Published on Thursday, March 19 2009
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.
Published on Tuesday, March 17 2009
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…
Published on Monday, March 16 2009
Just a test of the SyntaxHighlighter plugin
from datetime import datetime
echo $PATH
Published on Wednesday, February 11 2009
Yesterday’s OpenID User Experience Summit (hosted by Facebook) has got together a lot of people interested in building a better user experience for OpenID.
If the process succeeds we’ll be able to have a
world where it won’t matter if you’re on Facebook, MySpace or Microsoft Live – where Yahoo’s content is read by Friendfeed, and your MySpace music preferences are matched with friends in Facebook so that you all can coordinate events on Eventful that you heard about on someone’s TypePad blog and was Twittered about on Seesmic and later indexed and searched by Google.
I’ve been able to follow just a bit of the initial presentations on the UStream but Plaxo’s John McCrea has a detailed live blogging post, moreover all the presentations are online at slideshare (plus here are the UStream recorded sessions)
The first thing I find interesting are the results of the Plaxo/Google hybrid OpenID/OAuth experiment. The stunning 92% rate of click through success shows that the open protocols can be made more effective by implementing a better user experience. Moreover it shows that the users, if given a good enough experience, will not fear to follow a path that’s different from the antipattern they have been (mis)educated to use.
The Plaxo/Google process is awesome if you think about the amount of interaction that is taking place within those two clicks
- the user is signs up for a new service
- the service is veryfies his email address
- the user is grants (scoped) access to the service to a set of his own data
- the service accesses that data thus importing it and pre-populating the new account
It’s a win-win as this shows how something may be made at the same time
- safer and more useful for the user (who should not give away his password or let absolute access to his account) and
- more effective for the service providers (more reliable user data collection, possibly more user signups)
On the downside of this approach is that it will not be easy to scale this beyond the single provider. I hope it doesn’t ends up in a proliferation of single-provider buttons (for somthing that may be implemented with the same undelying technology).
This is a treat without cooperation among the interested parties but looking at the meeting and how the big-cos and many of the smaller players are talking to each other there is hope that it will happen for real.
