Weekly Smashing

How to Change the Default Web Browser in Mac OS X

2014-09-10T03:40:00.003-07:00

Do you want your programs to open a different browser when you click links? As long as you have another browser installed, you can change it to be the default web browser for all OS X applications. See Step 1 below to learn how.

First Method:

1. Open Safari. You can change the default browser to any other installed browser through the Safari settings. Safari can be found on your Dock or in your Applications folder.

2. Click the Safari menu. This is located in the upper-left corner of the screen after Safari is opened. Select Preferences from the Safari menu.

3. Select the General tab. Click the "Default Web Browser" pop-up menu. This will pull open a list of other browsers you have installed. If you don't have any other browsers installed, you will need to install one in order to change the default. Popular browsers for OS X include:

Mozilla Firefox
Google Chrome
Opera

4. Click Close. Once you've selected your new default browser, click the close button. Any links in other programs and apps will automatically be opened in the browser that you selected.

Second method:

1. Open the browser. Firefox and Chrome both allow you to set them as the default browser through their respective Preferences or Settings menu. This can be useful if the browser is already open and you don't want to open Safari.

2. Set the browser to be default. The process is a little different depending on the browser you are using:

Chrome: Click the Chrome menu button (☰) and select Preferences. Scroll to the bottom of the Settings page and click the "Make Google Chrome my default browser" button.
Firefox: Click the Firefox button and select Options. Click the Advanced tab and then look for the "System defaults" section. Click the "Make Firefox the default browser" button.

6 Steps To Prepare For A Skype Interview

2014-08-09T00:45:00.001-07:00

In order to save money on travel expenses and associated interviewing costs, many companies are taking advantage of the virtual power of Skype. Skype allows HR personnel and hiring managers to “meet” you and see how you present yourself in relation to appearance and interpersonal communication skills.

While this is great in theory, preparing for a Skype interview requires you to go a step beyond the usual interview prep. Skype presents some challenges that should be addressed to allow you to make the best impression you can.

Here are some suggestions to help make your Skype interview a positive experience:

If you don’t already have Skype downloaded on your computer, the first thing you need to do is go the Skype website and do this. Make sure you have everything configured properly in terms of camera position and sound volume. You want a few buttons of your shirt to show and your entire head should be visible. Conduct a test beforehand with a good friend, a family member, or a colleague.
Positioning the camera so that items in the background are neat and professional looking is a smart idea. While interviewers realize that they are “meeting” you in your home, having a distracting picture or sloppy bookshelf in the background can bring unwanted attention.
Lighting is another critical issue you should test before your interview. Bright light coming from a nearby window or a poorly positioned lamp can lead to unnecessary glare. Place lights in a position that illuminates your face without shadows. The lighting should be as flattering as possible.
Avoid wearing clothing that has distracting patterns. Additionally, whites will detract from your appearance. Instead, opt for darker colors with a sleek, professional look. While you can wear bunny slippers if you like, be sure to dress to impress from the waist up.
Practice making eye contact with the camera. Don’t focus your glance at the image of the person on the screen. This will make it appear as though you are looking down. One trick is to tape a photo of somebody next to the web-cam lens.
Prior to the interview, be sure to take precautions to eliminate all potential noise. Barking dogs, ringing telephones, and other noises can be distracting.

Skype presents its share of challenges, but it can also be your ticket to the next and final interview phase. By carefully preparing, you can be one step ahead of the competition and make an impression that will get results.

7 Tips to Ace a Phone Interview

2014-08-09T00:33:00.002-07:00

You have probably replied to many job postings without hearing anything back. Then, you finally get a call that begins like this: “Thank you for your interest in our company. Your résumé is impressive. Can we schedule an initial phone interview this week?”

Euphoria. As soon as you finish the call you start jumping for joy. You think to yourself: “They want me, the job is in the bag.”

Simmer down. The reality is that at this point you have several more hoops to jump through before you get the coveted job offer. Too often, well-qualified candidates trip themselves up at the first one: the phone screen interview.

At this stage you will likely deal with someone in human resources whose role it is to pave the way for the hiring manager to decide which candidates to bring in for a more serious discussion. He or she is tasked to gain basic information about multiple candidates and make initial judgments about personality, temperament, communications style, salary expectations and more.

It’s likely that you’ve got your story all bottled up inside, and you want to make sure to get every detail of your history and capabilities out there for consideration. Remember, however, that this interview will last only about a half-hour. Contain your urge to spew forth a detailed narration of your professional history. Instead, follow these tips for a more successful outcome:

TIP No. 1: Be prepared to explain every job transition. An HR screener will likely want you to step him or her through your résumé. Why did you make this or that choice of career direction? Why make that lateral move, or how did you get that promotion? And what about those short job stints or gaps between jobs? Be sure to have a copy of the same rèsumè you submitted next to you and/or on your screen in front of you before the interview begins.

This part of the interview is usually a check off item unless you give signals that there is more than meets the eye. “I was recruited,” “I left for greater responsibilities” or “I was part of a larger company reorganization” are all you need to say in most instances.

If you left to deal with a family or medical situation, you can simply say that without going into detail, but if it is true make certain to cast it as your fulfilling your basic obligations, and that the crisis (or whatever) is now fully resolved and you are ready to fully devote that same 100 percent commitment back to your career.

Tip No. 2: Be prepared to explain everything on your rèsumè. Any bullet point on your rèsumè might pique the curiosity of your interviewer. Be prepared to give more detail, but don’t take too much time on any one answer. After a few sentences, ask: “Is this what you were after, or would you like me to go in a different direction or provide greater detail?”

Tip No. 3: Understand that the interview isn’t just about questions and answers. Your interviewer is likely trained to glean from your conversation your level of self-confidence, personality and ability to communicate effectively. Remember that no matter what your prior situation may have been, you need to build trust in yourself and knowledge of your abilities from the ground up. Don’t rush your answers, and keep an even tone in your voice. But at the same time, do show something of your personality.

Tip No. 4: Understand your red flags and prepare to lower them. While you may be reticent to have to deal with issues like age, employment gaps or frequent job-hopping, you should understand that you can do a great deal to mitigate these issues when you address them head on. Just answer the question in a nondefensive, factual way, pivot the conversation to something else and move on.

Tip No. 5: Don’t get flustered when uncomfortable questions arise. The big four questions almost always rear their heads in a phone screen in one-way or another: Tell me about yourself. Tell me about your biggest strength/weakness. What are your salary expectations? And where do you expect to be in five years? There are numerous articles dealing with these and similar questions. Review them, and practice your answers many times.

Tip No. 6: Do your homework and prepare great questions to ask. You will likely be given an opportunity to ask questions. Use it to show your enthusiasm, ask about this or that aspect of the job, or ask about how you would be able to use X in your background to do Y. Never use this as an opportunity to ask about their process, start dates, salary, benefits or anything else they can do for you.

Tip No. 7: Control your environment. Always arrange to be in a quiet, well-lit room, free from distractions. Sit in a chair with relevant materials easily in front of you. Give your sole, focused attention to your interviewer, and whenever possible make sure you are on a landline rather than shaky cell connection.

When you keep these tips in mind, you’ll jump through the first hoop with ease, and be prepared for the in-person interview.

Happy hunting!

What To Expect During An HR Interview? Five Questions You'll Be Asked During A Screening Interview

2014-08-08T18:22:00.001-07:00

By Melissa Llarena

Screening interviews with human resources professionals are a crucial step to getting the job. A good or bad interview with HR will determine how far you go in the interviewing process, so it’s best to know what to expect and go in prepared.

As a career coach, I have worked with job candidates on how to answer the most common questions asked by HR. My mock interviews place clients in situations similar to ones they will actually face and prepare them to ace their interviews and land the job.

Let’s take a look at the five most common questions asked by HR during screening interviews and how you should approach them.

1. Why are you interested in this position?

HR professionals love this question so use it as your chance to reiterate your strengths and highlight your applicable skill set and passion for the company and the role. Speak to how your past experiences match the qualifications for the job using keywords from the job description to make the connection stronger. By clearly linking your skills to the position, you are helping the HR manager envision you in the role.

Sample Answer: Having worked within the financial services sector for five years, I have gained an appreciation for the power of client-facing roles in terms of my professional development and organizational impact. As a relationship manager in your firm, I envision bringing my ability to resourcefully optimize any given client’s portfolio as the best way I can help your company’s five-year strategic goal of retaining its client base at a 50% rate. I have done this in the past in X capacity while working for my previous employer and am confident that I can help you accelerate your current goals while growing my career.

2. Tell me about yourself.

As an age-old prompt that will likely never go away, it’s important to know how to provide a compelling answer for an HR manager. Instead of the typical chronological progression of your background, I recommend doing a SWOT analysis within the context of a professional interview. Analyze the sector, the company, and the job function using a SWOT and look for opportunities to market yourself. I go into this in more detail in my blog post on how to tell your professional story in a way that will entice an interviewer to hire you.

