Category Archive for ‘web’ at Agylen

Archive for the 'web' Category

Crop circles from the satellite, and people too

Published by ugo on February 21, 2006 in google and skeptic. 0 Comments

It doesn’t matter whether you believe crop circles are made by alien intelligences or are just pranks, it’s indisputable that sometimes they are real works of art. Now the fine people at Google Sightseeing have started collecting images of crop circles as they can be seen on Google Maps. Cool stuff!

On a related note, Antonella Pavese is collecting Google Maps pictures where people are visible, in the 2006 Google Earth Census. Until recently, the world as seen from Google Maps/Earth seemed eerily uninhabited, as if some mysterious epidemic has swept it empty of all human life, just like in some sci-fi movie. But recently, with the increased resolution made available by Google, it has been easier to spot people on satellite pictures. I wonder if, in the future, resolution will become so hight that it will be feasible to actually recognize some of those people. Scary, huh?

(Via Davide.)

Technorati Tags: google, google maps, google earth, google sightseeing

Campfire

Published by ugo on February 16, 2006 in ruby-rails and web. 0 Comments

The fine folks at 37signals have released another one of their nice, ajaxy, web-2.0-ish, ruby-on-rails applications: Campfire. Campfire is a web-based, group chat for businesses and it looks real cool.

I’m currently test-driving it and if you want to join my room for discussing Open Source, Web stuff, business opportunities or the weather in Amsterdam click here.

Update: with just four available access slots in the trial version, it will be difficult to come in. Moreover, it also looks like if you close your browser window, you’ll still figure as online, thus occupying one of the slots apparently forever…

Updated update: looks like idle users get thrown out in about 90 minutes. It would be great if this interval were configurable, but at least it’s there. Good.

Technorati Tags: rails, 37signals, web-2.0, ajax, campfire

AJAX is making the Web run faster

Published by ugo on February 16, 2006 in devel and web. 1 Comment

A very interesting article by Tim Bray on the real benefit of AJAX:

I suspect there’s a huge system-wide optimization waiting out there for us to grab, by pushing as much of the templating and page generation work out there onto the clients. In particular, when you’re personalizing a page, assign all the work you can to the personal computer sitting in front of the person in question. Yeah, that cool, responsive AJAXy stuff is nice but maybe it’s the icing on the cake; the real win is making the Web run faster.

That’s mostly true, but I suspect there are some downsides as well. The most obvious one is that not all browsers are AJAX-ready and if you want to cater to those, you’ll have to go through hoops in order to provide people using them with the same user experience level, which will probably complicate your life as a programmer just a little bit.

A second downside is that AJAX makes it really easy to write web pages that can hog a server much more than a traditional template processing step will ever be able to do. I can already see AJAX widgets constantly polling servers for updated data (news tickers, etc.) and possibly keeping server sockets tied for a long time, which is a usage pattern that most servers were not designed to cope well with.

Greg Wilkins wrote about this issue some time ago:

But there is a new problem. The advent of AJAX as a web application model is significantly changing the traffic profile seen on the server side. Because AJAX servers cannot deliver asynchronous events to the client, the AJAX client must poll for events on the server. To avoid a busy polling loop, AJAX servers will often hold onto a poll request until either there is an event or a timeout occurs. Thus an idle AJAX application will have an outstanding request waiting on the server which can be used to send a response to the client the instant an asynchronous event occurs. This is a great technique, but it breaks the thread-per-request model, because now every client will have a request outstanding in the server. Thus the server again needs to have one or more threads for every client and again there are problems scaling to thousands of simultaneous users.

To sum it up, I have some doubts that having a server process a large number of small requests will be more efficient than having it process a dynamic template, given that you can often design your dynamic pages to be cache-friendly and put a fat, reverse proxying cache in front of the server. Edge Side Includes are also promising in this respect.

What Tim is doing on ongoing is fine, but the potential for abuse by less cautious web developers is high.

