This validator may be used in conjunction with sfValidatorAnd() or other constructs, and just allows you to quickly and easily ensure that a field does not contain a value (or an array of values).

/**
* validatorNot verifies that an input value is NOT some other value.
*
* @author     Beau Lebens <beau @dentedreality.com.au>
*/
class validatorNot extends sfValidatorBase {
protected $not;

/**
* Configures the validator
*
* Available Options:
*
*  * not: The value or array of values that the input value should NOT be.
*
* Available Error Codes:
*
*  * not
*
* @param $options Array of options
* @param $messages Array of error messages
*
* @see sfValidatorBase
*
*/
protected function configure($options = array(), $messages = array()) {
parent::configure($options, $messages);
$this->addRequiredOption('not');
$this->addMessage('not', '\'%not%\' is not allowed.');
$this->not = $options['not'];
}

/**
* Compares $value to the restricted/denied value
*
* @param  mixed $value  The input value
*
* @return mixed The cleaned value
*
* @throws sfValidatorError
*/
protected function doClean($value) {
if (!is_array($this->not)) {
$not = array($this->not);
} else {
$not = $this->not;
}
foreach ($not as $n) {
if ($value == $n) {
throw new sfValidatorError($this, 'not', array('not'=>$n));
}
}
return $value;
}

/**
* Access the "not" value
*
* @return mixed value this field may not equal
*/
public function getNot() {
return $this->not;
}
}

My training partner (David) and I started specifically preparing for this grading approximately 3 months before it was scheduled (not counting our normal attendance at training). At the time, we were of the understanding that it would be a 2-day test. Saturday would be an approximately 5 hour “workshop”, where we went over all material from Levels 1 - 3, then Sunday would be the actual test. We were each doing between 7 and 9 hours of training per week in the lead up to the grading, because we obviously wanted to hone our skills, but also to build up endurance since we knew from experience that part of the challenge of the grading was just how long they take.

As it got closer to the date, things changed slightly, and it turned out that we were actually going to compress the entire grading into one day. It’s possible that this was David’s fault :-P. Anyway - knowing that, we really needed to be ready, so we kept working hard, including doing double and triple classes (2 and 3 hours) on Mondays/Wednesdays. I know I personally was trying to eat extra protein as we got closer, based on the suggested nutrition programs that marathon runners follow.

On the Wednesday before the big day, we finished with a double class, and then took the rest of the week off. I came home feeling pretty good and started switching my diet to be heavier on carbohydrates (again, based on marathon nutrition). I ate up big over the next few days and made sure to take a multivitamin as well, just to ensure that my body was getting absolutely everything it needed. I drank Gatorade on and off with water during the days to hydrate myself as much as possible. I also made sure to try and get up at 7:30 each day that week, which was the time I wanted to get up on the actual day. That turned out to be a little hard because I had tickets to see Ben Folds play on Thursday night (awesome) and Quantum of Solace on Friday (not bad, not as good as Casino Royale) but I stuck to it.

Saturday rolled around eventually, and I was up at 7:30, even though I’d been awake, laying anxious in bed for about an hour already. I took a quick shower, then went to get coffee to get me moving. When I got home, I tried to have some breakfast but only ended up eating 3 quarters of my food. I had muffins with banana and honey on them. I gathered my things together and headed off for the gym by around 9:20.

My plan was to have a 6 inch Subway sandwich ready for lunch, so I had called Subway and asked what time they opened on Saturday morning. They told me 8am. No problem. When I got there at 9:30 am however, I was greeted with a sign that said they opened at 10am every day of the week. Thanks. Back at the gym I got my things sorted out, put some stuff in the fridge then started stretching out a little and loosening up. My list of things that I took includes:

• 2 litres of Lemon-Lime Gatorade
• Some “Sharkies“
• 2 x Snickers Marathon Bars
• 3 cut up oranges
• 5 bananas
• Athletic tape and bandaids
• Ankle brace
• Headgear
• Shinpads
• Box/cup (groin protection)
• Boxing gloves
• Mouthguard

We got started at 10am, filling out some paperwork etc, then straight into the tough drills that Christian (our instructor) is famous for. We did a bunch of them, but 2 that stuck in my memory were the “paraplegic drag” and the “log roll”. I’ll leave the details to your imagination. Once we were warmed up (already tired!) we got right into the material. A Level 4 grading requires going through all material for Levels 1, 2 and 3, so we had a lot to cover.

It was going to be a long, hot (it was about 77 degrees outside) day, so Christian was good about giving us frequent hydration breaks, which we needed. The first half of the day was the “workshop” portion of the testing process, where we review all the material and refine our technique. This also serves to tire you out, which means the actual grading process is really testing your muscle memory, rather than your ability to think something through. 5.5 hours after starting, we broke for “lunch” for half an hour and tried to re-hydrate as much as we could, get some food into us, and get ready for the long-haul test that was coming up.

The grading went relatively smoothly, all things considered. We were all tired, and I think everyone there started getting cramps in some part of their body at some point in the day. Mine were in my right calf muscle, which seems to be where I always get them. By the end of the actual technique testing, we were all actually happy to start sparring (also part of the process). I think we did around 10 rounds of fighting, rotating through the entire room of people (there were 8 of us testing). We did about 6 rounds of stand-up sparring and 3 or so rounds of “ground fighting”, where you weren’t allowed higher than your knees (so it might be hands-only, on your knees, or it might be more traditional ground-style fighting).

At the end of that, I was completely exhausted. 11.5 hours after starting, we had finally finished, having effectively covered all material from Levels 1 - 3, twice (once in the workshop, once in the test). I had taken 3 Ibuprofen throughout the day to combat my neck which was giving me a hard time and they started making me feel sick. After we left the gym I was actually sick, which got it out of my system and actually made me feel a lot better A bunch of us headed around the corner to get a celebratory drink (or 3) and then I went home and curled up to die.

