Deconstructing the Web

Intriguing debate around MySpace’s “Death Spiral”

2011-03-26T16:31:01Z

Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace? – High Scalability

Some conjectures from the article:

Myspace didn’t have programming talent capable of scaling the site to compete with Facebook.

Choosing the Microsoft stack made it difficult to hire people capable of competing with Facebook. .Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers who are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace.

Their system had hundreds of hacks to make it scale that no one wants to touch, which hamstrung their ability to really compete.

Because of their infrastructure MySpace can’t change their technology to make new features work or make dramatically new experiences.

Firing a lot of people nose dived morale and made hiring tough. (duh)

Los Angeles doesn’t have startup talent capable of producing a scalable social network system.

Facebooks’ choice of the LAMP stack allowed them to hire quicker and find people who knew how to scale.

Browserling: interactive cross-browser testing in your browser

2010-11-24T18:54:06Z

Our first product is built on top of StackVM and is called Browserling. It’s an interactive cross-browser testing tool inside of your browser. A real browser inside of your browser! Just go to browserling.com to try it out! (please use Chrome.)

Website: Browserling – interactive cross-browser testing in your browser.

Blog Post: Announcing Browserling!

What can we learn from the Foursquare Incident?

2010-10-15T15:58:44Z

Sharding is a great scalability solution, but as Foursquare recently revealed in a post-mortem about their 17 hours of downtime, sharding also has problems. MongoDB, the database Foursquare uses, also contributed their post-mortem of what went wrong too.

via High Scalability – Troubles with Sharding: What can we learn from the Foursquare Incident?.

Armor Games Makes the Front Page of GamePro

2010-10-14T19:59:55Z

A little self promotion never hurt anybody, right?

We play and play, but we rarely pause to ask ourselves about the humans behind the games that liven up our lunch hour and the hours beyond. But if you’ve ever given up a chunk of your time to conquering Crush the Castle, fighting for your “life” as a zombie in Sonny, or battling through the dirt and blood of Warfare 1917, you’re already made a connection with the staff and community at Armor Games–as have millions of players before you.

The Story of Armor Games, Feature Story from GamePro.

Details of Facebook’s Self-inflicted DDoS Attack

2010-09-30T19:29:34Z

It seems as if someone deployed into production that incorrectly cleared values from their caching layer (they use Memcached, 28TB worth of memory across 800 servers). That caused all their app servers to query the DB for the uncached value. This seems to be what ultimately brought the site down.

Facebook – More Details on Today’s Outage.

Further tech reading and analysis:

High Scalability – Facebook and Site Failures Caused by Complex, Weakly Interacting, Layered Systems.

End of the Road for Xmarks

2010-09-28T23:27:07Z

I love this service and am sorry to see it go.

For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service. With that investment thesis thwarted, there is no way to pay expenses, primarily salary and hosting costs. Without the resources to keep the service going, we must shut it down. Our plan is to keep the service running for another 90+ days, after which the plug will be pulled.

Xmarks Blog » End of the Road for Xmarks.

Surprise! The Diaspora “Pre Alpha” Release Has Bugs

2010-09-17T17:23:08Z

Among the list of reported issues in the code are numerous XSS — or cross-site scripting — attack vulnerabilities, a session token thats easy to steal, a lack of user input filtering, and repeated errors when a null character is entered into web fields.

via Code for open-source Facebook littered with landmines • The Register.

API Anti-Patterns: How to Avoid Common REST Mistakes

2010-08-13T16:36:21Z

It is not unusual, however, that many APIs that claim to be RESTful actually fail to do so. Mike Pearce gave an interesting talk slides embedded below on how you can easily break REST principles and which mistakes you should avoid when designing RESTful API.

Api anti patterns

View more presentations from Mike Pearce.

via API Anti-Patterns: How to Avoid Common REST Mistakes.

A Revised Taxonomy of Social Networking Data

2010-08-10T18:03:48Z

I ran across this intriguing article which proposes a handy taxonomy for discussing and working with a users social networking data.

As we continue our conversations about what sorts of fundamental rights people have with respect to their data, and more countries contemplate regulation on social networking sites and user data, it will be important to keep this taxonomy in mind. The sorts of things that would be suitable for one type of data might be completely unworkable and inappropriate for another.

Service data is the data you give to a social networking site in order to use it. Such data might include your legal name, your age, and your credit-card number.

Disclosed data is what you post on your own pages: blog entries, photographs, messages, comments, and so on.

Entrusted data is what you post on other people’s pages. It’s basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don’t have control over the data once you post it — another user does.

Incidental data is what other people post about you: a paragraph about you that someone else writes, a picture of you that someone else takes and posts. Again, it’s basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don’t have control over it, and you didn’t create it in the first place.

Behavioral data is data the site collects about your habits by recording what you do and who you do it with. It might include games you play, topics you write about, news articles you access (and what that says about your political leanings), and so on.

Derived data is data about you that is derived from all the other data. For example, if 80 percent of your friends self-identify as gay, you’re likely gay yourself.

via Schneier on Security: A Revised Taxonomy of Social Networking Data.

Microsoft Street Slide

2010-07-29T17:35:19Z

A better way navigate interactive street level map imagery…

Link: Microsoft Research: Street Slide
PDF: Published Paper

Twitter commits Murder to GitHub (Code Deployment Using Bittorrent)

2010-07-27T20:43:36Z

Murder is a method of using Bittorrent to distribute files to a large amount of servers within a production environment. This allows for scaleable and fast deploys in environments of hundreds to tens of thousands of servers where centralized distribution systems wouldnt otherwise function. A “Murder” is normally used to refer to a flock of crows, which in this case applies to a bunch of servers doing something.