Google speaks Ruby (on Rails)

Published by ugo on February 15, 2006 in google and ruby-rails. 2 Comments

David Heinemeier Hansson: “MeasureMap just got bought out by Google. I believe that’s the first Ruby on Rails application to be picked up in a Web 2.0′ish buyout. And it didn’t even have to launch, take that Yahoo! Speaking of, I’m now having a sale of futures in ideas for apps that I haven’t even thought of. Who’s bidding?”

Picture me envious! Here’s hoping that my Ruby on Rails application is the second one to be picked up. Yahoo! are you listening?.

Now, more seriously, Google will probably need some Ruby programmers soon so, if you have any experience, it’s maybe time to polish up your resume and send it to Google Jobs.

Last, if Measure Map is as good as they (the lucky few beta testers) say, I hope they move to an open beta soon. I don’t dislike Analytics too much, apart from the lagging issue, but having a more blog-oriented tool would rock.

Technorati Tags: google, measuremap, ruby, rails.

“Evil or Not?”: Not just for Google anymore

Published by ugo on February 10, 2006 in fun and google. 0 Comments

You asked for it, and now you’ve got it! At “Evil or Not?” it’s now possible to cast your votes not just regarding Google’s evilness, but also Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s.

Now it will really be possible to compare the big three’s respective degrees of evilness. But for this comparison to be meaningful, we need many more votes. As soon as we have some data, I plan to put up a couple of zeitgeist pages with interesting statistics. So, please, visit “Evil or Not?” and vote!

We also need more feeds with fresh news about Microsoft and Yahoo. If you know of some good blogs or news sites with content on these two companies, besides the obvious ones like Scobleizer and Zawodny, please leave a comment.

All hail Bigdaddy

Published by ugo on February 6, 2006 in google. 0 Comments

Matt Cutts: “Bigdaddy continues to roll out and is now available at three data centers. In addition to 66.249.93.104 and 64.233.179.104, Bigdaddy is now up at 216.239.51.104. We%u2019ve been going through the spam feedback and acting on it, and reading through the general search feedback as well.”

OK, this is a totally vanity-driven post, but while checking search results on the new data centers that Matt mentions, I just noticed that results for my name (in quotes) will go up to about 59,300 from about 32,500. Does this mean that I’m almost twice as relevant as before, according to Google? I don’t know, but it’s nice to cultivate this illusion ;).

New “Google: Evil or Not?” features

Published by ugo on January 22, 2006 in google. 0 Comments

As promised, here’s a couple new features for Google: Evil or Not?. First, by popular request, gone are the percent values on the vote labels, substituted by textual labels like: “Real good”, “Almost good”, “Not too bad”, “Almost evil”, and “Real evil”. Not a big deal, since besides the labels the rating system works just like before. The trend graph is also still showing non-negative percent values, but that’s just because the graphing library I’m using does not correctly plot negative values.

More interesting is the option of voting for the removal of items that are not pertinent, giving users a certain amount of editorial review. After a certain number of removal requests has been received, the item disappears from the page. I hope that users will be able to keep the site clean by themselves and not find clever ways to abuse it, but I’ll try to keep an eye on it.

Last but not the least: The page for yesterday will be shown if there aren’t yet any items for the current day, instead of showing an empty list. This fix has actually been online since a few days ago.

Gmail delete button is here!

Published by ugo on January 20, 2006 in google. 0 Comments

Everybody, including yours truly, has been clamoring for it for ages. Now they’ve done it. The Gmail user interface now includes the most requested feature ever: A “Delete” button!

Google’s evilness low as a result of refusing to give in to Bush

Published by ugo on January 20, 2006 in google. 1 Comment

Google’s stance on the DOJ request to turn over its search records was really appreciated by people, as yesterday’s 16% evilness rating (with 1084 votes so far) shows. I really think we need similar pages for Microsoft and Yahoo! I’m sure we’d have seen a pretty significant difference.

