Category: IT

Hack: Facebook’s version of PHP, now for everyone (#technical)

It’s not news that Facebook has been running a modified version of PHP for some time. What is news is that now so can you.

You can get a copy of it at this website:Hack. It installs on most OSs (or will, soon), and even runs in the Cloud (on Heroku).

According to this, Facebook Introduces ‘Hack,’ the Programming Language of the Future | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com, what you get is a high performing version of PHP with very little you have to change to get the performance gains.

It will be interesting to see if this helps to drive up usage in PHP. There are lots of new technologies to build web site with these days: this could make PHP a desirable option.

Is Agile dead?

For people who work in software development, I recommend this article: The End of Agile: Death by Over-Simplification | Effective Software Design. It pushes back against what Agile is becoming. It also has some great links to others complaining about what Agile has become, including this, which I really like: The Anti Agile Manifesto | On the obfuscation of common sense in the software development community.

My belief is that there is a wide range of people using the term “agile”. Some of those people have alot of experience doing software development and can use it to create much better software. And then there are other people who use the term vaguely in order to sound intelligent and flexible. If you want to be more like the former and would like to know more about Agile, here’s a good place to start: Agile software development – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I don’t think it is dead: but I do think it needs resuscitation.

 

Some thoughts on the infancy of the Web, on it’s 25th birthday

The web is 25 years old, and I have been using it since the very beginning. For those of you that haven’t — and those feeling nostalgic — here are some fun facts about the early days of the World Wide Web:

  • Before the web, there was just the Internet. And the Internet consisted of various services, from e-mail (of course) to Gopher to ftp to WAIS to news groups/Usenet, etc. It was all great, but then the World Wide Web sprung into action and the browser quickly became THE tool for using the Internet (save email). I wonder if anyone under 30 has even heard of any of those other services, let along use any of them?
  • In the beginning, most people couldn’t access the Web or even the Internet. Most people’s PCs had Windows, and Windows didn’t come with software to connect to the Internet. I was using OS/2 at the time – Really! – and OS/2 did provide a “TCP/IP stack” that allowed you to connect. You could buy a Stack and install it on your Windows machine, and eventually Microsoft bundled it with Windows. When that happened, Internet access took off.
  • To access the Internet, everyone had a dial up modem, with U.S. Robotics making some of the finest ones at the time. Web pages had to be designed to be very small, because every byte delivered by modem had to count.
  • The mid to late 90s was an exciting time to be on the Internet. The web, access to the Internet via new software, ISPs, and email all hit most people at about the same time. Things changed so quickly, the notion of a “web year” (3 months) came about.
  • In the early days, there were a range of browsers, from Mosaic to Viola to the one from IBM called Web Explorer. Then came Netscape and then Internet Explorer. It was along time before Firefox and Safari came along to challenge IE.
  • The “www.” part was important at first when you were using the Web. You could type “www.ibm.com” or “ftp.ibm.com” or “some other protocol.ibm.com” and your browser and the server would figure out what you wanted. It wasn’t assumed you were going to a web site Likewise, you could type “ibm.com:80” to go the web server. Eventually , the only thing that people wanted was their browser to talk to the web server, and the “www.” and the “:80” became superflous.
  • Server technology was very expensive at first. Netscape’s web server came with nice bells and whistles and cost about $10,000 for some form of that. Then Apache came along with their web server and essentially obliterated the web server software market.
  • Yahoo! was a big thing in the beginning. I actually tried to do a Canadian version of it. FYI: you cannot hand craft your own Yahoo! It’s like an artisanal Google. Needless to say, I abandoned that idea soon and left it to the professionals. I was involved with the early development of IBM’s global presence on the web.
  • Early web pages seem ugly now, but at the time they were amazing. You didn’t have to type in a bunch of commands to access information, like you did with FTP. You could type in one thing and just point and click, and each click brought up new information or played audio files or played video files! All of that was simply amazing.
  • The moment I thought the web was going to be big was when paintings from the Louvre went online. I thought: this isn’t just for technical people: any one can do this.
  • In the early days of the Web, there were two big concerns. One was doing commerce on the web. Companies were cautioned to be very discreet about selling things: otherwise the hard core Internet people would make a big stink and make life difficult for you. The second big concern was that the Internet backbone in the United States would get broken up or underfunded or somehow messed up and that this would inhibit the health of the Internet. This was a really big concern. The Internet has always been in various states of precariousness, and the recent threats to net neutrality are part of an ongoing story.
  • Speaking of net neutrality, there have always been special connections between major sites and major ISPs. In the early days it was from big sites like AOL connecting directly to big ISPs. Now it is Netflix who is making the deals. The more things change… 🙂

Happy birthday, World Wide Web, you great information superhighway! May you be around for 25 more!