Visible or specific injuries for the day:

• My neck was totally out of alignment and was causing me trouble for most of the day
• I rolled my ankle lightly doing one of the drills, so I put on my brace to keep it stable
• Lots of small cuts and scrapes were just part of the deal (scraped the skin off a knuckle doing chokes against the wall)
• Got punched (hard) in the stomach as I advanced into it during technique testing
• Right eye scraped/bruised from someone’s glove in sparring
• Took an elbow right above the temple in ground fighting (we start back-to-back, and I turned the same direction as David’s elbow turned!)
• Lots of bruises all over the place from various hits and collisions

As I said - this was by far (actually by about 3 hours, which is how much longer it was than my previous grading!) the most grueling and intense physical thing I’ve ever done in my life. I’m glad it’s over, but I’m also proud to have completed it. I feel like I worked really hard to accomplish it, and it’s good to know that in the end it was worth it (I think), because I passed. It was quite an experience, and I was glad to share it with the people I did. I’ve got to thank everyone who was there (it was all a team effort), and in particular Christian (our instructor) and David (my training partner) - definitely couldn’t have done it without them.

Now back to resting for the rest of the week before I’m back at it, and into Level 4 classes!

It’s going to be long, so click through to read the full thing.

General Observations

• Really cool space (exposed brick, raw beams etc)
• Very professional set-up (black table-clothes, speakers, video etc)
• Good food/drink (bacon & egg croissants FTW!)
• Lots of seats, no power
• Secured but accessible wifi, but it’s painfully slow (very corporate controlled, thanks Fox)
• Saw/met dotBen right before we got started.
• Seeing/hearing a lot of people from big players like Google and Yahoo here.

Introductions

We’re getting a bit of background on OpenSocial’s development and organization over the last year. Seeing charts on growth over time, global reach (impressive, lots of international networks/apps implementing it). Some stats

• User Reach = 600,000,000
• 1 in every 2 users has installed an OS app
• 7,500+ apps available already

Now we’re getting some “how it used to be” from someone from hi5. He’s talking about their path to supporting OS. Before = “down in the coal mines”, After = “Borat, I liiiiike!”.

Lane from Google is now talking about the OS Foundation. The Foundation was created so that we could create cool stuff, without worrying about Intellectual Property. Also hearing about the structure of the Foundation and how it helps to ensure everyone’s voice is heard. Making sure we know about the new OS wiki and the IRC room (#opensocial on freenode).

Apache Shindig (Java and PHP only) sounds like a cool tool that speeds up development based on discovering information through your social graph.

Apparently all slides from the presentations today should be on the OS site within a day or 2.

Where Can We Go?

• On and off the web (mobile)
• New Features!
• Make it even easier to make it adopt and build, better interop
• OpenID, oAuth etc being completely standard and “required” for new developments

Ali from XYLabs

Small team from India. Started as 3 devs, 1 designer and a QA intern. They’ve developed a number of social applicattions. Containers = Orkut, hi5, Netwall (?), Friendster and MySpace.

Biggest app is PhotoBuzz, which allows users to “buzz” this contacts with a small “greeting” based on pre-built animations. They are profitable, but are focussing on growth rather than revenue right now. Basically they superimpose their animation over a photo supplied by the user and send it as a “greeting card”.

They built a collection of re-usable libraries, made it possible to drop in analytics engines of their choice to keep track of metrics. Strongly suggests watching your numbers and listening to your users. Adapt quickly.

Viral loops and messaging are the biggest things that differ from container (social network) to container.

150,000 - 200,000 new users per day during “the hockey-stick”. They are now working with things like AppEngine to work around the scaling issues.

They split out their front/back-end and put the backend on AppEngine (python), while the frontend was all PHP-powered, and run off their own servers.

Raymond from RockYou

RockYou is a social applications developer. They develop for all platforms and networks. Their monthly reach is 90,000,000 uniques+ and they have over 80 staff members. 12 billion impressions across their network of apps. RockYou is sponsoring drinks/cocktails at the event.

Mission Statement: Engage the world with social applications.

Apps have been installed over 55,000,000 times across all platforms.

SuperPets is a virtual pet application. Adopt, personalize, accessorize their pets, then engage with their friends through their pet.

They have a new service called RockYouAds which provides advertising across different social networks via their application installations.

Design your UI to support slightly different view sizes across all containers.

Different containers implement certain aspects slightly differently. Especially different user information fields available because of policy/privacy, etc.

Even though Facebook doesn’t support OS, you can encapsulate your app and abstract it out to be ported relatively easily if you think ahead. Generally things run in an IFRAME, so you need to abstract away the server communications parts so that you can make it use either OS or FB-specific processes.

Charles from PixChat

They started out with hi5, then ported out to everywhere. hi5 to MySpace took 90 minutes (!!). Orkut took 60 minutes. Googe AppEngine took 3 hours.

OS != Facebook (but you can make them work together).

Google AppEngine rocks (and will save you a LOT of time).

Use jQuery

Use JSON - it’s standardized and gives you the ability to access your data in all languages.

Build an abstraction toolkit (container differences, view sizes, presence detection, etc)

Use viral channels, measure things (Google Analytics with some custom JS triggers to track events).

Scott (MySpace) and Evan (Google)

Talking about OS 0.9 (what’s coming next). Going through the proposal process and how the community is required to approve/block proposals.

Evan talking about changes in 0.9 that make it much easier to build gadgets etc. Generating HTML on your own server and embedding it back immediately, e.g.

<Content href="http://your.server.com"></content>

OS Templates give you a templating language which will be handled by the container.

Splitting out views for apps so that you don’t have to load everything down initially.

Lunch

Pretty impressive lunch was supplied.

Arne (Google) - OpenSocialDevApp

OpenSocialDevApp is an interesting “sandbox” type application that gives you access to a lot of tools and resources to get started working on a new gadget/widget. Generates all sorts of shortcut code for you, helps manage server requests etc.