Article: Murder: Fast datacenter code deploys using BitTorrent

Code: http://github.com/lg/murder

An Entertaining Behind-the-Scenes Look at Modern Casual Game Artists

2010-07-02T07:19:32Z

Left to right: Daniel McNeely, Joey Betz, web developer Larry Root,
John Cooney and intern Danny Yaroslavski

The developers here make perfect, self-contained little game experiences that are addicting for a few minutes, but not all-consuming. For now.

A fun article by Megan Brescini of OC Weekly that exposes a few of the individual motivations within Armor Games.

Full Disclosure: It should be known that I am responsible for the upkeep of the “Submit Game” button referred to in this article.

Article: Little Games Are Big Business at Armor Games – OC Weekly by Megan Brescini

Tips For Creating Efficiently Rendering CSS

2010-06-10T16:37:22Z

In summary…

ID selectors are going to be the fastest while complicated qualified descendant selectors and such will be slower.

via Efficiently Rendering CSS | CSS-Tricks.

Smokescreen – A Flash Player Written in JavaScript

2010-06-01T19:37:11Z

Smokescreen is a new open-source project aimed at converting Flash to JavaScript/HTML5 to run where it previously couldn’t and better interoperate with webpages where it previously could.

Demo: Strong Bad Email

Home: Smokescreen

Google Introduces JavaScript Font API and Open Source Font Directory

2010-05-19T22:22:43Z

…Google wants to make it easier for developers to use a wider variety of fonts on the Web that go beyond the standard set of “web-safe” fonts that come pre-installed on most modern computers.

via Making Good Typography on the Web Easier: Google Introduces Font API and Directory.

NPR API Goes Read-Write

2010-05-18T03:50:48Z

Until today, the NPR API has been a one-way firehose of content, pushing hundreds of thousands of stories from NPR and the twelve NPR Music partner stations out to the world. Now the API is read-write, allowing authorized external parties to post stories to the NPR API.

via NPR API Goes Read-Write.

Non-Flash Users Get No Respect

2010-05-11T05:48:21Z

Why is it that users who do not use flash are subjected to the most disrespectful experiences. Here it is again, Disney and their Toy Story website essentially gives the middle finger to those who visit their web site without flash.

Top: with flash, Bottom: without flash

Its been over 13 years since Flash was introduce. To assume that users who visit a web site without flash have somehow forgotten to enable the plug-in is simply naive. Users who visit a site without flash have most likely done so purposefully. They have either chosen to disable flash or are not able to use flash because of some other limitation. Providing absolutely no useful experience to these vistors says a lot out your site, your brand and your respect for your users.

Frond-end Code Standards from Isobar (Molecular)

2010-05-08T19:13:05Z

A great contemporary and pragmatic approach to front-end web development standards…

This document outlines our de-facto code standards. The primary motivation is two- fold: 1 code consistency and 2 best practices. By maintaining consistency in coding styles and conventions, we can ease the burden of legacy code maintenance, and mitigate risk of breakage in the future. By adhering to best practices, we ensure optimized page loading, performance and maintainable code.

via Code Standards Isobar.

CloudApp 15 Second How To (Video)

2010-05-05T21:40:29Z

How to use CloudApp for the Mac in under 15 seconds.

Link: Checkout CloudApp

Need desktop access over the Web? Try some Guacamole

2010-05-05T19:56:11Z

Guacamole is a HTML5 and JavaScript Ajax VNC viewer, which makes use of a VNC-to-XML proxy server written in Java.

via Need desktop access over the Web? Try some Guacamole – desktop linux, Guacamole, html 5, Java – Techworld.

Internet Explorer Falls Below 60% Market Share

2010-05-03T20:14:15Z

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer dropped to a historic market share low in April, according to Net Applications. The company estimated IE’s market share at 59.95% in April, which is about the range that was reached by Internet Explorer 4 more than 11 years ago in early 1999. The big winner was once again Google’s Chrome browser, which maintained a double-digit growth rate and is now more than 2 points ahead of Apple’s Safari browser, which it surpassed four months ago.

via Internet Explorer Falls Below 60% Market Share | ConceivablyTech.

See What Facebook Publicly Publishes About You

2010-04-28T19:38:56Z

This is a fun: http://zesty.ca/facebook/

See What Facebook Publicly Publishes About You – Facebook – Lifehacker.

Use OS X’s Trash Within The Terminal

2010-04-22T16:29:16Z

The following link explains how to update your terminal shell on OS X to create a new “trash” script. This will send files to the same trash can that you will find on you desktop.

Use OS X’s trash in a Finder-like way from Terminal – Mac OS X Hints.

New to Cassandra? Check out “WTF is a SuperColumn”

2010-04-21T18:05:14Z

This post by Arin Sarkissian was very helpful in getting me up to speed on the data structure used in Cassandra. You can checkout his post, download the pdf or view the scribd doc below…

WTF is a Super Column

A wireframe kit for Google Drawings and 5 reasons it beats Omnigraffle and Visio

2010-04-19T22:15:37Z

If your a Google apps fan (like me) you may find this pretty cool…

Check out the shared folder on Google

A wireframe kit for Google Drawings and 5 reasons it beats Omnigraffle and Visio – Morten Just.