What if life follows Moore’s Law

A fascinating idea: what if life on earth follows Moore’s Law? If it does, as discussed
here, then it could explain why there are no beings in the universe advanced much beyond ours. It could also mean that life on Earth came from somewhere else.

The article in MIT’s Technology Review is well worth a read. It also makes me think that Moore’s Law could be a fundamental way of understanding much more than integrated circuits.

Some thoughts on dealing with Evernote problems on my Windows laptop

I recently had problems with Evernote on my Windows laptop, and I want to document my notes here in case you run into a similar issue.

I am not certain what was the cause of the problem, but one day I could not synchronize my Evernote client on my Windows laptop. It kept saying I could not reach the server. This was odd, because I could access the Internet and login to evernote.com and see my notes there.

Now the first thing I should have done is work to resolve this. Instead, I kept adding things to the Evernote that was having a problem. Bad idea. I can’t tell if I lost what I kept at the time. It doesn’t appear that I did, but don’t make this error. Work to fix it right away.

I tried a number of things to fix it. Finally what seem to fix it was uninstalling it, and then installing it using the Advanced install option. Going through the Advanced option, I picked a different directory than the default directory to install it in. When I brought up the Evernote client, I was notified by my security software that Evernote was trying to connect to the Internet. I allowed it and it then the client worked fine.

My theory is that there was something corrupted with the files in the old location where I had Evernote installed. As a result, uninstalling and then reinstalling didn’t correct the problem. Now this is somewhat odd, because when you uninstall Evernote, the file directory seems to go away. That leads to my other theory, and that is that there was something else that was corrupted (e.g. registry? appdata?), and that picking another directory with the Advanced option forced the installer to ignore the old settings and come up with new default settings.

The good news is that the problem is fixed and Evernote is fine and syncing is fine. I just checked and a note I just added an synced on my laptop flowed over to my iPhone.

a nice reminder to backup your files

My computer is toast. Specifically there appears to be a problem with either Windows XP or the file system where Windows resides. Regardless, it is likely going to mean a lot of restoring of files or at least moving them.

Ask yourself; if my computer stopped working right now, do you have a copy of the most important files on my computer? Do I even know which files are important? Have you tested restoring those files and did it work?

If you don’t have a good answer to these questions, look for ways to determine how to answer them today. In the worst case, take your most crucial files and email them to someone or use a service like drop.io as a temporary place to put them while you find a longer term solution.

You don’t need a complex solution. In fact backing up your files should be as easy as brushing your teeth! And just as important.

Visio – not just for IT diagrams

As an IT architect, I use Microsoft Visio for some of the diagrams I do. (I do use IBM’s Rational products as well.) Little did I imagine you could use it for non-technical things the way David Salaguinto does to make funny comics like this one:

For more on this, see Office Hours: Drawing a daily comic strip with Visio – Help and How-to – Microsoft Office Online

Free Wi-Fi at Starbucks


According to the nytimes.com blog, Bits ,

Starbucks announced today it will give most any customer two consecutive hours a day of free Wi-Fi access. Specifically, that offer applies to anyone who uses its prepaid Starbucks Card at least once a month. That represents as many as 60 hours of access for the price of one $2 cup of coffee.

It’s interesting to think of Starbucks as a network service provider. It has the potential to open up lots of other business opportunities for them as well. See Bits for more info.

OLPC ‘Give One Get One’ Program Extended until the end of 2007!

TheCompiler blog from Wired.com has the story. Key information:

The One Laptop Per Child project’s “Give One Get One” offer has been extended through the end of the year, which means there’s still time to pick up an XO laptop for yourself and someone in a developing country.The promotional offer kicked off two weeks ago and was originally scheduled to end yesterday, November 26, but due to the demand it has been extended through the end of the year.

Zoho Gets better and Better

Over at the blog Compiler from Wired.com is a good review of the latest AND greatest features in Zoho Writer. Key quote:

While it isn’t feature complete just yet, Zoho Writer is getting very close to the ideal in online editing with word processing software that works equally well in offline and online modes. With big names like Google Docs, Microsoft Live and even Adobe all vying for your online office loyalty, there’s no doubt that if offline functionality matters to you, Zoho has the lead.

FTP: not just for techies anymore.

The globeandmail.com has this article: U.S. Military documents found unprotected on FTP servers

I think it is a sign of the adoption of technology that the Globe could mention “FTP servers” in a headline: they must assume that people will know what that means.

Of course, there is a good article in there on the lack of security when it comes to such matters, but that is another story. 🙂