Zembly (Sun)

A cloud-based development environment for developing OpenSocial applications. It is a social network in and of itself, but it provides a “Wikipedia of OS apps”. Has code, gadgets etc as starting points/components.

Provides an IDE (in the browser) to speed up the process, and includes automated hosting built right in (1-click). Collaborative development by inviting/allowing other users to participate in your coding environment. Creates a network around programming artifacts (snippets, gadgets etc), and gives you activity streams etc. You can even create an iPhone app within it.

It connects to all sorts of APIs on the web, to give you access to do things like Twitter aggregation.

Casey (iWidgets)

They take existing content from big content providers and put it in the social networks where people already are. They make their money through CPM/CPC advertising embedded in their widgets. Write once, deploy everywhere (Facebook is still a challenge).

Has a basic RSS –> widget wizard. If you can use something like Yahoo Pipes or PowerPoint then you can use their product.

Open Social Client Libraries

New set of code libraries in popular languages to get you coding faster. They provide an interface to container queries, accessing data etc. Simplifies the process and abstracts away as many differences between containers as possible.

Global Container Crawl

Instead of a pub crawl, the plan was to work their way around the globe, coding/deploying apps for containers hosted around the world. There were prizes to be had and other incentives, but I had to head home to take care of some other things and get some juice for my laptop (battery life is pretty lame on the MacBook Pro…)

All in all a pretty good day, and a great introduction for me to OpenSocial. I’m looking forward to hopefully getting a chance to check it out in a bit more detail soon.

Yes we did.

It’s been a (long) time coming, but I finally got it online today. I thought it would be fitting. It is a day of change after all. It’s definitely time for a change here at Dented Reality — the previous version was online for around 5 years (April 20, 2003 according to the WayBack Machine). I think it stood up quite well considering the changes that took place in the browser landscape in those 5 years.

Dented Reality v4.0

You may notice that there are a number of new posts here, which just magically appeared. That’s because I was posting while I was developing this site on my laptop, but I didn’t want to post to the old site. For the record, here are all the posts that are new as of today (oldest to newest):

• Stanso: Simple TAgged Note Storage Online
• MyBabyOurBaby Clone Request
• Idea: Daily eBook Delivery
• Comcast FlubCustomizing WordPress 2.5’s Admin PanelBack in Wagin
• Making Internet Explorer Behave Like a Real Browser
• Apple MacBook Pro Dead Battery Problem
• Word of the Week
• Michael Phelps: Changing the façade of the Olympics
• Redundancy, Performance and Geo-Optimization with S3 and CDNs
• Fixed: WP Super Cache not creating meta files (and not working)
• Amazon’s Start-Up Event Tour 2008: San Francisco
• Idea: Amazon Music Exploration Application

There are going to be a lot of small tweaks to be done still, and I’m sure there are some broken links etc, but I think this version is quite a step up from the previous one. It reflects a change in direction for the site and I think does a better job of showing who I am and what sort of projects I engage in.

Dented Reality v5.0

Comments are now open (and powered by IntenseDebate), so please feel free to leave a note on what you think of the new site on this post!

According to iTunes, I have just under 6,000 “items” in my music library. That’s 16.5 days of music, playing 24/7. I like to find new music, and have pretty eclectic musical tastes (literally everything from The Corrs to korn appears in my library). I’d like a tool that helps me do a few things:

1. Find more music by the artists that I like
2. Find new artists that are similar to artists I like
3. Find new genres/categories of music to try out
4. Download/purchase all this music and add it to my iTunes library quickly and easily

Putting all this together, here’s what I’d like (Lazyweb?):

• An Adobe AIR application (that runs on my Mac)
• Full-screen ability, accessed ideally via the Apple Remote, a la Front Row
• Load my iTunes library (or Last.fm account perhaps) and use the play counts as a starting point for exploring music
• UI something like LivePlasma to start with, allowing me to browse related artists, as determined via the Amazon API.
• Navigate the hierarchy/relation-graph of genres to find new/related genres
• Use a CoverFlow-style UI to flick through the album art of albums within genres, showing artist and title on each album.
• Flip an album to view track listing.
• Preview all tracks available via MP3 right there (add them to a queue and let me keep browsing)
• Enable 1-click purchase of MP3 tracks, automatically adding them to my iTunes account once they are downloaded.
• It’d also be cool if this UI/app could run in a “local” mode, where it just provided a navigation experience on my own music collection, while still pulling in related information from Amazon.

That’s all for now - what do you think? What features would you want in a music exploration service? Do you even collect a local library anymore, or do you rely on services like Pandora to provide your beats? I’m also still waiting for a decent system to manage my media on my laptop + home theatre (Mac Mini).

So far I would estimate around 90 - 95% males, and perhaps even a higher than SF-usual ratio of about 90% Mac laptops in use.

NOTE: You know you’re at a “corporate” rather than a “community” event when the only wifi available requires payment…

Opening Statements - Adam Selipsky, VP AWS

It all started with Amazon building our own application (amazon.com), and needing to scale it, provide performance, etc. We spent over a couple of billion dollars to provide the infrastructure. We learned lessons:

• Moved away from expensive hardware
• Moved to standard hardware and lots of it
• Service-based architecture

Perhaps other people have the same or similar problems? So we started talking internally and externally about what we could provide. Asked people what’s important for all of this stuff

1. Reliability: It has to Just Work, not necessarily 100% of the time, but close,
2. Scalability: Upward and downward scalability,
3. Performance: It has to operate as quickly as if it were all in one data center
4. Simplicity: don’t make people have to learn too much (make it as simple as possible)

Enabling business to build and get paid for scalable, high-performance applications. Good results so far, including over 400,000 registered developers and S3 contains over 22 billion objects. Why do people love this stuff so much?