Sample Answer: I have been a sales manager for X years, with experiences that include being able to lead a sales force toward the accomplishment of aggressive goals. In light of your organization’s core strength in hiring the brightest salespeople, I would know exactly how to coach them to sell both new and legacy products in new markets quickly. While at Company X, I created the gold standard incentive program that resulted in helping us sell-in potential charge volume that exceeded our goals by 20% in both travel expenses and daily expenses. Prior to that, I worked at X where I completed X, etc. Side note: figure out the assets of the hiring firm or its needs and tailor your response accordingly.

3. Why are you leaving your current job?

HR managers ask this question to determine if there are any red flags related to your departure. Are you leaving on good terms or bad? Are you looking to escape from your current job or grow within a new one? These are a few of the questions running through the interviewer’s mind. Take this opportunity to speak positively of your current employer but communicate that you’re looking at this new position as the next step in your career. By framing your answer positively, you’re making the interviewer focus on your potential contributions rather than any red flags.

Sample Answer: My business unit started with 50 full-time employees and today it has 10. While this reduction in personnel enabled me to showcase my ability to produce results with limited resources in an organization where management has turned over, I am interested in transitioning to an organization like yours where there is growth potential. For example, in my current role I managed to acquire 100K clients with only one other sales manager and a dwindling budget. In your company, I would be managing a team of 20 sales managers, where I stand to make a significant impact not only for your firm but on the firm’s market share.

4. What do you know about the company?

This is a test and one you should be able to pass easily. Doing research on a company prior to an interview is a necessity. You need to know the history and makeup of the company, who the key players are, recent accomplishments and mentions in the press, and any other relevant information. Communicate the positive information you learned about the company, from awards to new product launches, to demonstrate your knowledge.

Sample Answer: Your firm competes with firm A, firm B, and firm C in the U.S. My understanding is that you are better positioned in this area vs. firms A, B, or C. Meanwhile, firms B and C bring these strengths to the table. Given my skill set, I know that I can help you optimize your strength in this and offset the strengths that firms B and C plan to invest more heavily in during 2014. *Side note: the point is to be specific in how you’d use this information to drive results.

5. What questions do you have for me?

ALWAYS have questions for the interviewer. The strongest candidates show their enthusiasm and position themselves as potentially valuable team members by asking smart, strategic questions that benefit both the interviewer and the interviewee. If you’re stumped, here are five questions to ask HR that will take you to the next phase of the interviewing process.

“To learn more about how to navigate job interviews or if you have an upcoming interview, set up a 15-minute consultation. I have helped professionals go from second choice to first.”

Source: Forbes.com

Mastering the "Tell Me About Yourself" Interview Question

2014-08-08T08:19:00.000-07:00

Just as the clock ticks to 11 am, Riley’s interviewer, Mr. Smith, walks out of his office to greet her. Having polished her technical skills for weeks, Riley is confident that this interview—her first of the fall entry-level recruiting season—will go smoothly. As they walk to Mr. Smith’s office, she mentally runs through the checklist in her head. Professional attire, check. Firm handshake, check. Confident smile, check. As soon as they each take a seat and Riley hands Mr. Smith her resumé, he says, “Well Riley, tell me about yourself.” She freezes.

"Well, I was born in California. We moved to North Carolina when I was four because my dad got a position as a software engineer at IBM, and we've lived here since."

Maybe I should be interviewing her dad instead, Mr. Smith thinks as Riley stumbles through the first question. Riley continues:

"Umm, I play club soccer and the piano, and I'm a hard worker. I'm looking for a position as a software developer here because I want experience in the field and because I like this location."

If she’s not prepared for this interview, is she prepared for this job?As Riley rambles on, Mr. Smith’s thoughts start to wander. He hopes that the other five candidates he’s interviewing today will be more prepared.

Riley’s Blunder

Neglecting to prepare for the “tell me about yourself” interview question is one of the most common and potentially disastrous mistakes that interviewees make. Nancy Fox of Fox Coaching Associates notes, “Many candidates, unprepared for the question, skewer themselves by rambling, recapping their life story, delving into ancient work history or personal matters.” By falling into this trap and failing to prepare a well-organized and appropriate response, Riley has not only made a poor first impression and set a negative tone for the rest of the interview, she has also given Mr. Smith reason to doubt whether she would be a good fit for the position.

So, what is the best way to tackle this question?

Based on his conversations with a number of career coaches, former human resources executive Marc Cenedella advises that when you construct your response, you should:

Focus on what most interests the interviewer
Highlight your most important accomplishments

Following these guidelines, Riley could instead have said:

"I am a computer science major at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Last summer, I interned for a startup in Silicon Valley, where I worked as part of a team of five to develop software that identifies students at risk of dropping out based on course performance. Six high schools in the Valley area currently use the software, and demand for it is rapidly growing. For the first step in my full-time career, I would like to work as a software developer for a larger firm with more resources so I can continue to drive growth for the company and in turn impact a greater number of people though my work."

This alternate response concisely meets both criteria because it (1) captures Mr. Smith’s interest by showing that Riley seeks to add value to the company (“continue to drive growth”) and (2) highlights her accomplishments by demonstrating that she can apply her skills to create a profitable product (“I worked as part of a team … rapidly growing.”)

Hopefully, Riley can still save the interview with her savvy technical skills. In the meantime, to all of those seeking jobs out there: Now that you know how to master the “tell me about yourself” interview question, go ahead and start forming your response!

By Sahar Kazemzadeh

Business, 2014

Tumblr Architecture - 15 Billion Page Views A Month And Harder To Scale Than Twitter

2014-08-07T20:02:00.000-07:00

With over 15 billion page views a month Tumblr has become an insanely popular blogging platform. Users may like Tumblr for its simplicity, its beauty, its strong focus on user experience, or its friendly and engaged community, but like it they do.

Growing at over 30% a month has not been without challenges. Some reliability problems among them. It helps to realize that Tumblr operates at surprisingly huge scales: 500 million page views a day, a peak rate of ~40k requests per second, ~3TB of new data to store a day, all running on 1000+ servers.

One of the common patterns across successful startups is the perilous chasm crossing from startup to wildly successful startup. Finding people, evolving infrastructures, servicing old infrastructures, while handling huge month over month increases in traffic, all with only four engineers, means you have to make difficult choices about what to work on. This was Tumblr’s situation. Now with twenty engineers there’s enough energy to work on issues and develop some very interesting solutions.

Tumblr started as a fairly typical large LAMP application. The direction they are moving in now is towards a distributed services model built around Scala, HBase, Redis, Kafka, Finagle, and an intriguing cell based architecture for powering their Dashboard. Effort is now going into fixing short term problems in their PHP application, pulling things out, and doing it right using services.

The theme at Tumblr is transition at massive scale. Transition from a LAMP stack to a somewhat bleeding edge stack. Transition from a small startup team to a fully armed and ready development team churning out new features and infrastructure. To help us understand how Tumblr is living this theme is startup veteran Blake Matheny, Distributed Systems Engineer at Tumblr. Here’s what Blake has to say about the House of Tumblr:

Site: http://www.tumblr.com/

Stats

500 million page views a day
15B+ page views month
~20 engineers
Peak rate of ~40k requests per second
1+ TB/day into Hadoop cluster
Many TB/day into MySQL/HBase/Redis/Memcache
Growing at 30% a month
~1000 hardware nodes in production
Billions of page visits per month per engineer
Posts are about 50GB a day. Follower list updates are about 2.7TB a day.
Dashboard runs at a million writes a second, 50K reads a second, and it is growing.

Software

OS X for development, Linux (CentOS, Scientific) in production
Apache
PHP, Scala, Ruby
Redis, HBase, MySQL
Varnish, HA-Proxy, nginx,
Memcache, Gearman, Kafka, Kestrel, Finagle
Thrift, HTTP
Func - a secure, scriptable remote control framework and API
Git, Capistrano, Puppet, Jenkins

Hardware

500 web servers
200 database servers (many of these are part of a spare pool we pulled from for failures)
- 47 pools
- 30 shards
30 memcache servers
22 redis servers
15 varnish servers
25 haproxy nodes
8 nginx
14 job queue servers (kestrel + gearman)

Architecture

Tumblr has a different usage pattern than other social networks.
- With 50+ million posts a day, an average post goes to many hundreds of people. It’s not just one or two users that have millions of followers. The graph for Tumblr users has hundreds of followers. This is different than any other social network and is what makes Tumblr so challenging to scale.
- #2 social network in terms of time spent by users. The content is engaging. It’s images and videos. The posts aren’t byte sized. They aren’t all long form, but they have the ability. People write in-depth content that’s worth reading so people stay for hours.
- Users form a connection with other users so they will go hundreds of pages back into the dashboard to read content. Other social networks are just a stream that you sample.
- Implication is that given the number of users, the average reach of the users, and the high posting activity of the users, there is a huge amount of updates to handle.
Tumblr runs in one colocation site. Designs are keeping geographical distribution in mind for the future.
Two components to Tumblr as a platform: public Tumblelogs and Dashboard
- Public Tumblelog is what the public deals with in terms of a blog. Easy to cache as its not that dynamic.
- Dashboard is similar to the Twitter timeline. Users follow real-time updates from all the users they follow.
  - Very different scaling characteristics than the blogs. Caching isn’t as useful because every request is different, especially with active followers.
  - Needs to be real-time and consistent. Should not show stale data. And it’s a lot of data to deal with. Posts are only about 50GB a day. Follower list updates are 2.7TB a day. Media is all stored on S3.
- Most users leverage Tumblr as tool for consuming of content. Of the 500+ million page views a day, 70% of that is for the Dashboard.
- Dashboard availability has been quite good. Tumblelog hasn’t been as good because they have a legacy infrastructure that has been hard to migrate away from. With a small team they had to pick and choose what they addressed for scaling issues.

