Just typing this from my iPhone. It works really sweet & is full of win.
Category: WebApps
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No Facebook or Twitter for a Week
What could go wrong?
The Bad:
- Work now requires me to put into my timesheet how long I take for lunch.
- I missed an appointment on Thursday that was in my facebook events
- I missed wishing @angmoore Happy Birthday on her Birthday. Happy Birthday, Ang!
- I missed the Flickr Party which was in my facebook events
- There’s a lot of side work that I missed from search.twitter.com It’s really a great tool for finding work.
- I explained to some folks why I hadn’t approved their friend requests or follows in person. That led to interesting conversations.
The Good:
- I felt a lot more focused
- There is a shared illusion of connectedness that can prevent you from achieving your dreams. I won’t let that happen to me.
- I avoided making any embarrassing statements, grammar mistakes or spelling mistakes
- I enjoyed really focusing on people physically close to me.
Nuggets of Wisdom:
- I didn’t miss twittering unless I was at a party or bar where I didn’t know anyone.
- Twitter’s search is Foucault’s panopticon.
- It’s what you don’t do on Facebook that gets you hired.
By taking the @memcached username on Twitter, Gear6.com has engaged in identity theft. Yes, someone call the police now.
I’m pretty sure this is one of those posts that won’t make anyone happy.
Let me first start off with what is meant by identity theft. Wikipedia provides a pretty solid, working definition. If you disagree with it, then I’m curious as to why and how, but for this discussion, I’m using it to prove a point.
“Identity theft is a crime used to refer to fraud that involves someone pretending to be someone else in order to steal money or get other benefits.”
For example, if I walked around telling people I’m Chow Yun Fat while flashing a fake ID that says Chow Yun Fat, and I say, “Let me into this party. Wasn’t Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon an awesome film?” then I’m stealing Chow Yun Fat’s identity. There is no way he’d say, “It’s cool, go ahead and pretend to be me.”
Let’s take a look at @memcached on Twitter.
First off, having the url, http://twitter.com/memcached , is like having a business card. A business card cannot be used to legally establish identity, but it strongly suggests an identity.
In this case, I would expect that http://twitter.com/memcached is someone, or a group of persons working on the memcached open source project.
Let’s say I go to the url for the memcached twitter account.
What do I see?
http://twitter.com/memcached/status/1376487185
@bdeshong How are you liking the new changes in 1.3.2? Digging the new stats?
I see a few posts of @memcached pretending to be a member of the memcache open source coding team just like some dude pretending to be Chow Yun Fat at a party.
And here’s bdeshong thinking he’s talking to memcache:
@memcached Haven’t had a chance to spend any time with it just yet. In the next week or two, though…
http://twitter.com/bdeshong/status/1376501081
There are other examples where they announce releases of memcache as if they were the memcached development team.
This is the equivalent of me signing up with the @twitter account and announcing based on the twitter blog that twitter has released new code.
Now they’re clearly pretending to be someone else, but are they doing it for stealing money? Getting other benefits? Well, no money has changed hands here. There are just a lot of confused people, but confusing folks isn’t a crime.
Are they getting benefits?
Yes! In the Internet age attention equals money in terms of pageviews. They are definitely getting the benefit of the advertising garnered through the memcached name!
This sort of reverse-swiftboating where the stolen, good name of an open source software project is used to prop up business interests. I really do believe that building scalable websites is a good business model, but please don’t steal names that represent reputations you haven’t earned.
I ask @ev and the folks at Twitter to please take away @memcached from Gear6.com and give it to the *real* memcached community.
What is your favorite algorithm?
My favorite algorithm right now is the merge sort.
I like it so much that I’ve implemented it in PHP and Ruby.
The problem is that as a web developer I’ve never had to use a merge sort. Back in the old days when pagination was tricky, I’ve had to use a linked list, but you really don’t have to use the merge sort anymore.
So at this point it’s really just academic.
What interview question should really count now?
More on that in my next post. As a clue, I’d like to say it has to do with Leibniz’s statement, “The present is big with the future.” A techie who believes that and the principle of sufficient reason is the kind of techie you want.