1. Get rid of the muck: don’t do things you don’t want to do or can’t do,
2. Focus: allows you to focus on product development, marketing, sales strategy etc,
3. Time to Market: allows start-ups to shave 2-6 months off delivery cycles (provisioning, configuration, etc)

Q: Is this a serious business or an experiment?

A: This is not an experiment, this is Amazon’s third business line. Retail Business, Seller Business (1.4 million active sellers) and now Developer Business.

Mention of Amazon Start-Up Challenge and invite people to check it out.

AWS Presentation - Jeff Barr, Sr. Evangelist AWS

As a consultant, I was invited to a small little conference hosted by Amazon. I was one of about 5 or 6 other freelancers there. I realized that they were talking about taking the covers off amazon.com and making the core of some of their system available to “everyone”. I was hired into a slightly different position and around 15 - 20% of his time was to “help out” when he could with AWS.

Summary of the 3 main business streams of Amazon.

Bandwidth consumed by AWS has surpassed the rest of all Amazon properties combined.

Why do people like this so much?

The “muck” or “undifferentiated heavy-lifting” can take up 70% of the time involved in building and scaling an online application.

Talks about the differential between projected usage and real usage, and how if you (traditionally) purchased assets to handle your projections, you will almost always have waste (or a deficit!).

Mentions “being famous” as showing up on: Techmeme, Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, TechCrunch

Amazon doesn’t usually see too many spikes across all users because of the averaging out effect of all of their clients’ usage cycles.

AWS principles: Easy to use, Fast, Elastic, Highly available, Secure, Pay as you go

Summaries of EC2 (+ EBS), S3 SimpleDB, DevPay, SQS, FPS, MTurk.

81 million Amazon.com users who you can enable to pay through FPS/DevPay.

Look at Podango, who have an impressive system that transcodes podcasts and automatically re-assembles them all with new advertising, announcements and raw content (daily). Everything is powered by AWS and automatically scales up and down to handle load (transcoding/assembly).

What has happened in the last year? FPS, DevPay, Elastic IPs, Availability Zones, Large Instances, CPU-Intensive Instances, EBS, S3 in EU, SimpleDB additions, Premium Developer Support, Service Health Dash, OpenSolaris/MySQL, plus more.

Trends We’re Seeing

• Systems using more than one service
• Massive datasets and large-scale parallel processing
• Enterprise adoption
• Increased need for support and transparency
• Running more sophisticated software in the cloud

Future Roadmap

• Security features and certifications
• Focus on operational excellence
• US and Int’l expansion
• Localization of technical resources (translations etc)
• EC2 GA (general availability) and SLA (we’re close)
• Windows Server support
• Additional services (we’re not anywhere near done!)

Start-Up Challenge

Over 900 entries last year in the competition to win $100,000 (cash + AWS credits). Ooyala won with their video content management system. Entrants are judged on:

1. Creativity and Originality
2. Likelihood of long-term success
3. How well it addresses a market need
4. Usage of AWS

Customer Presentations

Tap in Systems - Peter Loh

IT monitoring and systems management, powered by AWS. Their specialty is heterogeneous environments. They are recently funded and are now available under a limited beta. Monitoring usually comes last (requirements –> application –> monitoring), even though it’s a critical piece of the puzzle.

Deploy a monitoring solution in the cloud, capable of monitoring cloud devices or internal IT systems. Works like enterprise monitoring - gathers stats from all your systems, compiles them and provides reports. Their custom-developed systems are open source and will be released back to the community. Everything is priced per usage.

Provide all sorts of custom adapters/components to cater to specific services and their relevant metrics. Runs with Nagois, Ganglia, Cacti, Linux, Windows etc! They also ensure the security of your information because the EC2 instance runs under your AWS account, not theirs (they never see your data, just provide the engine to “do stuff with it”).

Vertica - Jerry Held

Grid-based, columnar DBMS for data warehousing and analytics. Founded in 2005 and now has 50+ customers worldwide, with great leadership/advisors. Moving some of their business to the cloud has provided a whole new playing field to expand their business etc.

Vertica provides:

• Scale out grid architecture
• Aggressive data compression
• Automatic high availability (failover, replication and recovery all in the cloud)

Some examples of what people are using it for:

• Analytic Software as a Service (companies providing specialized/assisted analysis of data)
• Short-term Analytics (competitve analysis, marketing campaign metrics, event post-mortem analysis etc)
• Frictionless Vertica Proof of Concepts (using the cloud lowers costs for Vertica AND for their customers)
• Vertica R&D (stress testing, benchmarking, etc)

“Don’t look at what you used to do, and figure out how to do it cheaper and faster in the cloud. Look at things that couldn’t be done before, but how this technology allows us to do something fundamentally different.”

Animoto - Brad Jefferson

Completely automated videos based on photographs and music. The Animoto engine analyzes the audio and syncs the video with the nuances of the music, rendering a completely custom video every time. It takes about 5 minutes to render a 30 second Animoto clip.

Halted development for 3 months and converted everything over to Amazon’s infrastructure. Probably the best decision they’ve made as a company. They use EC2, S3 and SQS. They don’t own a single server, and all work from laptops.

They have Editor, Producer and Renderer Queues to handle each component of the system, based on how it works in the real world.

Facebook application absolutely spiked them out - around 5 instances up to 3,600 instance in a matter of days. 25K users to 700K users on Facebook. It would have taken them 7,000 servers to handle this traffic spike.

Elastra - Stuart Charlton

A suite of software applications and components, provisioned and managed in the cloud using technologies created by Elastra. A company that’s around a year old, with 20-ish people. Software can manipulate hardware - game-changing.

Giving the system architects the direct ability to provision and manage the pieces of the system they design. EDML and ECML provide abstracted configuration of how this will all work together.

Q&A

Q: What about intellectual property rights etc?

A: It’s your data, it’s your code. We don’t look at it and we claim no ownership over it.

Q: Do you use Amazon for storage as well, or just for processing?

