The Codebelay Blog

I recently created a cross platform browser, Windows 2003 EC2 AMI: ami-69739500

It has the following pre-installed:

• gvim
• IE 7
• Firefox 3 with Web Developer, yslow & Firebug
• opera
• Putty SSH
• Putty SCP

Pretty much with that list you’re all set to do troubleshooting for cross platform browser issues.

There’s IIS 6.0 and SQL Server, too.

I’ve linked the password to this ami at http://www.codebelay.com/ami-69739500.txt . It’s a short-coming of Windows AMIs on EC2 that I have to link the password, so please change it once you get into the instance.

• By: Jim Barcelona, clutch coder

It looks like Open Source will contribute to the building of Cybernetic Life Nodes.
These open source projects are leading the way:

• http://www.leafproject.org/ – vision recognition
• http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/html/compare.php – voice recognition
• http://rossum.sourceforge.net/ – protocol for sharing code with other robots
• http://www.opencog.org/wiki/The_Open_Cognition_Project - advanced machine cognition
• http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/ – robot device interface, outdoor robotic movement
• http://alchemy.cs.washington.edu/ – entity resolution, link prediction, social network modeling
• http://www.alicebot.org/about.html - linguistic

The only thing missing is a robotic body to put this stuff in.

It's not easy being virtual.

Just typing this from my iPhone. It works really sweet & is full of win.

What could go wrong?

The Bad:

1. Work now requires me to put into my timesheet how long I take for lunch.
2. I missed an appointment on Thursday that was in my facebook events
3. I missed wishing @angmoore Happy Birthday on her Birthday. Happy Birthday, Ang!
4. I missed the Flickr Party which was in my facebook events
5. There’s a lot of side work that I missed from search.twitter.com It’s really a great tool for finding work.
6. I explained to some folks why I hadn’t approved their friend requests or follows in person. That led to interesting conversations.

The Good:

1. I felt a lot more focused
2. There is a shared illusion of connectedness that can prevent you from achieving your dreams. I won’t let that happen to me.
3. I avoided making any embarrassing statements, grammar mistakes or spelling mistakes
4. I enjoyed really focusing on people physically close to me.

Nuggets of Wisdom:

1. I didn’t miss twittering unless I was at a party or bar where I didn’t know anyone.
2. Twitter’s search is Foucault’s panopticon.
3. It’s what you don’t do on Facebook that gets you hired.

• By: Jim Barcelona, clutch coder

By taking the @memcached username on Twitter, Gear6.com has engaged in identity theft. Yes, someone call the police now.

I’m pretty sure this is one of those posts that won’t make anyone happy.

Let me first start off with what is meant by identity theft. Wikipedia provides a pretty solid, working definition. If you disagree with it, then I’m curious as to why and how, but for this discussion, I’m using it to prove a point.

“Identity theft is a crime used to refer to fraud that involves someone pretending to be someone else in order to steal money or get other benefits.”

For example, if I walked around telling people I’m Chow Yun Fat while flashing a fake ID that says Chow Yun Fat, and I say, “Let me into this party. Wasn’t Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon an awesome film?” then I’m stealing Chow Yun Fat’s identity. There is no way he’d say, “It’s cool, go ahead and pretend to be me.”

Let’s take a look at @memcached on Twitter.

First off, having the url, http://twitter.com/memcached , is like having a business card. A business card cannot be used to legally establish identity, but it strongly suggests an identity.

In this case, I would expect that http://twitter.com/memcached is someone, or a group of persons working on the memcached open source project.

Let’s say I go to the url for the memcached twitter account.

What do I see?

http://twitter.com/memcached/status/1376487185

I see a few posts of @memcached pretending to be a member of the memcache open source coding team just like some dude pretending to be Chow Yun Fat at a party.

And here’s bdeshong thinking he’s talking to memcache:

http://twitter.com/bdeshong/status/1376501081

There are other examples where they announce releases of memcache as if they were the memcached development team.

Now they’re clearly pretending to be someone else, but are they doing it for stealing money? Getting other benefits? Well, no money has changed hands here. There are just a lot of confused people, but confusing folks isn’t a crime.

Are they getting benefits?

Yes! In the Internet age attention equals money in terms of pageviews. They are definitely getting the benefit of the advertising garnered through the memcached name!

This sort of reverse-swiftboating where the stolen, good name of an open source software project is used to prop up business interests. I really do believe that building scalable websites is a good business model, but please don’t steal names that represent reputations you haven’t earned.

I ask @ev and the folks at Twitter to please take away @memcached from Gear6.com and give it to the *real* memcached community.

• By: Jim Barcelona, clutch coder

What is your favorite algorithm?

My favorite algorithm right now is the merge sort.

v1: Nuno Nogueira (Nmnogueira), v2: edited by Daniel Miller (cobaltBlue)

I like it so much that I’ve implemented it in PHP and Ruby.

The problem is that as a web developer I’ve never had to use a merge sort. Back in the old days when pagination was tricky, I’ve had to use a linked list, but you really don’t have to use the merge sort anymore.

So at this point it’s really just academic.

What interview question should really count now?

More on that in my next post. As a clue, I’d like to say it has to do with Leibniz’s statement, “The present is big with the future.” A techie who believes that and the principle of sufficient reason is the kind of techie you want.

• By: Jim Barcelona, clutch coder

I initially put up Google Adwords to bring more traffic to this blog.

What’s interesting with using Google Adwords is that you get to bid on certain key words. 3 months later I’m noticing that a few word phrases have gone up in price:

It’s a great sign that the phrase, “newlisp webserver,” has gone up 400%. It’s definitely a sign that more people are taking a commercial interest in newlisp as a serious web server. I’ve wrote about how newlisp is the fastest way to get onto the Internet before, and it still continues to be the fastest.

What’s also interesting is seeing that ec2 and lamp are still pretty stale.

The big take away is that you can use Google Adwords as a trending tool.

• By: Jim Barcelona, clutch coder

For checking up on sites in the enterprise, I use Alertsite. It was suggested to me by a VP I work with at McCann, Ed Recinto. It’s been a great tool.

For personal websites that I manage, I’ve been using something I rolled in newLISP, sitebeagle. Why? Because beagles are great watchdogs.

Very often, most problems can be solved with tweaking code, changing permissions, or upgrading and apache or mysql.

Very often, it’s the weekend, I’m sitting in a cafe, and get an alert from Nagios or Alertsite. With iSSH, on the iPhone, I can ssh into a LAMP server and do the work I need.

I can see things getting a bit more complex. What tools do you use to sysadmin from an iPhone?

• By: Jim Barcelona, clutch coder

Alan Kasindorf just introduced me to a great blog by Eric Day, Oddments.

If you are into learning about alternatives to MySQL like Drizzle, or how to scale writes to a database using Gearman, then I wholeheartedly recommend his blog.

I really like the samples of code he puts up that acts as a very useful, and direct tutorial to new technologies.

• By: Jim Barcelona, clutch coder