Deviant Abstraction

Commodity based open source storage software à la Red Hat GFS is it seems the next big wave. One of the reason is web companies use a lot of storage and cannot afford expensive NetApp or EMC hardware. They are also too small to create their own Distributed/clustered filesystems.

Solutions: open source with support as MySQL did it.

This is a quick win, since it is not particularly hard compared to the guaranteed lucrative market position, a company would gain. I guess VC are not interested in this market, as they were not in MySQL at their start.

In the meantime, Amazon S3 is gaining a lot of advance since its competitor are non existant yet.

I have recently relocated from a big city to a small town in the countryside. This lifestyle change pointed out several limits of the web application paradigm since I have now only a very limited Internet connectivity.

At first I tried to use web applications extensively for my private life: agenda, text processor, todo and so on…. But it turns out this is a far from ideal situation.

For instance:

• No confidentiality. I don’t want to expose all my data to outsiders especially on a wifi network. I send and receive sensitive data like my credit card number.
• Only online access. OK this one is obvious but my Internet access is limited and irregular. This is is the first time in more than ten years. It is destabilizing. How do I access my calendar even when there is no Internet around? Web application do not provide this.
• Silo effect. I usually process subset of my data with custom made scripts. Those scripts are not web aware. There are as far as I know no find or grep for the Web. Not even a universal and easy way to parse any HTML page from any computer language.
• Lack of customization. I have tailored my desktop to my needs and this is a huge value add for me. For instance, Evolution, Skype and Gaim are automatically launched at startup times, my SVN repositories are updated… Web application does not offer any way to configure them this easily. What I need is kind of NetVibes on steroids
• Integration with current application. Desktop applications are heavily integrated. For instance, I can load with my desktop computer my Ipod. I can not from web applications.
• Interactivity. I need speed and efficiency. This is the basis of interactive applications. Web applications (even Gmail) are slow and clumsy for obvious latency reasons. This is OK for email not for code editing.

One silly example that happened yesterday. I need to fill online my tax declaration. For this French’s government is generating a certificate. But no web applications allow me to store this certificate for me (and for good reasons).

You might object that I could have built a web application to take care of those needs, this Netvibes on steroid. Actually I started but I found in between a much more elegant solution: the use of a remote desktop system. One issue remains though. Its cost: a dedicated server is expensive.

(USB systems have also their own limit mainly “no background mode”.)

A virtual machine paid by the hour such as EC2 is perfect and nearly free (it could even be financed by advertisement if a company wanted to operate such a service). It is my Personal Virtual Machine (PVM). Some companies have started offering them for free (ie Desktop On Demand) but their offer is unreliable, slow and you cannot run all the applications you want/need.

In the end I installed KDE and NXE on my dedicated server (NXE is a great WAN remote desktop tool. Truly impressive). It solved all my problems really fast although it is costly (more than 30 euros per month). Marketing hype is on web applications but now we should start to explore alternatives especially if they empower users and are a cheaper alternatives (I can demonstrate it if needed). I can access it from my corporate PC, my cellphone or a cybercafe.

As a final note I am not saying that WebApp are bad. Just that they are not the universal panacea. Especially for lonely, interactive and heavily used applications. I will discuss this in more depth later. The PVM vision is not either the perfect solution but for heavy computer users such as myself it offers real advantages: no need for backup ever,r power consumption alway the lowest possible, you access your machine at your will without leaving it on.

The next steps is to be able to tie a virtual machine to a physical computer and then sends it back in the cloud. VMware system allows such trick. I will discuss this later in more depth too and I will tell you how it was to use this prototype for a month.

What do you think of this idea? Would you like me to explore those ideas more in depth?

The coming Fab revolution. A must read. Especially the links.

Link

A nice post about Ruby vs. Python. I have used those languages for different tasks and I went on the same conclusions on my own. He explains them better though.

Link

This is a memo from Microsoft. It shows how they have prepared for a paper for Wired.

This is really freaky. It is OK to present your angle of the story IMO, but this is manipulation. I understand why Wired is quite upset.