A: Everything is stored on S3.

Q: What is missing from AWS?

A: CDN performance, latency/initial data across the wire, EBS solves a lot of problems, Elastic IPs are a little limited, DevPay could use some more granularity on its reporting, a better way to handle software licensing.

Q: How are your experiences using EBS vs S3

A: Similar to Enterprise SAN or Network Storage. [Elastic Fox]. You can stripe, RAID, and performance is close to the local ephemeral storage. It will be the primary way that we configure our systems.

Q: How can you speed up the “spin-up” time for these services dealing with large volumes of data.

A: We’re looking at parallel loading of content using multiple instances to speed things up.

Salil Despandi - Bay Partners

We always ask if people are using EC2/S3. If not, why not? What about your architecture prevents you from working on AWS infrastructure? As a startup, you’re in a good position to re-architect so that you can.

“Java has become the COBOL of the 21st century.”

Issues (a year ago)

• ephemeral storage (now EBS!)
• cookie-cutter-ness of machines (more options now)
• scale out, not up (can get bigger sizes though)
• IP stability etc
• still very machine focused (not minutes/hours/etc)
• commercial software licensing is an unknown
• configuring and managing thousands of nodes is still difficult

Opportunities

• tools & higher layers of infrastructure (fault tolerance, load balancing, dashboard, etc etc)
• higher levels of service (like engineyard.com for RoR, ways to get data in, CDNs, security, etc)
• every layer of the stack, offered as a distributed scalable service in the cloud
• AWS-compatible private clouds
• open source and cloud intersection
• big ecosystem

Cocktails/Networking

Cheese/bread/fruit platter provided. Hors’ dourves came around care of the SFD staff and there were a few different beers and a red/white wine available. Not too bad at all. I had a few interesting conversations with a few interesting people, and it seemed like others were doing the same. Cards I collected were from people at:

• Right Scale: really interesting services providers who help you manage all your AWS stuff
• FathomDB: upcoming provider of database services, backed by AWS technologies (MySQL on EC2/S3)
• rPath: software appliances powered by AWS
• syncplicity: interesting synchronizing service that syncs not just web <—> desktop, but also desktop <—> web applications (think Flickr, Facebook, etc).
• Shoppertron: provides white-labeled storefronts which aggregate big providers (eBay, Shopping.com, etc) and integrate smaller providers as required
• Carticipate: cool iPhone App which helps you find car-pooling/car-sharing buddies who are near you, going in your direction.

Feedback

I find these specific events to be a great “intro to AWS”, but personally I’d love to see them do some more advanced events where they are quite technical and explore, in depth, some of the solutions customers have built, what their architecture looks like etc. I talked with Tracy Laxdal (AWS Marketing Manager) at length about this, and about how a lot of the people using their services are developers, and could benefit from more education on the systems architecture side of things.

In retrospect, I think there is also some great value to be had (for AWS and for customers) to do some perhaps on-the-spot case studies of looking at how someone has an application built, and how they could take what they have and implement more/other Amazon services to enhance their architecture and improve on what they’ve got. This could even be done using existing web apps as examples, and breaking down how you could build it on AWS. For example, you could take Flickr.com and talk about spinning up instances for handling image uploads, resizing etc, then look at a possible architecture of databases and web servers, fault tolerance at all levels, etc.

The Configuration

Everything here is happening on a completely (and very) custom theme, which is hosted on a WP 2.6.1 blog. It’s powered by 2 frontend web servers, which are transparently accessed via an LVS. The database is hosted on 2 servers, which are configured in a multiple-master configuration and are also accessed via the LVS. I’ve configued WP-Cache and WP-Super-Cache before so I’m confident I haven’t messed anything “basic” up with the configuration of the plugin.

The Problem

Let’s make sure we’re solving the same problem here. I was seeing my pages load just fine, and they even included the appended comment:

<!-- Dynamic Page Served (once) in 0.928 seconds -->

I saw that files were created in wp-content/cache/*.html but there were no files created in wp-content/cache/meta/*.meta (for WP-Super-Cache). Apparently without the meta files (which contain appropriate headers etc), the caching system assumes it can’t send the cached version, so it re-processes everything and sends the dynamic version (thus the comment).

The Solution(s)

I tried all sorts of things to get this to work, including:

• Moving the define(’WP_CACHE’, true) to the top of wp-config.php, just in case
• Deleting and manually re-creating the symlink for advanced-cache.php
• Turning on $use_flock in wp-cache-config.php
• Modifying $sem_id in wp-cache-config.php (you never know!)
• Banging my head repeatedly on the keyboard.

Needless to say, none of these things worked. Eventually, I came across a thread where Donncha (the author of WP-Super-Cache, and really nice guy to boot) mentions that a plugin doesn’t have an ob_end_flush() where it should. That reminded me of a post about Anarchy Media Player not working with WP-Cache that I’d seen, so I tried it out by changing the end of my footer.php theme file to look like this:

</html><?php while (ob_end_flush()) {} ?>

That seems to have fixed it! I’m now getting the beloved comment that I was looking for in my source files:

<!-- Cached page served by WP-Cache -->

and performance is way up. High-fives all around. The moral of the story is make sure you close/flush buffers in your themes and plugins. This is a bit of a hack fix for when someone doesn’t do that, but it works.

Disclaimer: This is a theory, I haven’t tried this out (anyone at EdgeCast want to confirm/give me a free account to try it out? )

I was looking at ways to store large volumes of user-uploaded resources (images) in a web environment tonight and had a bit of an epiphany. I had defaulted to Amazon’s S3 web service as the storage platform, since I’ve worked with it before and love the idea of an “unlimited”, fully-redundant storage device. The main problem with S3 however, is that it’s got less than stellar performance as far as latency and geographically-optimized delivery. That, and the bandwidth is relatively expensive.

So — what happens if you combine S3 with a Content Delivery Network of some sort?