Old Tumblr

When the company started on Rackspace it gave each custom domain blog an A record. When they outgrew Rackspace there were too many users to migrate. This is 2007. They still have custom domains on Rackspace. They route through Rackspace back to their colo space using HAProxy and Varnish. Lots of legacy issues like this.
A traditional LAMP progression.
- Historically developed with PHP. Nearly every engineer programs in PHP.
- Started with a web server, database server and a PHP application and started growing from there.
- To scale they started using memcache, then put in front-end caching, then HAProxy in front of the caches, then MySQL sharding. MySQL sharding has been hugely helpful.
- Use a squeeze everything out of a single server approach. In the past year they’ve developed a couple of backend services in C: an ID generator and Staircar, using Redis to power Dashboard notifications
The Dashboard uses a scatter-gather approach. Events are displayed when a user access their Dashboard. Events for the users you follow are pulled and displayed. This will scale for another 6 months. Since the data is time ordered sharding schemes don’t work particularly well.

New Tumblr

Changed to a JVM centric approach for hiring and speed of development reasons.
Goal is to move everything out of the PHP app into services and make the app a thin layer over services that does request authentication, presentation, etc.
Scala and Finagle Selection
- Internally they had a lot of people with Ruby and PHP experience, so Scala was appealing.
- Finagle was a compelling factor in choosing Scala. It is a library from Twitter. It handles most of the distributed issues like distributed tracing, service discovery, and service registration. You don’t have to implement all this stuff. It just comes for free.
- Once on the JVM Finagle provided all the primitives they needed (Thrift, ZooKeeper, etc).
- Finagle is being used by Foursquare and Twitter. Scala is also being used by Meetup.
- Like the Thrift application interface. It has really good performance.
- Liked Netty, but wanted out of Java, so Scala was a good choice.
- Picked Finagle because it was cool, knew some of the guys, it worked without a lot of networking code and did all the work needed in a distributed system.
- Node.js wasn’t selected because it is easier to scale the team with a JVM base. Node.js isn’t developed enough to have standards and best practices, a large volume of well tested code. With Scala you can use all the Java code. There’s not a lot of knowledge of how to use it in a scalable way and they target 5ms response times, 4 9s HA, 40K requests per second and some at 400K requests per second. There’s a lot in the Java ecosystem they can leverage.
Internal services are being shifted from being C/libevent based to being Scala/Finagle based.
Newer, non-relational data stores like HBase and Redis are being used, but the bulk of their data is currently stored in a heavily partitioned MySQL architecture. Not replacing MySQL with HBase.
HBase backs their URL shortner with billions of URLs and all the historical data and analytics. It has been rock solid. HBase is used in situations with high write requirements, like a million writes a second for the Dashboard replacement. HBase wasn’t deployed instead of MySQL because they couldn’t bet the business on HBase with the people that they had, so they started using it with smaller less critical path projects to gain experience.
Problem with MySQL and sharding for time series data is one shard is always really hot. Also ran into read replication lag due to insert concurrency on the slaves.
Created a common services framework.
- Spent a lot of time upfront solving operations problem of how to manage a distributed system.
- Built a kind of Rails scaffolding, but for services. A template is used to bootstrap services internally.
- All services look identical from an operations perspective. Checking statistics, monitoring, starting and stopping all work the same way for all services.
- Tooling is put around the build process in SBT (a Scala build tool) using plugins and helpers to take care of common activities like tagging things in git, publishing to the repository, etc. Most developers don’t have to get in the guts of the build system.
Front-end layer uses HAProxy. Varnish might be hit for public blogs. 40 machines.
500 web servers running Apache and their PHP application.
200 database servers. Many database servers are used for high availability reasons. Commodity hardware is used an the MTBF is surprisingly low. Much more hardware than expected is lost so there are many spares in case of failure.
6 backend services to support the PHP application. A team is dedicated to develop the backend services. A new service is rolled out every 2-3 weeks. Includes dashboard notifications, dashboard secondary index, URL shortener, and a memcache proxy to handle transparent sharding.
Put a lot of time and effort and tooling into MySQL sharding. MongoDB is not used even though it is popular in NY (their location). MySQL can scale just fine..
Gearman, a job queue system, is used for long running fire and forget type work.
Availability is measured in terms of reach. Can a user reach custom domains or the dashboard? Also in terms of error rate.
Historically the highest priority item is fixed. Now failure modes are analyzed and addressed systematically. Intention is to measure success from a user perspective and an application perspective. If part of a request can’t be fulfilled that is account for
Initially an Actor model was used with Finagle, but that was dropped. For fire and forget work a job queue is used. In addition, Twitter’s utility library contains a Futuresimplementation and services are implemented in terms of futures. In the situations when a thread pool is needed futures are passed into a future pool. Everything is submitted to the future pool for asynchronous execution.
Scala encourages no shared state. Finagle is assumed correct because it’s tested by Twitter in production. Mutable state is avoided using constructs in Scala or Finagle. No long running state machines are used. State is pulled from the database, used, and writte n back to the database. Advantage is developers don’t need to worry about threads or locks.
22 Redis servers. Each server has 8 - 32 instances so 100s of Redis instances are used in production.
- Used for backend storage for dashboard notifications.
- A notification is something like a user liked your post. Notifications show up in a user’s dashboard to indicate actions other users have taken on their content.
- High write ratio made MySQL a poor fit.
- Notifications are ephemeral so it wouldn’t be horrible if they were dropped, so Redis was an acceptable choice for this function.
- Gave them a chance to learn about Redis and get familiar with how it works.
- Redis has been completely problem free and the community is great.
- A Scala futures based interface for Redis was created. This functionality is now moving into their Cell Architecture.
- URL shortener uses Redis as the first level cache and HBase as permanent storage.
- Dashboard’s secondary index is built around Redis.
- Redis is used as Gearman’s persistence layer using a memcache proxy built using Finagle.
- Slowly moving from memcache to Redis. Would like to eventually settle on just one caching service. Performance is on par with memcache.

Internal Firehose

Internally applications need access to the activity stream. An activity steam is information about users creating/deleting posts, liking/unliking posts, etc. A challenge is to distribute so much data in real-time. Wanted something that would scale internally and that an application ecosystem could reliably grow around. A central point of distribution was needed.
Previously this information was distributed using Scribe/Hadoop. Services would log into Scribe and begin tailing and then pipe that data into an app. This model stopped scaling almost immediately, especially at peak where people are creating 1000s of posts a second. Didn’t want people tailing files and piping to grep.
An internal firehose was created as a message bus. Services and applications talk to the firehose via Thrift.
LinkedIn’s Kafka is used to store messages. Internally consumers use an HTTP stream to read from the firehose. MySQL wasn’t used because the sharding implementation is changing frequently so hitting it with a huge data stream is not a good idea.
The firehose model is very flexible, not like Twitter’s firehose in which data is assumed to be lost.
- The firehose stream can be rewound in time. It retains a week of data. On connection it’s possible to specify the point in time to start reading.
- Multiple clients can connect and each client won’t see duplicate data. Each client has a client ID. Kafka supports a consumer group idea. Each consumer in a consumer group gets its own messages and won’t see duplicates. Multiple clients can be created using the same consumer ID and clients won’t see duplicate data. This allows data to be processed independently and in parallel. Kafka uses ZooKeeper to periodically checkpoint how far a consumer has read.

