Category: technology

the beauty of the API

interdubs technology

The main purpose of the API for INTERDUBS was to let my clients use it programmatically. Their system control INTERDUBS in a way that fits best into their workflow. That is what the API was made for, and it works. Every day.

Interestingly there are other, somewhat more surprisingly, benefits to having an Application Programmable Interface to a system too. This week I had a discussion with a client where they outlined specific needs in respect to their data that they have in INTERDUBS. They could have updated things manually, but that would have taken a very long time. By using the API myself it actually took me not that long to implement their needs. I spent only slightly more time on it than the actual discussion took that we had about their needs. This was very nice to see. And actually quiet unexpected. If the next client needs something similar I will be able to solve this in five minutes.

twitter for INTERDUBS

interdubs technology

Let’s see if people are interested in getting updates about INTERDUBS via twitter:


http://twitter.com/interdubs

Having seen meme’s come and go together with their tools I am extremely neutral on any new technology that comes up. Does not stop me from seeing if it could be useful.

As usual I try and then see what happens. Easier to ‘do’ and then see instead of having endless evaluations and discussions about something.

Four days of work for 0.8% improvement

interdubs technology

Four days of intense work for less than a percent of improvement sounds not like a great use of my time. But I am actually very happy about the outcome: I was able to increase the success rate of clip meta data detection in INTERDUBS by 0.8%. This is great since it went up from 98.8% to 99.6%. Or looking at it from the other end: two third of all flawed detections were and will be corrected with the improved code. One of the benefits of having 100,000s of clips online is to be able run simulations and stats while improving the code. There is a wide variety in what people like to use as their encoding and file format. I’d rather do some more -invsible- work on the backend than to lecture my clients on how exactly they should encode their files. There are recommendations. Sure. But why fail if you don’t have to?

Even though this application of Grubers Broken Windows is seemingly invisible, in the end it certainly is not: A well running system just needs less support per client. Actually so far I was able to decrease the total time spent on support. Despite the fact that the client based tripled last year.

gray screen on boot up, posix_spawnp /usr/sbin/mDNSresponder no such file or directory

Apple technology

an OS X server got unhappy and seemingly did hang on bootup on the gray screen with the rotating ‘progress’ indicating.

Booting it with text mode enabled (holding command V) revealed that the machine would loop with the following error message snippets:


posix_spawnp ... /usr/sbin/mDNSresponder ... no such file or directory

ls -lsd /
0 drwxrwxr-t 43 root admin 1530 Dec 20 03:57 /

Booting into single mode (command -s) and then doing the suggested fsck and mount -uw / revealed that the permissions actually were set to:


drwwrx---

Meaning that others have not even read permissions. This makes the mDNSresponder seemingly unhappy. I would guess that it quickly gives away its root privileges after launch for security reason. Running what the internet suggested


chmod 775 /

did fix the issue.

.exrc not working in OS X 10.5.6

Apple technology

I have no idea why, and it os most likely me. But traveling with the same user to another laptop .exrc stopped being looked at for vi. Strange. .vimrc still works. So I put my settings in there and continued to work. Not sure what’s going on. Not time to investigate.

#5 wins

Apple technology

So now I am on laptop number 5 ( Titanium, 12″ G4, 15″ G4, iBook G4, 15″ first gen Macbook Pro) and I am considering to get a second one to put it away so that I can keep on using this kind of machine once I have worn this one out. Storing a computer for 4 years before you use it for the first time is a stupid thing. I still consider it. Apple might have peaked with this machine.

I got a refurb Al 17″ (pre unibody) and it works like a dream. It’s non glossy 1920×1200 screen is gorgeous. Hey even the trackpad works, and the keyboard is a match to the fingers. All things I didn’t like about the unibody flavor. And the price is pretty sweet for a 4GB Ram (nice one) 300GB drive machine I paid $2100.