I have recently done some work with the guys over at EdgeCast, who provide a nice, proxying CDN that’s really easy to use. Basically you CNAME a sub-domain of yours to point to their network, and then all requests to that sub-domain are mapped via their CDN nodes to your static resources. So normally, that’d look something like this (if you had the CDN configured to load files from www.example.com):

User Request (cdn.example.com/images/test.gif) --> edgecastcdn.net --> www.example.com/images/gif

The CDN node closest to the User will handle the request, loading the resource from the source domain (www.example.com in this example) if required, then passing it along to the User. That got me to thinking — could you combine the performance of the CDN with the redundancy and reliability of S3? Sure, why not?

Initially I was going to say that you’d want to do the CNAME configuration of S3 to point a sub-domain on your main site to S3, but I’m going to take a stab in the dark and suggest that you can skip that step if you like. Instead, jump straight to EdgeCast and configure an “HTTP Customer Origin” to point to your bucket, let’s say it’s “cdn_s3″. You would enter “http://cdn_s3.s3.amazonaws.com/” in your admin screen. From my experience you’ll also need to contact EdgeCast support and ensure that they configure the “Customer Origin” in their system correctly. You’re going to want to have them point it to your S3 bucket’s URL, so that it’ll proxy content directly from there. You will also need to configure a DNS entry (CNAME) for “cdn.example.com” pointing to (in my case) “edgecastcdn.net” to handle requests from your web pages for images in your S3 bucket.

Let’s say you had an <img> tag in a page that referenced “http://cdn.example.com/images/test.gif”. Theoretically, you should be able to upload “images/test.gif” to your S3 bucket, then when that URL was used in a page, the request would be passed through to edgecastcdn.net (via the cdn.example.com CNAME), which would distribute it across it’s CDN to the node nearest to the requesting user. If that node had a “fresh” copy of the content, it would be served immediately. If it didn’t have a fresh copy, then it would request it back via the “Customer Origin” configured at EdgeCast, which is to say it would load it directly from http://cdn_s3.s3.amazonaws.com/.

Voilà - redundant, high-performance, geo-distributed and optimized content delivery. Right?

The IOC officially barred Pistorius from competing in the Olympics due to the modified lower-legs he competes upon, a requirement due to the fact that his God-given limbs were amputated at the age of 11 months. Using a variety of thinly-veiled excuses such as “[t]he rule book says a foot has to be in contact with the starting block” and “we cannot accept something that provides advantages”, the IOC on one hand denies a man with no legs, while on the other they allow the juggernaut American swimming team to suit up in specially-engineered “super suits” to improve their own performance. The real controversy however, is not what we see at first glance, but the startling facts of the reality that is Michael Phelps.

As explained in Phelps’ body, the secret of success, we are talking about no ordinary 23-year-old man. Indeed, depending on how it is judged, we man not be talking about a man at all. The laundry list of evidence of Phelps’ super-human physique and biological make-up is impressive:

• He measures in at 6′4″ and 195 pounds, with “a long, thin torso”,
• His “wingspan” is a full 3 inches longer than for a normal man his height, with “his arms work[ing] as powerful propulsive paddles”,
• He “has an upper body of a 6′8″ person but his lower body seems to be of someone who is only 5″10″, which also make[s] the perfect plane in water”,
• He was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, giving him more energy to channel into training, while
  
• “His unique constitution also produces less lactic acid than others which means Phelps takes less time to recover”.
• As if that wasn’t bad enough, his size 14 feet are attached to double-jointed ankles, allowing him to motor through the water as if equipped with custom propellers.

And what, you may ask, is the scientific probability of a single person coming together with all of these traits and being pushed into swimming at a young enough age to hit peak physical performance right when the US needed a hero? Precisely a bazillion to none. That is, however unless you accept that Phelps was clearly either genetically engineered, or selectively bred for precisely this reason.

While Phelps’ birth mother was everywhere to be seen at the Olympics, decidedly absent was a father of any kind. The publicity nightmare that would have ensued had all of his fathers been there was obviously something Team USA chose to avoid. To breed a specimen such as Phelps, it is likely that at least 3 different fathers were involved, splicing their DNA together and fertilizing a single egg to create the real “Aqua Man”. For now, journalists have settled with reporting on what they expect to be the first of many fathers.

With the floodgates on hyperhuman athletes now well and truly open, what will future Olympic games hold? Cross-bred cheetah-sprinters? Amphibious dolphin-men? Mermaids? Flea-legged high-jumpers and Rhino-powered shot-putters? Only time will tell. The 2012 London Olympics, held in the largest metropolitan cultural melting pot the world has ever seen is an incredibly appropriate venue for the first global competition between the engineered athletic monsters we’ll be watching perform there. Here’s to hoping that other countries can accelerate their medical programmes fast enough to stand a chance against scientific America.

To confuse, upset or disrupt. My Krav Maga instructors use this often when describing attacks/defenses. e.g. “You need to defend here and strike simultaneously to discombobulate your attacker.”

1. Click the Apple Menu
2. Click “About This Mac”
3. Click “More Info”
4. Select “Power” in the left pane
5. Under “Battery Information” look for “Full Charge Capacity (mAh)

Apparently this number should be up over 5000 on a healthy battery. When mine died, that number was around 3000 from memory. Currently mine is at 5440. If your battery has a low full charge capacity, then it’s likely it failed, and if you take it back to Apple they will (hopefully, as they did for me) replace it with a brand new one, free of charge.

Hope that helps someone.

Napoleon Syndrome

Apparently Internet Explorer has a problem with its height. All too often, it needs to be told how tall a block element is just to render it remotely properly. Personally I like to tease IE with the fact, taunting it about its height issues by applying the smallest height property I can. The fix here is just to apply:

height: 1%;

to block elements that are having trouble rendering properly (or at all) and they seem to come back to life. This is generally referred to as the “Holly Hack” (look for that title). You may also choose to assign a specific pixel height or something else more indicative, but I don’t like to give IE the satisfaction of making me figure that out.