I have some changes for Google: Evil or Not? that I plan to publish this week-end, if I can make it, but adding new targets to track is going to take more time.

In the meantime, if you actively want to contribute to the war on terror with your searches, head over to Philipp’s Patriot Search engine. I would myself, but before I do, I want assurance that they won’t turn any of this dat over to Karl Rove ;).

The “Evil or Not” Google homepage module

Published by ugo on January 17, 2006 in google. 1 Comment

Just got news, from Corsin, of a Google personalized homepage module for displaying the current evilness rating from Google: Evil or Not?. Check it out!

If some people are wanting to display the current evilness trend graph on their website or blog, please feel free to link directly to http://evilornot.info/browse/trend.png, maybe scaling the size down if you like.

More on “Google: Evil or Not?”

Published by ugo on January 14, 2006 in google. 2 Comments

Looks like Google: Evil or Not? arose a bit of a buzz in the blogosphere. Thanks to everyone who linked to it (and Philipp in primis), we gathered more than 5000 votes. Keep them votes coming!

I also got some interesting suggestions towards a better implementation of the concept. Some people complained that the “0% - 100% evil” scale is confusing and I actually agree. I’m thinking of substituting the numerical values with something like “Totally good”, “Almost good”, “Indifferent”, “Almost evil”, “Totally evil”. What do you think?

TDavid asked for some editorial control on the relevance of the aggregated items. This would certainly make the website more interesting, but would require that I dedicate some time to manually filtering posts. While not much, I’m not sure I can sustain this activity in the long run. You see, Google: Evil or Not? is just a fun application that I hacked together in a couple of evenings during my year-end vacations, mostly to learn programming with Ruby on Rails. I am grateful for all the suggestions and critiques I received, but people shouldn’t expect to much out of it, unless I can find some way to monetize the traffic, a thing that I don’t foresee yet, at least in the near future.

One option might be giving user the option to filter out irrelevant items by voting them out. If a certain threshold is exceeded, the item goes automatically in the trash bin. Shouldn’t be too hard to implement. I’ll have to think about it.

Google: Evil or Not?

Published by ugo on January 12, 2006 in google and ruby-rails. 2 Comments

Do you still believe the “Do no evil” Google mantra? Do you think Google Book Search, the AOL deal, and Larry and Sergey’s 767 point to Google losing it’s pristine morality and turning over to the dark side?

Now you can discover what the world thinks and contribute your own opinion. Head over to Google: Evil or Not? and vote with your mouse. Every day, the site presents you with a selection of relevant news snippets and, for each one of them, you can select the level of Google evilness, or lack thereof, that is suggested by it. Let the collective wisdom of the Web decide whether Google is evil or not!

Alright, it’s a silly little app, but it could be fun. It’s also my first application developed with Ruby on Rails and it’s fully Web 2.0 compliant, uses RSS and Ajax and leverages the power of the community. What more could you ask?

Give me more leeches

Published by ugo on January 11, 2006 in google and web. 0 Comments

I totally agree with Jason Calacanis here: “This the studipest thing I’ve read in a long time.”

Looks like Jakob has a big problem distinguishing between organic and sponsored search results. The picture below is from this site’s statistics in January:

Visits by source

As you can see, direct and non-search-engine referral hits are a tiny minority for me. Almost 85% of my traffic came from Google alone! How much did it cost me? Zero!

A decent percentage of these visitors also do click on ads, which brings the net value of search engine traffic to a net positive. If search engines are leeches on the Web, give me more of them!

Google Web Comments Firefox Extension

Published by ugo on December 27, 2005 in google. 0 Comments

Just found and installed this nice Firefox extension from Google: It lets you see which bloggers have linked the web page you are on. Don’t be fooled by the reference to Blogger in the name. It uses Google Blog Search, so all entries known to it will be shown. However, if you want to post to your blog straight from the extension, you must have a Blogger blog. They say they hope other blog services will be supported in the future, however.