Microsoft should learn how to relax and trust. Especially in our new connected-happy-world where those totalitarian tactics does not work (or not at this level). It reminds me of some dysfunctional companies I worked for.

Memo in PDF and the Wired article (via the Long Tail)

A refreshing look on some common Linux myths. Some part are stupid but others well thought. Interesting read at least for the step back. The writer works in Entreprise Software, so interesting insights in this business too.

Link

This post claims Skype is sending on startup to its server your unique PC indentifier to their server. They send the BIOS content containing some unique informations.

Anonymity on Skype seems something from the past. Since you have bought your PC: those UUID are on a bill or an invoice order somewhere, hence a link to your name and your Skype calls.

There are others UUID in a PC (ie MAC address), so this is clearly to allow identification of a call. In a way this is no surprise and easy to defeat, still sad.

Since I am on Linux, I cannot check. Did someone else found this file?

Link

WidgetAccelerator is the best way to accelerate the displays of your widgets in a webpage.

My blog uses it. It has two accelerated widgets. The display of the page has been increased of more than 10 times actually.

It caches the JS file and prints its content directly in the HTML page. Therefore, your visitors do not need anymore to gather a lot of different javascript files from a lot of various hosts. The main consequence is a speedier website.

It does not check for cache consistency before displaying the page. This is why it is fast (Most HEAD requests are as slow as a GET.)

This is also why you have to specify which widget to cache. Of course you should not use it for widget with highly dynamic content like a Javascript webstat tracker.

Installation
To use this script, you will need to.

1. Download the script (copy/paste this link and rename the extension of the file to .php)
2. Upload it to your server.
3. Create a writable directory to store the cached widgets.
4. Configure the script: two constants must be defined (at the top of the script). $CACHE_DIR is the path to the cache (ie: $CACHE_DIR="/var/www/cache/";) and $CACHE_TTL is the lifetime in seconds of the cached widget (ie: $CACHE_TTL = 3600;)
5. Include the script in your template or in the page you want to accelerate: $lt;?php include( "/PATH/TO/widget_accelerator.php" ) ?>
6. Accelerate the widgets you like. You have to change for instance this widget
   
<script defer="defer" id="snap_preview_anywhere" type="text/javascript" src="http://spa.snap.com/snap_preview_anywhere.js?ap=0&etc" ></script>

   to
   
<?php accelerate('<script defer="defer" id="snap_preview_anywhere" type="text/javascript" src=http://spa.snap.com/snap_preview_anywhere.js?ap=0&etc" ' ></script>');?>

7. Optional but nice for me add this quote to your template: powered by WidgetAccelerator
   which in html is: <a href="http://www.deviant-abstraction.net/index.php/2007/01/30/widget-accelerator/"> powered by WidgetAccelerator</a>

A little bit further
WidgetAccelerator looks for src=” or src=’ inside accelerate(). Without proper enclosing of this attribute, the accelerate function will print an error. Finally, all URL inside src must be in absolute to be accelerated.

In case of problem, features ideas or contribution, do not hesitate to mail me or leave a comment here.

Legal
Of course, this script is offered AS IS and I withhold all responsability for any damage that might come due to its use.

Next steps
If you like it, I will add support for images and predictive cache (to automatically set up the cache TTL).

A really interesting article from a consumer point of view. It is good to see people still being to step back on AJAX and web apps.

Link (via the wonderful JoeyCoco)

I wonder why when to get some tech data on MySQL you need to register on their website. It makes everything harder especially when you want to google their doc.

This is a classical example of an ungeek marketing department. Of course, it allows them to gather statistics on who reads what… But most of the data they ask is already given by my IP address.

The other example I have in mind is IBM. Even Microsoft does not ask for registration.

Update I did eventually register (I need it for my master’s thesis) but I received the doc three
four nine times by email. And I just needed to read one page. I hope they don’t send me a survey to evaluate it. Actually, I have set up a spam filter to avoid receiving any more times this white paper.

One example