Cell Design For Dashboard Inbox

The current scatter-gather model for providing Dashboard functionality has very limited runway. It won’t last much longer.
- The solution is to move to an inbox model implemented using a Cell Based Architecture that is similar to Facebook Messages.
- An inbox is the opposite of scatter-gather. A user’s dashboard, which is made up posts from followed users and actions taken by other users, is logically stored together in time order.
- Solves the scatter gather problem because it’s an inbox. You just ask what is in the inbox so it’s less expensive then going to each user a user follows. This will scale for a very long time.
Rewriting the Dashboard is difficult. The data has a distributed nature, but it has a transactional quality, it’s not OK for users to get partial updates.
- The amount of data is incredible. Messages must be delivered to hundreds of different users on average which is a very different problem than Facebook faces. Large date + high distribution rate + multiple datacenters.
- Spec’ed at a million writes a second and 50K reads a second. The data set size is 2.7TB of data growth with no replication or compression turned on. The million writes a second is from the 24 byte row key that indicates what content is in the inbox.
- Doing this on an already popular application that has to be kept running.
Cells
- A cell is a self-contained installation that has all the data for a range of users. All the data necessary to render a user’s Dashboard is in the cell.
- Users are mapped into cells. Many cells exist per data center.
- Each cell has an HBase cluster, service cluster, and Redis caching cluster.
- Users are homed to a cell and all cells consume all posts via firehose updates.
- Each cell is Finagle based and populates HBase via the firehose and service requests over Thrift.
- A user comes into the Dashboard, users home to a particular cell, a service node reads their dashboard via HBase, and passes the data back.
- Background tasks consume from the firehose to populate tables and process requests.
- A Redis caching layer is used for posts inside a cell.
Request flow: a user publishes a post, the post is written to the firehose, all of the cells consume the posts and write that post content to post database, the cells lookup to see if any of the followers of the post creator are in the cell, if so the follower inboxes are updated with the post ID.
Advantages of cell design:
- Massive scale requires parallelization and parallelization requires components be isolated from each other so there is no interaction. Cells provide a unit of parallelization that can be adjusted to any size as the user base grows.
- Cells isolate failures. One cell failure does not impact other cells.
- Cells enable nice things like the ability to test upgrades, implement rolling upgrades, and test different versions of software.
The key idea that is easy to miss is: all posts are replicated to all cells.
- Each cell stores a single copy of all posts. Each cell can completely satisfy a Dashboard rendering request. Applications don’t ask for all the post IDs and then ask for the posts for those IDs. It can return the dashboard content for the user. Every cell has all the data needed to fulfill a Dashboard request without doing any cross cell communication.
- Two HBase tables are used: one that stores a copy of each post. That data is small compared to the other table which stores every post ID for every user within that cell. The second table tells what the user’s dashboard looks like which means they don’t have to go fetch all the users a user is following. It also means across clients they’ll know if you read a post and viewing a post on a different device won’t mean you read the same content twice. With the inbox model state can be kept on what you’ve read.
- Posts are not put directly in the inbox because the size is too great. So the ID is put in the inbox and the post content is put in the cell just once. This model greatly reduces the storage needed while making it simple to return a time ordered view of an users inbox. The downside is each cell contains a complete copy of call posts. Surprisingly posts are smaller than the inbox mappings. Post growth per day is 50GB per cell, inbox grows at 2.7TB a day. Users consume more than they produce.
- A user’s dashboard doesn’t contain the text of a post, just post IDs, and the majority of the growth is in the IDs.
- As followers change the design is safe because all posts are already in the cell. If only follower posts were stored in a cell then cell would be out of date as the followers changed and some sort of back fill process would be needed.
- An alternative design is to use a separate post cluster to store post text. The downside of this design is that if the cluster goes down it impacts the entire site. Using the cell design and post replication to all cells creates a very robust architecture.
A user having millions of followers who are really active is handled by selectively materializing user feeds by their access model.
- Different users have different access models and distribution models that are appropriate. Two different distribution modes: one for popular users and one for everyone else.
- Data is handled differently depending on the user type. Posts from active users wouldn’t actually be published, posts would selectively materialized.
- Users who follow millions of users are treated similarly to users who have millions of followers.
Cell size is hard to determine. The size of cell is the impact site of a failure. The number of users homed to a cell is the impact. There’s a tradeoff to make in what they are willing to accept for the user experience and how much it will cost.
Reading from the firehose is the biggest network issue. Within a cell the network traffic is manageable.
As more cells are added cells can be placed into a cell group that reads from the firehose and then replicates to all cells within the group. A hierarchical replication scheme. This will also aid in moving to multiple datacenters.

On Being A Startup In New York

NY is a different environment. Lots of finance and advertising. Hiring is challenging because there’s not as much startup experience.
In the last few years NY has focused on helping startups. NYU and Columbia have programs for getting students interesting internships at startups instead of just going to Wall Street. Mayor Bloomberg is establishing a local campus focused on technology.

Team Structure

Teams: infrastructure, platform, SRE, product, web ops, services.
Infrastructure: Layer 5 and below. IP address and below, DNS, hardware provisioning.
Platform: core app development, SQL sharding, services, web operations.
SRE: sits between service team and web ops team. Focused on more immediate needs in terms of reliability and scalability.
Service team: focuses on things that are slightly more strategic, that are a month or two months out.
Web ops: responsible for problem detection and response, and tuning.

Software Deployment

Started with a set of rsync scripts that distributed the PHP application everywhere. Once the number of machines reached 200 the system started having problems, deploys took a long time to finish and machines would be in various states of the deploy process.
The next phase built the deploy process (development, staging, production) into their service stack using Capistrano. Worked for services on dozens of machines, but by connecting via SSH it started failing again when deploying to hundreds of machines.
Now a piece of coordination software runs on all machines. Based around Func from RedHat, a lightweight API for issuing commands to hosts. Scaling is built into Func.
Build deployment is over Func by saying do X on a set of hosts, which avoids SSH. Say you want to deploy software on group A. The master reaches out to a set of nodes and runs the deploy command.
The deploy command is implemented via Capistrano. It can do a git checkout or pull from the repository. Easy to scale because they are talking HTTP. They like Capistrano because it supports simple directory based versioning that works well with their PHP app. Moving towards versioned updates, where each directory contains a SHA so it’s easy to check if a version is correct.
The Func API is used to report back status, to say these machines have these software versions.
Safe to restart any of their services because they’ll drain off connections and then restart.
All features run in dark mode before activation.

Development

Started with the philosophy that anyone could use any tool that they wanted, but as the team grew that didn’t work. Onboarding new employees was very difficult, so they’ve standardized on a stack so they can get good with those, grow the team quickly, address production issues more quickly, and build up operations around them.
Process is roughly Scrum like. Lightweight.
Every developer has a preconfigured development machine. It gets updates via Puppet.
Dev machines can roll changes, test, then roll out to staging, and then roll out to production.
Developers use vim and Textmate.
Testing is via code reviews for the PHP application.
On the service side they’ve implemented a testing infrastructure with commit hooks, Jenkins, and continuous integration and build notifications.

Hiring Process

Interviews usually avoid math, puzzles, and brain teasers. Try to ask questions focused on work the candidate will actually do. Are they smart? Will they get stuff done? But measuring “gets things done” is difficult to assess. Goal is to find great people rather than keep people out.
Focused on coding. They’ll ask for sample code. During phone interviews they will use Collabedit to write shared code.
Interviews are not confrontational, they just want to find the best people. Candidates get to use all their tools, like Google, during the interview. The idea is developers are at their best when they have tools so that’s how they run the interviews.
Challenge is finding people that have the scaling experience they require given Tumblr’s traffic levels. Few companies in the world are working on the problems they are.
- Example, for a new ID generator they needed A JVM process to generate service responses in less the 1ms at a rate at 10K requests per second with a 500 MB RAM limit with High Availability. They found the serial collector gave the lowest latency for this particular work load. Spent a lot of time on JVM tuning.
On the Tumblr Engineering Blog they’ve posted memorials giving their respects for the passing of Dennis Ritchie & John McCarthy. It’s a geeky culture.

Lessons Learned

Automation everywhere.
MySQL (plus sharding) scales, apps don't.
Redis is amazing.
Scala apps perform fantastically.
Scrap projects when you aren’t sure if they will work.
Don’t hire people based on their survival through a useless technological gauntlet. Hire them because they fit your team and can do the job.
Select a stack that will help you hire the people you need.
Build around the skills of your team.
Read papers and blog posts. Key design ideas like the cell architecture and selective materialization were taken from elsewhere.
Ask your peers. They talked to engineers from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn about their experiences and learned from them. You may not have access to this level, but reach out to somebody somewhere.
Wade, don’t jump into technologies. They took pains to learn HBase and Redis before putting them into production by using them in pilot projects or in roles where the damage would be limited.

Why Are There Only 28 Days in February?

2014-08-07T18:45:00.002-07:00

Well, something to that effect. Some believe February once boasted 29 days and that Augustus Caesar stole a day so he could add it to August, which was named for him. (If there’s a month named after you, why not milk it?) But that’s a myth. Rather, February has 28 days because, to the Romans, the month was an afterthought. In the 8th century BCE, they used the Calendar of Romulus, a 10-month calendar that kicked the year off in March (with the spring equinox) and ended in December. January and February didn’t even exist:

Martius: 31 days
Aprilius: 30 days
Maius: 31 days
Junius: 30 days
Quintilis: 31 days
Sextilis: 30 days
September: 30 days
October: 31 days
November: 30 days
December: 30 days

Tally up those numbers, and you’ll see a problem—the year is only 304 days long. Back then, winter was a nameless, monthless period that no one cared for much. (Planters and harvesters used the calendar as a timetable. To them, winter was useless and wasn’t worth counting.) So for 61 days out of the year, Romans could ask “What month is it?” and you could correctly answer, “None!”

King Numa Pompilius thought that was stupid. Why have a calendar if you’re going to neglect one-sixth of the year? So in 713 BCE, he lined the calendar up with the year’s 12 lunar cycles—a span of about 355 days—and introduced January and February. The months were added to the end of the calendar, making February the last month of the year.