Put IE in position

You’d be surprised how many floating/positioning problems can be fixed by simply adding

position: relative;

to a CSS definition. Try it. It especially comes in handy when you’ve got overflow defined on some elements, as described by Jonathan Snook over at snook.ca (sexy site BTW).

Broken CSS Attribute Parsing is Your Friend!

The last pair of hacks come care of Internet Exploder’s broken CSS parsing, which does/doesn’t recognize certain attributes, despite their invalid definition. I specifically like the way that this brokenness can be “stacked” to achieve different results in different browsers. An example:

#crazy-div {
position: relative;
left: 0px;
_left: 100px;
*left: 200px;
}

What’s up with all the * and _ business you ask? Well it turns out that those characters are basically ignored by IE, so it will take those rules into account, even though Real Browsers won’t. So that set of rules goes something like this:

1. position: relative; everyone understands and applies this.
2. left: 0px; all browsers get this as well, so it’s applied across the board.
3. _left: 200px; This is the Underscore Hack, which IE 5+ will render properly (IE 7 managed to fix this one), so IE 5 + 6 will move #crazy-div over 100px.
4. *left: 100px; Internet Explorer 7 (only) will ignore the asterisk and render this rule, so #crazy-div will be shifted 200px.

So there you have a decent way to get a set of rules in place that will allow you to target certain (lame) browsers and fix up some of their rendering and positioning problems. I’m sorry that you’ll need to use these hacks, but the Internet is a messy place

My friends in Como were always amazed (and perhaps appalled) at the stories I told of my childhood. Somewhere along the line someone suggested that I should write down some of those stories because they were so different. Thus Back in Wagin was born, a short auto-biographical compilation of stories from my childhood. I originally wrote the book when I was about 17, and printed it myself (on a computer printer) then spiral bound it. I still have the first original copy. Now things are very different, and I’m re-publishing a Second Edition at Lulu.com. The power that services like Lulu (and Blurb, and SharedBook, etc etc) give to people to be able to express themselves is amazing and inspiring.

I spent a number of weeks on and off adding stories that I’d previously missed, cleaning up my grammar and generally improving the book. It’s now rounded out to 90-ish pages, and I’m in the process of putting together a snazzy full-color cover for the book. It will be available from Lulu.com for about $12 in case anyone wants a copy.

Going through all those memories has been a great experience. I’m really glad I took the time to write them all down when I did. Even if you don’t go as far as me and get it printed (semi?)professionally, I’d recommend the process to anyone.

Basically what they’ve done is extracted all the color-based information from the admin CSS files, and put them into pluggable files called “Admin Color Schemes”. The cool bit is that it looks really easy to add your own! It looks like the Admin Color Scheme is one of the last (core) stylesheets loaded into a page as well, which means you’re really not limited to only changing the colors.

So how do you do it? Here we go:

1. Download this plugin: WP Admin Color Schemer 1.0
2. Install and enable the plugin, which will look for CSS files inside its own “/schemes/” directory (/wp-content/plugins/wp-admin-color-schemer/schemes/*.css).
3. Create your own CSS file and drop it in that directory. The filename of the CSS file should be a lower-case, letters/numbers only, dash-separated version of the name of the scheme. For example, a scheme called “Billy’s Amazing Scheme” would be in a file named “billy-s-amazing-scheme.css” (replace everything that isn’t a letter or a number with a dash, but only ever have a single dash at a time). Make sure the first line looks like this (with “My Admin Scheme” being the name you want to give your scheme, and each hex value representing one of the main colors used in your CSS palette. This must be the first line of the CSS file, be commented out as below, and must contain commas, but the spaces are optional):

/* My Admin Scheme, #000000, #111111, #222222, #333333 */

Once you’ve done that, go to your profile page within the Admin Panel, and you’ll see your new scheme and should be able to easily select it. When you hit the Update button, your Admin Panel should take on the new colors immediately.

If you’d like to use one of the built-in Admin Color Schemes as a starting point, then they live at /wp-admin/css/colors-classic.css and colors-fresh.css.

Now you can easily style your Admin Panel to match the rest of your site (and hopefully Theme authors out there will start packaging Admin Color Schemes to match their Themes).

• Ben Bochmann,
• Steve Worthington and
• Benjie Lasseu

Nice to meet you guys. Comcast sent me a very “snail-mail-spam” looking “Express Letter” envelope containing some new up-sell marketing junk today, and apparently they forgot to flick the paper and blow air in it before putting it in the printer or something

I received 3 copies of the same “letter”, all stuck together (it was glossy paper, which has a tendency to do that) inside the envelope.

Good job Comcast… keep up the great work.

For either delivery mechanism, the user would go to the site, purchase a book, then select their options for how and when they’d like it delivered. Some of the important bits would be:

1. Delivery Schedule: Daily? Weekdays only? at 8am? at 8pm?
2. Amount per Delivery: 1 page? 500 words? 1 chapter?
3. Format: Full text in email/RSS? Link to current location in online version, with their “quota” highlighted somehow?

Once you have those options configured, you’d get your periodic email (or feed, via a customized URL that would point to your specific delivery configuration) containing the current portion to read, and you would want some options in each payload I think:

• Give me more next time
• Give me less next time
• Give me more right now
• Put my deliveries on hold

This probably isn’t a business, but it’s a feature that would be pretty cool for existing eBook retailers to offer. I’d be happy to make it for someone if they want it

UPDATE: DailyLit

I suppose imitation is the greatest form of flattery right? So we should take this as a compliment?

In amongst some work that I’ve been doing recently, and looking at my own work habits and trends, I realized that something super-useful to have would be a very accessible “microcontent storage system” where you would be able to store small snippets of information, tag them, have them fully-indexed and searchable using a simple, slick interface. Basically, I’m seeing this as del.icio.us, with more space for storing text, and no requirement for a link.

