeus.blogspot.com
        d => 1139388034903227

Java has no tie operator (that's probably a good thing). But Sleepycat has incorporated a Collections framework that's pretty cool and gets you pretty close to tied hash functionality. Note however that it's not entirely compatible with the interfaces in the Java Collections Framework but if you know those APIs, you'll immediately know the Sleepycat APIs.

com.sleepycat.collections.StoredMap implements java.util.Map with the folloing cavaets:

  1. It doesn't know how big it is, so don't call the size() method unless you want to see a UnsupportedOperationException
  2. You can't just abandon java.util.Iterators that have been working on a StoredMap, you have to use com.sleepycat.collections.StoredIterator's .close(Iterator) method to tidy up.
But that's no big deal.

So what does the code look like? Well, let's say you wanted to store a bunch of these vanilla beans in the database: 

public final class ImmutableBlog implements Serializable {

    private static final long serialVersionUID = -7882532723565612191L;
    private long lastmodified;
    private String url;
    private int id;
    
    public ImmutableBlog(final int id, final long lastmodified, final String url) {
        this.id = id;
        this.lastmodified = lastmodified;
        this.url = url;
    }
    public int getId() {
        return id;
    }
    public long getLastmodified() {
        return lastmodified;
    }
    public String getUrl() {
        return url;
    }
    
    public boolean equals(Object o) {
        if (!(o instanceof ImmutableBlog))
            return false;
        if (o == this)
            return true;
        ImmutableBlog other = (ImmutableBlog)o;
        return other.getId() == this.getId() &&
            other.getLastmodified() == this.getLastmodified() &&
            other.getUrl().equals(this.getUrl());
    }
    
    public int hashCode() {
        return (int) (id * 51 + url.hashCode() * 17 + lastmodified * 29);
    }
    
    public String toString() {
        StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer(this.getClass().getName());
        sb.append("[id=")
        .append(id)
        .append(",lastmodified=")
        .append(lastmodified)
        .append(",url=")
        .append(url)
        .append("]");
        return sb.toString();
    }
}
note that it implements java.io.Serializable
This is a class that knows how to persist ImmutableBlogs and provides a method to fetch the Map: 
public class StoredBlogMap  {
    
    private StoredMap blogMap;
    public StoredBlogMap() throws Exception {
        init();
    }
    
    protected void init() throws Exception {
        File dir = new File(System.getProperty("java.io.tmpdir") +
                File.separator + "StoredBlogMap");
        dir.mkdirs();
        EnvironmentConfig envConfig = new EnvironmentConfig();
        envConfig.setAllowCreate(true);
        Environment env = new Environment(dir, envConfig);
        DatabaseConfig dbConfig = new DatabaseConfig();
        dbConfig.setAllowCreate(true);
        Database blogsdb = env.openDatabase(null, "blogsdb", dbConfig);
        Database classdb = env.openDatabase(null, "classes", dbConfig);
        StoredClassCatalog catalog = new StoredClassCatalog(classdb);
        blogMap = new StoredMap(blogsdb,
                new IntegerBinding(), new SerialBinding(catalog, 
                        ImmutableBlog.class), true);
    }
    
    public Map getBlogMap() {
        return blogMap;
    }
}
The majority of the code is just plumbing for setting up the underlying database and typing the keys and values.
Here's a unit test: 
public class StoredBlogMapTest extends TestCase {

    private static Map testMap;
    static {
        testMap = new HashMap();
        testMap.put(new Integer(539), 
                new ImmutableBlog(539, System.currentTimeMillis(), 
                        "http://www.sifry.com/alerts"));
        testMap.put(new Integer(540), 
                new ImmutableBlog(540, System.currentTimeMillis(), 
                        "http://epeus.blogspot.com"));
        testMap.put(new Integer(541), 
                new ImmutableBlog(541, System.currentTimeMillis(), 
                        "http://www.arachna.com/roller/page/spidaman"));        
    };
    private StoredBlogMap blogMap;
    
    protected void setUp() throws Exception {
        super.setUp();
        blogMap = new StoredBlogMap();
    }
    
    public void testWriteBlogs() throws Exception {
        Map blogs = blogMap.getBlogMap();
        for (Iterator iter = testMap.entrySet().iterator(); iter.hasNext();) {
            Map.Entry ent = (Map.Entry) iter.next();
            blogs.put((Integer)ent.getKey(), (ImmutableBlog)ent.getValue());
        }
        int i = 0;
        for (Iterator iter = blogMap.getBlogMap().keySet().iterator(); iter.hasNext();) {
            iter.next();
            i++;
        }
        assertEquals(testMap.size(), i);
    }
    
    public void testReadBlogs() throws Exception {
        Map blogs = blogMap.getBlogMap();
        Iterator iter = blogs.entrySet().iterator();
        while (iter.hasNext()) {
            Map.Entry ent = (Map.Entry) iter.next();
            ImmutableBlog test = (ImmutableBlog) testMap.get(ent.getKey());
            ImmutableBlog stored = (ImmutableBlog) ent.getValue();
            assertEquals(test, stored);
        }
        StoredIterator.close(iter);
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        junit.textui.TestRunner.run(StoredBlogMapTest.class);
    }
}
These assertions all succeed, so assigning to and fetching from a persistent Map works! One of the notable things about the BDB library, it will allocate generous portions of the heap if you let it. The upside is that you get very high performance from the BDB cache. The downside is... using up heap that other things want. This is tunable, in the StoredBlogMap ctor, add this: 
// cache size is the number of bytes to allow Sleepycat to nail up
envConfig.setCacheSize(cacheSize);
// ... now setup the Environment

The basic stuff here functions very well, however I haven't run the any production code that uses Sleepycat's Collections yet. My last project with BDB needed to run an asynchronous database entry remover, so I wanted to remove as much "padding" as possible.

( Feb 08 2006, 12:22:21 AM PST ) Permalink View blog reactions


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


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