But no Roman calendar would be complete without some good old-fashioned superstition mixed in! The Romans believed even numbers were unlucky, so Numa tried to make each month odd. But to reach the quota of 355, one month had to be even. February ended up pulling the short stick, probably because it was simply the last month on the list. (Or as Cecil Adams puts it, “If there had to be an unlucky month, better make it a short one.”) Numa’s calendar ended up looking like this:

Martius: 31 days
Aprilius: 29 days
Maius: 31 days
Iunius: 29 days
Quintilis: 31 days
Sextilis: 29 days
September: 29 days
October: 31 days
November: 29 days
December: 29 days
Ianuarius: 29 days
Februarius: 28 days

Of course, a 355-day calendar had its bugs. After a few years went by, the seasons and months would fall out of sync. So to keep things straight, the Romans would occasionally insert a 27-day leap month called Mercedonius. The Romans would erase the last couple days of February and start the leap month on February 24—further evidence no one ever cared much for the month.

This caused headaches everywhere. The leap month was inconsistent, mainly because Rome’s high priests determined when it would arrive. Not only did they insert Mercedonius haphazardly, but the priests (being politicians) abused the power, using it to extend the terms of friends and trim the terms of enemies. By Julius Caesar’s time, the Roman people had no clue what day it was.

So Caesar nixed the leap month and reformed the calendar again. (To get Rome back on track, the year 46 BCE had to be 445 days long!) Caesar aligned the calendar with the sun and added a few days so that everything added up to 365. February, which by now was at the top of the calendar, kept its 28 days. We can only imagine it’s because Caesar, like everyone before and after him, just wanted it to be March already.

What is a Gadget?

2011-03-07T02:11:00.000-08:00

Have you ever wondered what the little, single-service applications that sit in your desktop or your iGoogle are? These are gadgets. A gadget is a small application that you can use to simplify your life. There are all kinds of gadgets. You are probably most familiar with things like the clock gadget, the To Do list gadget, the calendar gadget, calculator gadget and other every-day gadgets that sit on your desktop and are referenced throughout your day-to-day life.

There are also more specific types of gadgets that can simplify your life even further. For instance, if you are travelling then you could use a currency converter gadget to help you figure out how much things cost in your native currency or you could use a weather gadget to see what the weather will be like in the country you are travelling to before your trip. A popular gadget in blogs and websites is the RSS gadget, which allows you to post a feed of content from other sites on the Web.

Gadgets are for use within specific sites, unlike widgets, which can be embedded in many different types of places. For instance, Google websites only work in Google pages and a Microsoft gadget can only be used within Microsoft pages. Now that you understand gadgets, use them to simplify your life.

What's the Difference Between a Widget and a Gadget?

If there is one web trend that is seemingly unending, it is the trend of the Internet to spew forth new words and phrases every year. From portals to blogs to widgets to mashups to Web 2.0, the Internet has a knack for lighting these words on fire. And the worst part is that sometimes the word lacks any true definition that everyone can agree on.

For those just now trying to get a grasp on things, it can make your head spin.

So, if you've come across some 'gadgets,' and you are wondering just what the difference is between them and 'widgets,' you aren't alone. Twenty years ago, explaining the difference between a widget and a gadget would be the stuff of comedy. Nowadays, it is serious discussion.

The easiest way to explain it is that a gadget is any widget that is not a widget. Sound confusing? A widget is a piece of reusable code that you can plug into virtually any website. A gadget acts just like a widget, often fulfilling the same purpose, but it is proprietary. It only works on a certain website or a specific set of websites.

For example, Google Gadgets can look and act like widgets. But they only work on Google pages.

A widget, on the other hand, works on any page that lets you add an HTML block. You can put them on your blog, or your personalized start

18 Similarities Between Women and Computers

2011-03-07T02:07:00.001-08:00

Before you read any further, please note that this is not a piece out to damage or cut down the important role of women in our society. Read below only as humor and nothing more. These are intended solely for a good laugh.

Women are unique in many ways (and by this I mean different than men) and its this specific uniqueness or certain traits that I refer to when likening a woman to a personal computer. Do not get offended; it is intended to create a smile.

1) A woman is like a computer in that she costs more than you thought it would.

2) A woman resembles a personal computer in that she will not do exactly what you thought it will.

3) After a while, you simply cannot do without both: your computers and your woman.

4) Computers are just like women: after you have gotten used to them and cannot do without them, you discover that one is not enough.

5) Some computers, like some women, serve many people.

6) You can work miracles with both by gently using your fingers if you only know the proper code.

7) If you are inactive with them for more than fifteen minutes, they go off.

8) Just like a computer, the one who runs her has more privileges than just anyone else who is just running her.

9) When there are short-circuits of electricity, they shut you off and then you cannot always return to what was before the short-circuit.

10) Normally, they are available and receptive in the night, but it’s a lot better when they are available and receptive in the morning.

11) When you are, at last, sure that they will do what you wanted, they go off and do something else.

12) The only thing that you predict about the future with them is that they will react unpredictably.

13) Just like women, so too for computers: every year a new model is released that is younger, more advanced and gives a lot more.

14) A woman is just like a computer: you are happy with what you have but when you see what your friends have got, you are sure you want what they have.

15) Women are like computers in that no matter how much you improve and put into them, they only improve for a short time and then go back to their same old pace.

16) Women are like computers in that every day a new program comes out promising to revolutionize your knowledge and use of them, but after spending a lot more cash you realize that none of them work better than the old one you had before.

17) Women are like computers: you always want what others have and they want what you have but you cannot switch even for a trial basis.

18) Women are like computers in that when you get them you are sure that they are the best. But when the days go back, you wonder why you did not get them with a replacement note.

The Tibetan Mastiff (Bhote Kukur)

2011-02-10T18:44:00.000-08:00

AKA: Bhote kukur

Tiben Mastiff - Nepali Bhote Dog

Description: The Himalayan Sheepdog is a Nepali dog breed. It is now rare, and not much is known about it. What is known is that it is a large dog, with similarities in appearance to that of the Newfoundland dog and the Tibetan Mastiff. It has a long double coat, ranging from solid black to light brown. A white Himalayan Sheepdog is the rarest of them all. The Himalayan Sheepdog usually has a patch of white fur on the chest. It also has a long, round and hairy tail.

Dynamics: The Himalayan Sheepdog can be ferocious and strong-willed. This makes it great guard for livestock and farm houses. This breed is intelligent and at times can be very stubborn. Obedience training may be necessary. It is an excellent family dog. It is naturally reserved with strangers, though, because of its guarding instincts.

Breed Group: Flock Guardian

Weight: 62-84 lbs (28-38 kg)

Height: 26-32 inches (66-82 cm)

Color: The double coat of the Himalayan Sheepdog ranges from solid black to light brown. A white Himalayan Sheepdog is rare.

Country of Origin: Nepal

Grooming: The straight double coat of the Hokkaido Dog should be brushed and combed regularly.

Other Info: The Himalayan Sheepdog can live for some 10-13 years if they are bred properly.

Full Detail:
The Tibetan Mastiff (Bhote Kukur) is a very ancient breed and type of domestic dog originating with nomadic cultures of Central Asia, and is especially identified with Tibet. The English name, Tibetan Mastiff, is reflected in the name 'Bhote Kukur' in Nepali, which means Tibetan Dog. In Mongolia it is called "bankhar", meaning "guard dog". The Tibetan name, Do-khyi, means 'tied dog', reflecting its use as a home guard, much as the old English ban-dog (also meaning tied dog) was a dog tied outside the home as a guardian.

The Tibetan Mastiff is among the largest breeds. It is found in a heavier mastiff type and a more moderately sized mountain type. Its sturdy bone structure and large, wide head makes it appear considerably more massive than other dogs of a similar height. It can reach heights up to 31+ inches (80+cm) at the withers, although the standard for the breed is typically in the 25 to 28 inch (61 to 72 cm) range. History records the largest of the breed weighing over 110 kg.

This characteristic is still found in more primitive canids species like wolf. Since their oestrus usually takes place during late fall, most Tibetan Mastiff puppies are born between December and January.

Its double coat is long, and found in a wide variety of colors from solid black to tri-color with the rarest being white. Like other types of mastiffs, the larger variety has a heavier head and more pronounced wrinkling, while the mountain type has a smoother brow with less jowling, giving them a drier mouth than other mastiff breeds. They are also hypoallergenic with a thick double coat that only sheds once per year.

The native type of dog, which still exists in Tibet, and the Westernized purebred breed can vary in temperament. Elizabeth Schuler states, "The few individuals that remain in Tibet are ferocious and aggressive, unpredictable in their behavior, and very difficult to train. But the dogs bred by the English are obedient and attached to their masters." Others claim that the ferocity of those in Tibet is due to selective breeding and their training as guard dogs rather than companion dogs, as reflected by their Tibetan name, "tied dogs." Many breeders throughout Asia are now seeking to preserve and breed the larger, original, more protective Tibetan Mastiff while Western breeders have sought to stabilize the temperament, in both size varieties.

As a flock guardian dog in Tibet, it is tenacious in its ability to confront predators the size of wolves and leopards. As a socialized, more domestic Western dog, it thrives in a spacious, fenced yard with a canine companion, but it is not an appropriate dog for apartment living. The Western-bred dogs are generally more easy-going, although somewhat aloof with strangers coming to the home. Through hundreds of years of selective breeding for a protective flock and family guardian, the breed has been prized for being a nocturnal sentry, keeping would-be predators and intruders at bay, barking at sounds throughout the night. Leaving a Tibetan Mastiff outside all night with neighbors nearby is not recommended.

