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It’s true, I actually follow a few races that don’t end on Sept. 5.
I have to admit, after a crushing 11 minute loss in the Alps, Floyd Landis delivered a stunning stage 17 and a top notch individual time trial. I watched all of stage 20 into Paris.
What a ride. With Basso and Ullrich out so early, it really was every rider’s race to lose. The last 20 miles are worth watching, even if you don’t follow cycling. So an American brings home the yellow jersey once again. It appears that all is right with the world.
Hotsoup
The new venture that Ron Fournier is putting together is a mix of social networking and policy discussion.
From the fact sheet:
Americans believe their institutions are failing them. Research and polls show a long decline in the public’s faith in government, business, and even organized religion. Opinion Drivers across the country are losing patience with party lines and PR spin.
They understand that the challenges America faces are complex and therefore require reasoning and intelligent discussion. They want smart debate, real answers, and most importantly, they want the opportunity to each be heard.
Opinion Drivers want access to the personalities who set the national agenda, and conversely, those leaders want direct access to the people who can help them shape public opinion.
Sounds like my kind of crazy! The site combines policymakers from both sides of the aisle with the public through a social networking paradigm. They have far exceeded my expectations with this and I’m looking forward to the release.
This morning’s Note opens with the following lede:
“We finally figured out why superscribe Ron Fournier left the Associated Press. We can’t say as much as we know, but we can say this: Fournier, who just got done writing a bipartisan book about the importance of community building in the Internet Age, has teamed up with political strategists from both sides of the fence and leaders from the Internet industry to create the next big thing in communications and community. It will all be clear to the world in the next 24 hours. Stay tuned.”
Ron Fournier is the author of Applebee’s America, a book about the Internet as a tool for Government-to-Citizen dialog.
Politics is notoriously behind the times with regard to technology, I’m anxious to see whether this is a real development, or more of the same.
AJAX applications are not sophisticated. They’re a special variety of kludge that we’ve been conditioned as computer enthusiasts to think are special. AJAX hinges on a technology which still isn’t always fully supported (XMLHttpRequest) and requires crafting sometimes overly complex XML documents to achieve simple data transfer. But it beats standard CGI in terms of responsiveness, so web developers follow the crowds of users to the land of no-refresh websites and drag-able maps.
However, even simple applications using these cool new technologies sometimes require a bit of unique thinking to keep them from drowning in their own complexity.
Case in point, the ever popular AJAX chat. It’s a common goal, and one which has given mixed results. For a single server implementation, the requirements are simple: a common exchange area for data, sometimes in the form of a database, and some method for synchronizing clients.
The problem with implementing this via AJAX is this: HTTP, which includes the XMLHttpRequest only goes one way. Applying Comet can help things along by providing an asynchronous server-event driven control flow, but polling for state change on the current data can still bring a powerful system to a crawl, especially if operations are disk-bound. Trust me on this, disk-bound read-write operations can really slow down your snappy application.
So how to effectively communicate state change and synchronize clients without clients polling the server for new data constantly?
Semaphores. I’ve been telling my roommates and family exactly how cool semaphores are. They stare at me strangely and move along.
Semaphores solve the problem by providing an incredibly quick method for synchronization. Each client attempts to spinlock a semaphore server-side. When the server receives new data, it releases the semaphore, which is then passed around among the waiting clients, informing them each that the new data is ready in shared memory.
There are variations involving MD5 hashing, sleeplocks, or more complex socket programming, but I find this method allows me to call an AJAX method from the server asynchronously, which can greatly improve the responsiveness of an application without overloading the client with a lot of unnecessary javascript.
SOAP, AJAX. You could almost guess what’s next. That’s right.
Comet.
HTTP Streaming.
AJAX makes it super easy to call server functions from the browser and have a callback received asynchronously, leading to very responsive, polished web applications.
Now Comet lets things go the other direction. Server to browser, through inline script tags in conjunction with AJAX.
Apparently Web 2.0 is all about cleaning things up.
For people like me, a good reward for a job well done is, well, more work. I respond rather well to a 20% program. Of course, near their conclusion, 20% projects usually become 60% projects. In any case, one such project of mine was recently rolled out for some preliminary testing. Without letting too much out of the bag, it involved some pretty extensive server-side processing and has a spiffy lightweight client side interface. The two talk to each other using the acronym of the year, AJAX.
To make a short story even shorter, it failed pretty miserably after more than five users were present. Just didn’t scale well enough. So I decided to take a look under the hood of my hosting server.
cat /proc/cpuinfo revealed this:
model name : Pentium III (Coppermine)
Excuse me? We’re paying for that? I think to myself, maybe it’s something else that I’m not seeing.
uname -r corroborates my suspicions:
2.4.21-40.ELsmp
No sophisticated I/O scheduler there, no wonder my repeated disk access and server-side MD5 hashing is paralyzing the machine!
I will tolerate no such abuses, the hosting company has no upgrade path and so I begin shopping around. Before long, I remember a server company that some other geeks were lauding a few weeks ago. It’s called A Small Orange and from what I hear it’s terrific. I begin to check it out and complaints seem to be minimal. Then I notice a pattern in the server names: Desmond, Claire, Jack, Vincent, Libby, Charlie, Walt. Server companies should get bonus points for clever allusions to pop culture, as we all know us geeks never get time to actually participate in said pop culture.
If you don’t believe my previous diatribes on the wonders of Ubuntu, you can listen to Matthew Newton, who named Ubuntu number 27 in the top 100 Best Products of the year.
It comes in below Boot Camp and Craigslist, and above such wonders of modern technology such as Meebo, Flickr, TiVo, iTunes, and Rhapsody. (Okay, okay, scratch Rhapsody from the list of modern wonders.)
In any case, it’s the first Linux that I’ve worked with that’s both geek-friendly and void of sharp metallic edges. The average user will not inflict catastrophic harm on themselves or their machine while running Ubuntu, which is more than can be said for most operating systems, OS X excluded.
If you’re inclined, check Ubuntu out.
It’s a small one, but the Buzz has awarded Scott Farrell the first Campaign Gumption Award.
There are 6 positive comments already on the blog, the last one makes mention of an online “Town Hall Meeting.”
True? You Might Say That, I Couldn’t Possibly Comment.
7 Days until Novell releases its Q2 Earnings. It’s fitting that I’ll be in Las Vegas for the conference call. The market has a love/hate relationship with Novell (leaning towards hate at the moment)
Now, I’ve never been much of a SuSE man, favoring Debian, Gentoo or some derivative of those, Ubuntu being my fanboy distro of the year. That being said, I think Novell has really made SuSE into a distro for the masses.
If you’re still skeptical and have 33 minutes to spare, check out Nat Friedman’s test drive of the new SuSE.
If you have less time, but still want to see how XGL can make life better, check out this video of Dapper in action. (Soundtrack by Andre Benjamin).
Google maps are great at finding the quickest path between two points of interest, but sometimes that’s not what you’re looking for. On a bike, sometimes you’d like to take the “long way” made up of slow, meandering roads where traffic is scarce and drivers know the meaning of “share the road.” Hence, I’ve long wanted the ability to plot out my own routes on something like Google Maps. With routebuilder, I can.
The interface is slick and snazzy, and doesn’t try to implement too many features. A set of input elements keep a running total of miles, kilometers, and feet. It’s very useful for plotting out alternate routes and measuring distance before you get out on the road. This one I’ve done twice: at 32 miles one way, I call it the fun kind of muscle pain.
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