I initially put up Google Adwords to bring more traffic to this blog.
What’s interesting with using Google Adwords is that you get to bid on certain key words. 3 months later I’m noticing that a few word phrases have gone up in price:
It’s a great sign that the phrase, “newlisp webserver,” has gone up 400%. It’s definitely a sign that more people are taking a commercial interest in newlisp as a serious web server. I’ve wrote about how newlisp is the fastest way to get onto the Internet before, and it still continues to be the fastest.
What’s also interesting is seeing that ec2 and lamp are still pretty stale.
The big take away is that you can use Google Adwords as a trending tool.
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Doing Sysadmin on the iPhone
For checking up on sites in the enterprise, I use Alertsite. It was suggested to me by a VP I work with at McCann, Ed Recinto. It’s been a great tool.
For personal websites that I manage, I’ve been using something I rolled in newLISP, sitebeagle. Why? Because beagles are great watchdogs.
Very often, most problems can be solved with tweaking code, changing permissions, or upgrading and apache or mysql.
Very often, it’s the weekend, I’m sitting in a cafe, and get an alert from Nagios or Alertsite. With iSSH, on the iPhone, I can ssh into a LAMP server and do the work I need.
I can see things getting a bit more complex. What tools do you use to sysadmin from an iPhone?
Ever see characters any of these characters:
1) ^M
2) <feff>
3) A black diamond with a white question mark in it.
4) What<92>s going on?
???
Does your version control system tell everything has changed when it doesn’t?
Does your web app break because one of the above characters?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you are not alone!
If you’ve dealt with this and figured out it please definitely shared your findings in the comments below.
I believe it is *the* number one issue in working in a hybrid environment, e.g. with Windows, Linux, and OS X.
In the next blog posts, I’ll talk about how I’ve struggled with these issues with other developers.
Being on the bleeding edge of technology just isn’t as profitable as making money. A good example right now is the beer industry. BUD is making tons off of our down economic times. But I bet you if you look at BUD, you might find a non-networked FoxPro application, or something from 10 years ago. You might find that there are copying processes that you would’ve replaced with rsync ages ago, or user rights managements issues still solved with point and click.
I can’t say for sure, because I’m not there. If the clothing that most people wear in Fortune 500 companies is any indication, their tech is 10 years behind the times.
How do you communicate to them?
Kathy Sierra style and use a deck. Create a power slide presentation for free at Google Docs.
If you’re at a big company, a coder that turns his passion and goals into something others share uses a deck. By my count, you should spend an hour of your day making a deck to get a point across.
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This Post posted by ScribeFire
ScribeFire is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to post to your blog. In fact, I didn’t have to go through the WordPress interface to publish this, and used ScribeFire’s interface instead. It’s a must have plug-in if you’re a blogger.
Technorati Tags: scribefire, wordpress, plugins
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Setting Up a newLISP Webserver
How fast can you get on the web? With newLISP it’s about as fast as typing:
newlisp -http -d 8080 -w /usr/home/www/httpdocs &
How fast can you create a backdoor with newLISP?
newlisp -p 1234 &
If you telnet into port 1234 in localhost, you’ll see something that looks like this:
Trying 127.0.0.1…
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
newLISP v.10.0.0 on OSX IPv4 UTF-8.
>
This opens up a lot of possibilities for distributed computing.
For example, you can set up a newLISP server that’s ready to respond to a newLISP client with this command:
newlisp -c -d 1234
Your newLISP client can have code that sends a computing problem to be solved to the server:
(net-eval “localhost” 1234 “(+ 3 4)” 1000)
Or let’s say you had a farm of newLISP servers:
#!/usr/bin/newlisp
(set ‘result (net-eval ‘(
(“192.168.1.100” 4711 {(+ 3 4)})
(“192.168.1.101” 4711 {(+ 5 6)})
(“192.168.1.102” 4711 {(+ 7 8)})
(“192.168.1.103” 4711 {(+ 9 10)})
(“192.168.1.104” 4711 {(+ 11 12)})
) 1000))
(println “result: ” result)
(exit)
If the above example reminds you of Gearman, you get +12 points.