Like all flock guardian breeds, they are intelligent and stubborn to a fault, so obedience training are recommended since this is a strong-willed, powerful breed. Socialization is also critical with this breed because of their reserved nature with strangers and guarding instincts. They are excellent family dogs.

Marco Polo encountered the large Tibetan dogs in his travels and described them as "tall as a donkey with a voice as powerful as that of a lion."

Writing a Good Software Case Study

2010-11-01T22:47:00.000-07:00

Compelling case studies should be a strong tool for software marketing and sales, especially for B2B software and services. They give your target customer a specific example of how your software product can be used to solve a business problem that they can relate to.

But when I was in the field doing technical sales and marketing for a major technology company, finding and using good software case studies was always a challenge: We had case studies and customer success stories put together by corporate marketing, but many of them never got used or were not terribly effective when they were. I’m sure many of you have the same experience. Why?

Well, from my own experience selling technology solutions to Fortune 500 enterprise clients, these are the top five reasons why case studies fail in their role as a sales and marketing tool:

Not enough detail about the customer and their situation;
Not enough detail about the solution: How was it implemented? What was the technical architecture? What were the main “gotchas”? etc;
Too much of a technology/feature sales pitch;
No backup materials or speaker notes;
Not a representative customer example: irrelevant industry or segment, very small business example when you’re trying to sell to the enterprise, etc.

When we used case studies, it was as part of a presales conversation with the client. Naturally, if the prospect is interested they are going to ask some probing questions about the case… and it’s not enough to say “I’ll have to check with the team on that project and get back to you.” Credibility is key, and a weak case study can destroy the sales team’s credibility.

As the role of software marketing is changing, so too is the role of the case study. Gone are the days when just having a glossy leave-behind was enough. Now case studies must be able to engage the customer in a conversation, promote interaction, and incite the customer to learn more about the solution through references and additional detail.

Here are some tips on writing strong software case studies:

Choose a customer example that is representative of your target segment.
Lead with a description of the customer’s problem in language typical of their industry or segment – use that to pull in the reader.
Resist the temptation to start touting your product features too early in the case study.
Describe the solution in business language: how did your software product solve the customer’s problem.
Highlight tangible and quantifiable business results.
Highlight the main customer lessons learned, and any considerations that must be taken into account by someone else wanting to go the same route.
Provide references and links where the reader can get more information.
Provide detailed speaker notes for the sales team.
Even better: get a trusted third party (eg, analyst, media, etc) to publish the case study.

source : http://www.softwareceo.com

NURTURING CHOICE : nurture over nature, The heart of a Lioness

2010-10-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

Photo: M. Telewa /REUTERS

It's nurture over nature for Kamuniak, a lioness in north Kenya's Samburu National Park, who has adopted her fifth newborn oryx antelope. Kamuniak, whose name means "the blessed one" in the local Samburu language, has been adopting oryxes since last year. On each occasion she has protected the calves from other predators and even let their natural mothers feed them. Eventually, the calves escape with the help of their birth mothers or the park wardens.

World Cup 2010 - Paul the Octopus dies

2010-10-26T19:24:00.000-07:00

Paul the Octopus, the cephalopod who became a global sensation after successfully predicting matches at the World Cup, has died peacefully in his sleep aged two.

Paul the mighty octopus

Stefan Porwoll, general manager of the Oberhausen Sea Life centre in Germany - where Paul made his predictions - confirmed the news.

"He died last night, a peaceful and natural death," Porwoll said.

Paul, who was born in January 2008 in Weymouth, correctly predicted the winner of all seven of Germany's matches at this summer's World Cup in South Africa. He then correctly chose Spain over the Netherlands before the final.

Paul made his predictions by choosing between two feed boxes which bore the flags of the two nations involved in the next match.

Time and again his predictions came true, transforming him into a global sensation who attracted big-money transfer offers after the tournament.

Yet the Oberhausen Sea Life centre insisted on keeping their star attraction - and are now devastated at the news of his passing.

"We all loved him and we will all truly miss him," added Porwoll.

Reasons Why Facebook is Rocking

2010-10-07T00:21:00.000-07:00

Facebook is doing some amazing things – and it’s not just because it is a smart social network. Innovation is constant and is heavily influenced by Facebook members. As time goes by, Facebook is solidifying its grip on a very loyal userbase and attracting new members because…it’s just better.

Take a look at some of the data out there and it may just be the reason why we continue to see tremendous percentage growth (Compete.com estimates that compared to this time last year, Facebook visits are up 127%).

So, without further adieu, here are seven reasons why Facebook is rocking:

1. Privacy
Facebook’s success starts with it being a clean, secure, and stable environment. Basically, it is the opposite of MySpace.

Facebook puts the user in control, allowing them to limit specific pieces of information they want to share within their various networks. In fact, there are so many privacy controls that it is a bit overwhelming at first.

2. News and Mini-Feeds
You might have heard about the backlash to Facebook’s News and Mini-Feeds when they first arrived. Essentially, these feeds show updates from a user’s networks on his/her homepage: ”Mike and Bill are now friends”, “Michelle posted a link.”, “April tagged Jen in a photo”, etc.

I would argue that feeds are now the defining feature of Facebook. It is what keeps users logging in, expanding their networks (e.g., Mike sees that Bill became friends with Andy and knows Andy too, so then he connects with him), and more generally being active on Facebook. Feeds keep Facebook fresh; their absence on MySpace makes it stale and boring.

3. Status Updates
If you are a fan of Twitter (or know anything about it), then Facebook Status Updates are right up your alley – except they are smarter.

While I like the idea of Twitter, sharing “what you are doing” with everyone in the world doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. But what if you could share your status with a subset of trusted friends? Status Updates are Twitter 3.0 (yes, two versions ahead of it).

4. Mobile
Of course, Status Updates couldn’t be compared to Twitter unless mobile updates were available. And they are. But in addition to updating your status, you can post links to your profile and get info about your friends – all via text message commands.

There is also a very sleek mobile version of Facebook available at http://m.facebook.com. Try pulling MySpace (or most websites) up on a mobile device…not pretty.

5. Near Unlimited Photo Storage / Advanced Photo Editing
While MySpace is out buying Photobucket, Facebook allows near unlimited photo storage on its site. Each album is limited to 60 pictures but there is nothing indicating the maximum number of albums a user can have.

Facebook also allows people to “tag” photos. See your friend Sally in a photo? Tag that portion of the photo and it will get associated with her. You can even view all photos tagged with “Sally” (users can remove the tags if they don’t want them on the photos).

Check out the most recent post on the Facebook Blog – Facebook Photos Infrastructure.

6. Facebook Marketplace
Yes, it is true that MySpace has this sort of functionality (i.e., a classified section). But in Facebook, you leverage privacy and perhaps more importantly, benefit from targeted listings. Items are posted into networks, so it makes them easier to find and more relevant. Classifieds do not work as well unless they are geographically based.

7. API
The Facebook Developer Platform allows interested parties to build on top of Facebook. Picture Facebook as the Salesforce.com of the social networking world.

Facebook’s Firefox Toolbar is one very cool example of what you can do with it. And I’m certain more powerful examples are yet to come. If you don’t want to take my word for it, maybe you’ll listen to the WSJ (Facebook Opens Its Pages As a Way to Fuel Growth).

Honorable Mention: Facebook Share

http://kenyarmosh.com/7-reasons-why-facebook-is-rocking/

4 Sites That Let You Create Your Own Wikipedia-Like Website

2010-10-07T00:13:00.000-07:00

“A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor.” That’s the definition provided by Wikipedia, the most popular wiki on the Internet.

Wikis serve as collaborative sites and can be very useful if you operate a community or are part of a group of any kind. Wikis bring people with common interests together, and can be centered around anything from movies and video games to recipes and studying. With the right software, anyone can build a site like Wikipedia.

In this article, I am going to show you a few sites that you can use to build your very own Wikipedia-like website. Whether you are looking to join a wiki or build one of your own, you should be able to find what you’re looking for using the resources found here.

MediaWiki

MediaWiki, which we covered previously in the directory, is the best way to go about creating a Wikipedia-like collaboration environment. It is a free software wiki package written in PHP, and utilized by several projects and collaborations.

MediaWiki can accommodate any number of users, from the one-man team to upwards of a few hundred people or more. It has dozens of extensions you can install, configurations like file uploading and skinning, and it can be installed on any hosting provider.

[Note]: Depending on your hosting provider, you might already have MediaWiki functionality built-in and ready to install. Check with your host or find out by searching around on your CPanel.

You can find hundreds of examples of companies utilizing MediaWiki here. Note that I have only point to the English section.

As Daniel pointed out a few years ago, MediaWiki is pretty simple to install. Just download the software, upload it to your server, and configure the application to meet your needs.

Wikia

If you don’t pay for hosting, have your own web server, or are just looking for something a little simpler, Wikia might be for you. As Saikat pointed out in an article last year, Wikia is a wiki farm, meaning that essentially it is a website made up of tons of different wikis.

Here is an example of a Call of Duty wiki that was created with Wikia. You can browse the various types of wikis you can join and create right from the home page.

