Internet is Freedom

Lawrence Lessig’s speech at Italian Parliament: Internet is Freedom

Invisible Applications

As developers we fight with the desire to build useful new services and applications which can attract many users while at the same time reducing the friction that makes it difficult for our average user to try and keep using our creations.

I started observing how people usually hate learning and using too many different tools (except possibly for us geeks), this happens because we have limited resources and look for the maximum utility (this happens most at the cross of the business and consumer markets).

Uncertainty also plays a role in forming our decisions as users, where the perceived value of a new application is decreased by the lack of knowledge about how well it can fit the problems that we need to solve.

This has a few consequences: resistance in adopting new tools since it takes a too big effort to learn and preference for generic tools since they are perceived as more flexible and adaptable to our needs.

To overcome this we may reduce the visible part of the application to a level where the user stops noticing while making sure the user can easily reach the value we add. In the end it will all be about finding a way to give increasing returns for the same effort.

One way to follow this path is leveraging the tools that people are already using, integrating into or with them thus giving new ways to use those “old” and generic applications to do new things. Our invisible application will integrate within the flow of information that the user is receiving, it will remove modality from the interactions and augment the context around the documents and data that the users already handle to enrich the interaction with the same old services. Also, an important role will be played by allowing deep adaptation of the interface, whether automatically or via manual customization by the user (for the italian readers, look also at this presentation by Luca Mascaro).

Parallels 4.0 is fast

Just when I was losing to the idea of configuring my macbook for dual boot (or even getting a new machine) to be able to use Windows XP with more ease.

I am using Parallels to be able to do testing of the apps I’m writing on IE (one site I’m working on has more than 1/3rd of users still IE6…) and to be able to recompile and package an old J2EE application using a proprietary framework and builder that works only on Windows :-(

Until upgrading to Parallels 4.0 (which I did yesterday), generating the EAR for said application was taking more than 25 minutes, now it’s just down to less than 5 minutes! The big improvement seem to be in the (shared) filesystem access but also everything else seems snappier and the VM feels lighter on the system.

Overall a highly recommended upgrade to anyone using the product.

Controlling an EC2 instance with python

One of the selling points of EC2 is that it enables elastic provisioning of computing infrastructure; this allows following novel usage patterns where a server is used only for the time required to do some work.

The key to reach this flexibility is the API that gives developers the ability to startup a server, configure it, use it and shut it down. There are libraries for many programming languages but I like the way the boto python library makes it really simple do these things (and a lot more).

Here I’ll show how to use boto to start a server instance then how to send a file to the instance and execute a command on the remote server, and finally I’ll show how to terminate the instance.

Den Rest lesen…