Being able to drive a 30″ screen and the better sound of the built in speakers are other benefits that I did not consider but certainly appreciate. And the thing is cool. The 15″ was heating my fingers. But only when it was cold. I hope this gfx card lasts longer than the one in the machine before.

downtime

interdubs internet technology

Downtime happens. And it is not pretty. But science can help. And all science starts with data. That is why I monitor how sites like INTERDUBS are availabe to their users. A company that shall remain unnamed was down for four hours this morning, which made me wonder how everybody is doing. I also wanted to play with Google Charts a bit more.

Accumulated downtime since April 2008. Less is better:

Congratulations to Adbeast for being clearly better. I am happy about the second place in this case. It is hard to derive the user experience of outages just based on this one measure. It very well mayb be that the customers of Competitor A – C are also happy with how things are going for them.

In anyway I also feel good in light of thise data about offering 99.999% uptime guarantees with a full months money back.

Update March 2009:
It turned out that I probed a static page for Adbeast. So the praise that I would have loved to give is somewhat unjustified. At this point it is early to tell how the real content pages rank. So far they are much less stable INTERDUBS though. Which is almost a shame: Nobody beliefs a statistic that makes the author of the statistic the clear winner …

sysdeputil.c:162: error: expected declaration specifiers or ‘…’ before ‘capset’

linux technology

I have no freaking clue what I am doing. So be careful just following this blindly.
When I initially googled for this issue I did not find this specific solution:

When tried to install vsftpd.2.0.7 from source on a centos 5.2 64 bit machine I get the error:

sysdeputil.c:162: error: expected declaration specifiers or '...' before 'capset'

Followed by allot of similar errors. I was able to address this by


yum install libcap-devel.x86_64

At which point the linker complained:

/lib/libcap.so.1: could not read symbols: File in wrong format

I had to actually commend out the line

locate_library /lib/libcap.so.1 && echo "/lib/libcap.so.1";

in vsf_findlibs.sh. After that it compiled and seemed work.

1080p

technology

Since I don’t watch TV just some DVDs I was quiet happy with the decent Sony Tube thing making the pictures. Yesterday I wandered over to the the going out of business sale public viewing of Circuit City. Which I can not recommend: 10% off all items that have not been marked down already. And the staff is as motivated as it was in the last year when it’s own purpose seemed to have been to avoid customers.

Standing in front of a panasonic 50″ with 720p and 1080p I was wondering if I should spend $1100 or $1500. I did do the right thing: Not getting either. Of course the store feeds the screens crappy std-def TV signals. But it made me curious. This week I also had another look on a specific 65″ 720p panasonic plasma from 2005. And subjectively a blue-ray DVD looked great.

I collected a couple of resolutions of devices and aligned with viewing distances. My conclusion is that a 50″ with 720p is more than enough: In order to be able to experience the higher resolution of the 1080p device I would need to sit ridiculously close to it. Even a 65″/1080p would have move me much closer than I usually watch in order to match resolutions that I am accustomed to and experience subjectively as a good picture. That -of course- will not stop vendors to make 1080p 42″ devices. And people will buy them as much as they bought cameras based on their megapixels years after more megapixels actually meant better images.

So I am roaming Craigslist now for 720p plasmas as big as possible. I will loose out on the improvements in plasma pixel technology (live, contrast ratio, coating). But I certainly don’t need to wast any money on a 1080p since they simply don’t make them big enough. Maybe I should get a projector after all …

I am sure Fios is awesome

internet marketing technology

Just too bad that Verzion isn’t. So I think I could use FiOS. The Verizon website however has a problem with the address that I happen to have. A message then claims that I could call to find out if Fios is available. Calling that number I just go through 5 menus only to be disconnected when the system tries to hand me over to the next station. On the internet that’s called a broken link. I am sure Verizon has spent some money on marketing to make me aware of Fios. They also have spent money to put the actual thing in place. Too bad that they are unable to make a sale since their sales tools just happen to be broken. I guess they need a bail out too pretty soon …