Whether you’re looking to join one community or several, Wikia will grant you access to them all with a single username and password. If, for some reason, you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can create your own.
Additional Resources

By now you should be in wiki-Heaven. However, if you think the list of suitable wikis stops there you are wrong my friend. If you are looking for something more, you might try Wikispaces or Wikidot. They offer premium features at a price but they both also have a pretty decent free option.

WikiSpaces

With a free, basic plan on Wikispaces, you can build one individual wiki (per account) with unlimited users and unlimited pages and messages. You are allocated 2GB of file storage and will have access to all the standard features, including the WYSIWYG editor, image and file upload, simple page linking, widgets, and easy setup.

Wikidot

A free account on Wikidot gets you 5 sites, 300MB of storage on each, unlimited number of pages, custom CSS themes, simple backups, custom domain mapping, and advanced membership roles and permissions. They even have a sandbox that lets you “experiment without consequences”.

If you are not looking for an online wiki and would rather have something smaller/desktop capable, check out Justin’s article on Zim.

For every other piece of wiki software known to man, explore Wikipedia’s massive list of wiki software.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many different ways to create a Wikipedia-like website. Based on your current needs, one of the resources mentioned may better suit you than the others, so it’s important that you do your homework. You can start by joining a few wikis that interest you. If you take part in these online communities, you will begin to realize what you need to do to create an effective one of your own.

What would you need a Wikipedia-like website for? Will you be using any of these resources to create a wiki of your own?

Please leave your thoughts, ideas, and comments below. Also, if you found this article useful, try sharing it with the social media buttons below!

src : http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-sites-create-wikipedialike-website/

Google Doctype like Wikipedia for Web Development

2010-10-06T23:53:00.000-07:00

Google's new web site Doctype rounds up web development tips, tricks, and best practices in an editable format à la Wikipedia. Whether you dabble in HTML on your blog or you're a full-on web professional, this one's worth adding to your reference toolbox. [via]

Best Rich Text Editors for Your Web Sites

2010-09-24T09:42:00.000-07:00

1. FCKeditor

FCKeditor is a very nice HTML text editor brings to the web much of the power of desktop editors like MS Word. It's lightweight and doesn't require any kind of installation on the client computer.

2. TinyMCE

TinyMCE is a platform independent web based Javascript HTML WYSIWYG editor control released as Open Source under LGPL by Moxiecode Systems AB. It has the ability to convert HTML TEXTAREA fields or other HTML elements to editor instances. TinyMCE is very easy to integrate into other Content Management Systems.

3. Yahoo! UI Library: Rich Text Editor

The Yahoo! Rich Text Editor is a UI control that replaces a standard HTML textarea and is based on Yahoo! UI Library; it allows for the rich formatting of text content, including common structural treatments like lists, formatting treatments like bold and italic text, and drag-and-drop inclusion and sizing of images.

4. Xinha

Xinha is a powerful WYSIWYG HTML editor component that works in Mozilla based browsers as well as in MS Internet Explorer. Its configurabilty and extensibility make it easy to build just the right editor for multiple purposes, from a restricted mini-editor for one database field to a full-fledged website editor. Its liberal, BSD licence makes it an ideal candidate for integration into any kind of project.

5. Free Rich Text Editor

Free Rich Text Editor is an extremely easy to use FREE javascript based HTML WYSIWYG editor for your website, it can easily be implemented into any existing content management system or other web application with no knowledge required in programming or javascript. Only 3 lines of code required to set up the editor. It also now outputs as XHTML compliant code!

The Difference Between A Developer, A Programmer And A Computer Scientist

2010-09-20T22:17:00.000-07:00

While surfing through the net, and doing some research with the developers blog I found an interesting article indicating the differences between developer, programmer and computer scientist. Wow, what an wonderful article. Till date I thought these are the similar sort of terms that people used to call interchangeably. But after reading this article, I really found some differences between the three and I still wondering to which category should I keep myself - a programmer, a developer or a computer scientist.

Well if you want to categorize yourself according to the article then here you go. The following article is copied and pasted as it is without a single change. So enjoy the article and find out -

The Difference Between A Developer, A Programmer And A Computer Scientist

Original post taken from SKORKS
by Alan Skorkin

I have often used those three terms almost interchangeably, yes, even computer scientist. After all, most of us have a degree in computer science, so what does that make us? However, recently I find that those three things have come to take on more and more distinct personalities in my mind. It has come to the point where if I think about someone I know – or know of – within the industry, they immediately fall into one of those three categories. Which is not to say that one person can't have attributes from all three, but regardless, they always tend to favor one most strongly and so I fit them into that category, programmer, developer or computer scientist.

It is difficult to define what each one should be, (it is more of a gut feel rather than a strict delineation) they are very similar (and rightly so), but I am going to attempt to do it anyway, cause I am a glutton for punishment :).

Computer Scientist

They write code (yeah I know it's a bit of a bombshell). It may not be the prettiest or most well-factored code, but it gets the job done. It is not about the design of the code or "good" practices, it is about proving what they set out to prove. A computer scientist is as much a mathematician as they are a technologist (they have 31337 math skills), they don't just need to know that stuff works, they have to prove it. Communication and people skills are desirable traits, but not emphasized. Software process and team dynamics skills are desirable traits, but not emphasized. They have good breadth of general knowledge of their whole field, but they deeply specialize in one or several narrow areas. In these areas they are considered world-class experts. They work on stuff related to their research in their personal time.

Programmer

Programmers write awesome code. Making it clean, well-factored and error free are very important concerns, but not at the expense of getting the job done. It is all about knowing the meaning of "good code" within their domain. They need to have some math skills, but this is not a paramount concern. They need to know of good (best) solutions to problems, but they don't need to prove it is the best solution. A good breadth of algorithmic knowledge is imperative. They have a depth of skill in a wide area of expertise and have reasonably good knowledge of related areas as well. Communication and people skills are desirable traits, but not emphasized. Software process and team dynamics skills are desirable traits, but not emphasized. They work on personal software projects they find of interest in their off time.

Developer

They write code. Making it well-factored and clean is important, but other factors often take priority. Math skills are very much optional, but it does help to be aware of common problems and solutions related to the domain they are in. Communication and people skills are paramount. Process and team dynamics are bread and butter skills. They are consummate generalists without any truly deep specializations. They are expert at finding ways around problems and plugging components together to fulfill a set of requirements. In their personal time they are either trying to build the next Facebook, or engage in activities that have nothing to do with programming, developing, or computer science.

* Developer are programmers to a greater or lesser extent.
* Computer scientists are programmers to a greater or lesser extent.

* Enterprise software is the domain of the developer.
* The Googles and Microsofts of the world are after programmers (and to a lesser extent computer scientists). The developers who end up there become product managers.
* RnD and academia are the domain of the computer scientist (and to a lesser extent the programmer)

The thing to remember here is that none of the three is derogatory or "bad" in any way. One is not more or less desirable than any of the others. They are simply different dimensions (with some crossover) of the field we are all involved in. Particular personalities will identify more with one but that does not mean that all three can't "bleed" into each other and combine favorably. It is entirely possible to be both an awesome developer and a great programmer (although it is difficult with so many important things to focus on). In rare cases you may even get an all 3 in 1 type of deal, in which case I'd love to hear from you, cause we should start a company together, so that I can ride your awesomeness all the way to easy-street :). But no matter where you fall, it is entirely possible to be highly successful if you fit snugly into just one of the three.

What about a software engineer? That's just a subset of developer.

What about an architect? They design buildings and stuff, so I am not quite sure how that's relevant :)

I do believe that I have thoroughly failed to communicate my meaning. No matter. I will throw the ball to you, dear reader. Do you see programmer, developer and computer scientist as distinct and if so are you definitions similar to mine? If not, then I'd love to hear your thoughts about them being one and the same.

Images by Esthr, Chealion and Pieter Baert

iPhone iOS Devices Jailbroken

2010-09-09T18:52:00.000-07:00

By George Hulme

Hackers are claiming to have uncovered a flaw within iPhone and iPod Touch hardware that will make it easy for users to jailbreak their devices. And, if these reports prove accurate, it’ll not be a trivial workaround for Apple to fix.

Hacker Pod2g from the group Chronix Dev Team claims to have found a boot ROM vulnerability that can be used to create jailbreak exploits for most iPhones and iPod Touches. Such an exploit can’t be fixed with a firmware update – rather they require a replacement of the hardware device. That’s because once the boot ROM is programmed and set and the phone assembled in the factory, this segment of hardware can’t be updated.

That means if you bought your device before today, or before Apple patches the hole in manufacturing, you may be able to jailbreak your device without Apple being able to do much – if anything – about it.

Any day now expect the iPhone Dev Team and others to publish software that will make it simple for anyone to jailbreak their iPhone or Touch.

It seems serendipitous that the jailbreakable vulnerability was announced on the same day Apple made its iOS 4.1 upgrade available. As Paul McDougall points out, the upgrade offers a number of enhancements including a social gaming platform, TV show rentals, iTunes Ping, advanced photographic capabilities, and fixes a number of bugs and other performance issues.