General Idea

So I see this as a series of “items”, stored with a note/body item of some sort, which would normally be text. In addition to that, you’d have an optional title and link/URL. You’d have a list of tags/keywords, and perhaps allow for arbitrary meta-data. I like the idea of the meta-data because it makes the system simple, yes extensible in ways that simple tags don’t provide (easily).

The UI would probably be largely based around search (a la Google), and would provide a list of items recently added as the default result-set. When searching, we’d probably use AJAX to make it “live search” to aid progressive discovery. I’d like to be able to save a search as well, and have that available as a navigation item of some sort (e.g. All items tagged “work” and “urgent” but note “done”). Adding an item should be a matter of clicking a link, then typing a few items and hitting a button. You’d also want a bookmarklet to be available so you could do this from anywhere. Perhaps even a Firefox plugin a la the del.icio.us one.

I’d also want RSS feeds available, specifically “recent items added” and “all items tagged x”.

Privacy controls, the ability to share items (or tags) and some other things like that would come down the line. I’d specifically like to be able to invite people to access my stream, and grant them the ability to see only items tagged with certain tags.

From here, we would also want a robust API so that we could plug the system in as the storage/backend behind any number of other apps. I see the use of POST to create new items, GET being able to retrieve a simple XML description of an item, PUT updating existing ones, and DELETE removing one. Standard REST stuff. The interesting thing here is that there’s no real reason why you couldn’t do it all with namespaced RSS (2.0) or Atom. I think that’d be a good approach because the basic structure is there, you just need to add some meta-data options which is no real problem.

The API is where the real fun lies - this could be the Twitter of… everything else. I see it as a generalized micro-content publishing system. Two immediate things that I think would be fun to plug on top of it (perhaps as paid services?) would be an email reader and an RSS reader. Basically these 2 systems would periodically check email/RSS feeds, then parse new items, tag them (using existing tags or some style of content analysis) and then POST the new item to your Stanso stream. It’d be interesting to see your email, notes, RSS feeds and potentially other things all mixed in together, tagged using a common scheme etc. Who knows where it could go? This could be a todo list, an email client, a news reader, a blogging platform, a status system, a bookmark repository, a password storage tool, a file manager, or all sorts of other things.

Technology Options

Obviously this could be built very simply using something like Scuttle (del.icio.us clone), or just from scratch using the normal LAMP stack (or RoR, or whatever). Another option I’ve been pondering is Amazon Web Services. Of particular interest are SimpleDB (still in beta, waiting on the list…) and potentially S3.

SimpleDB allows you to store a very loosely-structured set of data around a “record” in a fast-lookup, easily-queryable environment. Seems perfect for the task. It could handle arbitrary meta-data per item if you wanted, and could handle unlimited tags per item easily as well. I think S3 could be an interesting addition if you added the ability to upload a file (with tags etc), which was sidelined into S3, then automatically linked (via the URL field in an item) into your Stanso stream.

Another possibility would be to use something like WordPress to build this, since it actually handles a lot of elements of the system already (post title, body, tags, meta-data, the general blogging/posting flow). Having worked with WordPress a lot in the last 6 months though, I’d have to think that it was overkill for this, and provides a lot of other (wasted) functionality that provides more overhead than is worth adopting. Probably taking something like Scuttle and modifying it would be a best bet for a prototype at least. If building on AWS then you’d have to get pretty custom.

Possible Implementations/Features

• Simple note storage — you post small notes and snippets to remind you of things, or to hang on to passwords etc so you can find them later.
• Feed reader — feeds come in, are tagged and added to your stream, you navigate by tag or by “recentness”.
• Email client — email is pulled in and automatically tagged based on content analysis, sender details, etc. Being able to add your own tags would be awesome.
• Todo list — post items that you need to do, tagging them as “not done” perhaps. When they are done, you remove that tag (or just delete the item).
• Micro-blogging — post small updates on what you’re doing, what you’re thinking etc, then publish it out from the system via the “recent” RSS feed
• Bookmark storage — as per del.icio.us, minus all the social stuff.
• File manager — with file uploads going to S3, and meta stored in Stanso, you could store things in any “structure” (via tags) you wanted.

The cool thing is that you could actually do a number of these (if not all) at once, since you would have the ability to segment out your storage/retrieval of items based on tags as well.

Of course, after I started writing all of this, I realized it was just a slimmed down version of HTFS… so yes, I really should be building that system

The idea of the site is to give parents and families a secure place online where they can compile a journal of memories for their children. We’re focusing primarily on photos right now, but hope to include video and audio as we progress. Here’s a couple of the things that I think make MyBaby unique or worth a look:

• Unlimited uploads (backed by Amazon S3)
• You choose to have your book open to the public (for reading), or completely invite-only.
• Once they join your book via invitation, other people can add their own photos and stories to your book as well
• We have some really beautiful book themes (and more coming) care of Ray Hernandez/Stoodio
• We’ve created a forum on the site as well to allow people to interact across books (anyone who’s a member can post) and ask each other questions etc.
• You can try it out for free!

Right now, people get 3 weeks to try it out for free, after that, if they like it, it’s $8 a month to continue using the service. This covers you for as much as you (and all the members of your book) want to upload. You can pay for more than a month at a time and get a discount as well. We’re trying out a slightly different method of payment where subscriptions aren’t actually available in a traditional set-your-details-and-forget way. What we’re doing is allowing anyone who’s a member of the book to contribute by paying for as much (or as little) as they like. We’re hoping that rather than the parent having to pay every month, other people in the family will chip in and cover the cost of keeping the book running if they see value in it.

Ray and I are really excited now that it’s live, and very nervous to see where it goes. We’ve spent a lot of time working on this and refining things, so it’s great to finally have some other people using it.

Now for the real work — keeping it up and running and constantly improving it for our new users!