However, users may want to think twice before jailbreaking their devices. In February, Apple filed for a patent that covers the ability to spot and disable various unauthorized uses of an iPhone, Touch, or iPad – jailbreaking included.

So by jailbreaking the device, you may not only be voiding the warranty – but you may one day end up with a bricked phone or MP3 player.

10 things you need to know about buckyballs

2010-09-04T09:45:00.000-07:00

Today is the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the buckyball - a spherical fullerene, or molecule made up entirely of carbon atoms. That's the science bit. And here are the top then things you need to know about everybody's favourite chemical compound that resembles a geodesic dome.

1) We're not on entirely familiar terms, so let's address the buckyball with the formality such a big occasion deserves: as the first fullerene to be discovered, it is formally known as Buckminsterfullerene (C60).

2) The name is an homage to Richard Buckminster Fuller, an architect whose geodesic domes (similar to the Walt Disney resort's Epcot theme park 'golf ball') it looks like.

3) It was first prepared in 1985 by Harold Kroto, James Heath, Sean O'Brien, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Kroto, Curl and Smalley were awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their roles in the discovery of the buckyball.

4) Containing 60 carbon atoms arranged to form a hollow sphere (a truncated (T = 3) icosahedron), the buckyball's structuer is often compared to a football.

5) The diameter of a C60 molecule is about 1 nanometer (equal to one billionth of a metre) and the nucleus to nucleus diameter of a C60 molecule is about 0.71 nanometer.

6) Fullerenes occur in nature only very rarely - although the C60 is found in soot.

7) Buckyballs have been utilised in research for electronics and nanotechnology.

8) In the PC game Civilization: Call to Power, one of the scientific advancements available is a city-encompassing force field of C60 buckyballs.

9) In Arthur C. Clarke's novel 3001: The Final Odyssey, BuckminsterFullerene is the substance used to build the massive station-ring around earth and the necessary surface supports to maintain it.

10) The buckyball is the state molecule of Texas.

How to Open and View NFO Files in XP , Vista or Seven

2010-09-01T19:45:00.000-07:00

Many users find it difficult to open or view NFO files. These are just text files and using them is very easy. NFO files are actually 'info' files. These text files frequently contain information regarding the installation or use of downloaded packages.

If you click on it you might get this information.

---------------------------
System Information
---------------------------
System Information cannot open this NFO file. It might be corrupted or an unrecognized version.

Here is how to open and use these files. You may download some programs to view these text files but however, you can use simply a notepad to view them and save your penny.

1. Browse to the NFO file on your computer

2. Right-click on the file and click Open With

3. Select Notepad from several list of programs.

4. Click OK.

Its simple. Many people still got confused with nfo file issue and about how to open them.

Add a Feedback Form to Your Blogger Blog

2010-08-30T21:44:00.000-07:00

Blogging is all about connecting with your readers. If you want to be a better blogger, you need to listen to your readers. You need to give them an opportunity to get in touch with you.

That’s why it is important to have a "Feedback" form in your blog. Feedback form not only makes your blog look professional, but will also make you understand your readers better, help you in getting a lot of tips from them and ultimately will make you a better blogger in the long run.

Unfortunately, Google Blogger blog neither has a Feedback Form nor any related widgets like many plugins available in the WordPress Blog.

But nothing to worry about, if you want to put a form like that in our contact us page, then it can be done with ease. It is done using Zoho Creator. Though there are multiple options available like response-o-matic, freedback, wufoo and google docs, we are going to use Zoho Creator due to the number of reasons:

- Zoho Creator is free
- Zoho is a reputed company and will not burst in a dot com bubble any time soon.
- No separate user account is needed. If you have a Google account (obviously, you do own a Google account if you are blogging in Blogger), then you can use it to log into Zoho.
- The input form that you create is highly customizable. The flexibility in customizing the form is much greater than Google Forms. Hence you can easily blend this form with the rest of your blog.
- You can configure Zoho to email you the contents that user submitted. Therefore, you don’t have to login to Zoho’s web site ever after.
- Zoho provides many ready made scripts which provides many added functionality. Like for instance, if you have added an email field in the form, you can configure it to check whether the email that the user entered is a valid email or not.

Sleeping with your boss can 'boost your career and give you a promotion

2010-08-28T10:07:00.000-07:00

By Daniel Bates

It will threaten to destroy your family life and lose you the respect of others.

But having an affair with the boss is seen as likely to boost your career, especially if you are a woman.

Some 37 per cent of office workers said that from their experience those who slept with their superiors were rewarded with a career boost.

And no wonder - no matter how high achieving, female executives will not reach the very top of their profession unless they find a 'sponsor' who will speak out on their behalf, the study for the U.S. Centre for Work-Life Policy found.

Fair trade? Some 37 per cent of office workers said that those who slept with their superiors were rewarded with a career boost

More often than not they are in a position of power and influence, and almost always male and married.

Despite all the risks, affairs in the workplace are still a common occurrence.

Some 34 per cent of women in executive positions said they knew a female colleague who had slept with their boss.

Even at director level or above, 15 per cent of women admitted to having had an office fling.

The risks of inappropriate behaviour in the office were recently illustrated when Mark Hurd, 53, the chief executive of computer giant Hewlett Packard, resigned over alleged sexual harassment of Jodie Fisher, 50, a former reality television contestant turned marketing consultant with the company.

Hurd who is married, has settled the matter out of court for an undisclosed sum.

But even if he had kept his job, the study showed the damaging effects that sleeping with the boss would have had on office life for the pair of them.

In terms of morale, 61 per cent of men and 70 per cent of women lose respect for a leader involved in an affair.

Don’t expect that your colleagues will have no idea what is happening - 60 per cent of male executives and 65 per cent of female executives suspect that salary hikes and plum assignments are being traded for sexual favours.

And once they find out, don’t expect any sympathy if it all falls apart.

Some 48 per cent of men and 56 per cent of women feel animosity towards the involved couple, and 39 per cent of men and 37 per cent of women see a fall off in productivity as the team splinters.

Relationships expert Jean Hannah Edelstein said: ‘Office affairs are a bad idea. Your boss already has a lot of power of you so once your start sleeping with him, how do you know that he’s going to fulfil his end of the bargain?

'Even if it happens in the short term, everyone will know what’s going on and you’ll lose their respect.

'It poisons the atmosphere and in the long run it is not worth it and will follow you around the industry.'

She added: ‘In some jobs that are boring you’re sitting there all day and you want to fancy someone, or in some high-pressure jobs there is nowhere else to meet people, so these things do happen.

‘If it does, be prepared to leave your job if it goes sour, it can be that serious.

‘You really have to ask yourself: "Am I that into this person I’d be prepared to lose my job over it?" If the answer is no, then don’t do it.’

source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk

Deep-sea images reveal colorful life off Indonesia

2010-08-27T00:37:00.000-07:00

By ROBIN McDOWELL

JAKARTA, Indonesia – Scientists using cutting-edge technology to explore waters off Indonesia were wowed by colorful and diverse images of marine life on the ocean floor — including plate-sized sea spiders and flower-like sponges that appear to be carnivorous.

They predicted Thursday that as many as 40 new plant and animal species may have been discovered during the three-week expedition that ended Aug. 14.

AP/NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program

More than 100 hours of video and 100,000 photographs, captured using a robotic vehicle with high-definition cameras, were piped to shore in real-time by satellite and high-speed Internet.

Verena Tunnicliffe, a professor at the University of Victoria in Canada, said the images provided an extraordinary glimpse into one of the globe's most complex and little-known marine ecosystems.

"Stalked sea lilies once covered the ocean, shallow and deep, but now are rare," she said in a written statement. "I've only seen a few in my career. But on this expedition, I was amazed to see them in great diversity."

Likewise, Tunnicliffe has also seen sea spiders before, but those were tiny in comparison, all around one-inch (2.5 centimeters) long: "The sea spiders ... on this mission were huge. Eight-inches (20-centimeters) or more across."

One animal captured on video looks like a flower, covered with glasslike needles, but scientists think it is probably a carnivorous sponge. The spikes, covered with sticky tissue, appear to capture food as it passes by.

Scientists used powerful sonar mapping system and the robotic vehicle to explore nearly 21,000 square miles (54,000 sq. kilometers) of sea floor off northern Indonesia, at depths ranging from 800 feet (240 meters) to over two miles (1.6 kilometers).

The mission was carried out by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's ship, the Okeanos Explorer. An Indonesian vessel, the Baruna Jaya IV, also took part, collecting specimens that, together with all rights for future use, will remain in the country.

Confirmation that a species is new involves a scientific peer review and other steps and can take years.

source : news.yahoo.com

Google Voice

2010-08-26T19:19:00.000-07:00

More over a year back, google released an early preview of Google Voice, a web-based platform for managing communications. To try it out, one needed to request and receive and invite to try it out. Now after some hard work of testing and tweaking, Google Voice is opened to the public, no invitation required.

Check out the revamped features page of Google Voice to learn about everything of its power. The video above provides a good overview in less than two minutes.

A quick context diagram, infographic created created by Google visualize some recent history of human communication and how Google Voice uses the web to help communicate in more ways than ever before.

If you appreciate our work, please help us do more for you by clicking on one of the sponsor link below.

source : Google Voice