N.B.: Requires Firefox 1.5 or later.

Google Analytics ups number of profiles

Published by ugo on December 21, 2005 in google. 2 Comments

Shortly after Google Analytics was opened to the public, they had lots of scalability problems and almost immediately blocked the creation of new accounts and limited the number of available profiles per user to one.

But logging in today, I saw the following announcement:

As part of our efforts in expanding system capacity, your account now has the ability to utilize additional profiles. The total number of profiles enabled is: 5.

So I immediately created another profile for The Open Source Zone, and installed the necessary Javascript snippet in all pages. Unfortunately, it looks like there’s still some problem:

Tracking Unknown (Last checked: 0000-00-00 12:00 AM PST.)
The Google Analytics tracking code has not been detected on your website’s home page. For Analytics to function, you or your web administrator must add the code to each page of your website.

I’m pretty sure the tracking code is correct. I’m also sure, by looking at the webserver logs, that no kind of Google bot requests my homepage every time I ask it to check the status. Moreover, the “last checked” date seems highly suspect.

Has anybody else been able to successfully add a new profile to Analytics, or is this yet another of Google’s missteps with Analytics?

Update: A few hours later, Analytics reports that my tracking code is OK and data is being collected. I guess you just need to be patient.

Google Earth for the Mac

Published by ugo on December 12, 2005 in apple and google. 0 Comments

Some time ago, I prayed for an OS X version of Google Earth. Looks like my prayer was answered. There isn’t an official version yet, but I tested the one that has leaked (link below) and it works fine. Yay!

Nathan Weinberg: “Gary Price writes that it appears a Mac OS version of Google Earth has leaked ahead of its release. That is a surprising development, Google releasing anything for the Mac. A Mac-head friend of Gary’s says it works just fine, but download at your own risk. AppleInsider has some info and screenshots, which look identical to the Windows version.
(via Steve Rubel)”

Web 1.0 Companies Definitely NEED To Scale

Published by ugo on December 7, 2005 in personal and web. 5 Comments

Jeremy Wright: “Listen up. If your company relies on the web to stay alive, you’d damn well better be using at least some of the following “ladder to high availability”:

Backups, Redundant, Failover, Cluster, Distributed, Grid and finally Mesh.”

I actually tend to agree with most comments to Jeremy’s post: It’s not so important for Web 2.0 startups to really scale so well, at the beginning.

However, I got bitten today by a particularly nasty failure on part of Trenitalia (sorry, no link here; I don’t want their scalability problems to become even worse), the Italian national railways company. I have been trying all afternoon to reserve a seat on a train to Rome, but their online reservation system is totally non-functioning. I’ve phoned their call center and they said their own terminals are stuck too. They even told me it’s been going like this since yesterday.

I tried going to the station, but the kiosks there display a large, red, “Out of order” message. There was a lot of people standing in queue at the manned counters. Apparently the terminals there are still functioning, or maybe they are distributing hand-written tickets, like in the days of yore.

I was planning to go to Rome next monday, but there’s a strike on that day. The train I was planning to take leaves one hour before the beginning of the strike, and the call center operator told me that he would have been able to reserve me a seat, strike notwithstanding, if only his terminal had worked.

Given that most trains will be suppressed on monday, the planes are of course all sold out. In the end, I thought it safer to leave on tuesday, so I cancelled one night at the hotel, but still I haven’t been able to reserve a train seat for tuesday.

Now, I don’t know whether this is a scalability problem or some kind of catastrophic failure, but given the reliance we’re starting to put into being able to conduct most of our businesses online, this is scary.

Today’s non-news: Google Calendar

Published by ugo on December 7, 2005 in google. 0 Comments

Contrary to the expectations of many, Google Calendar was not announced yesterday at When 2.0 conference. Speculations regarding the motives of the non-annoucement are running wild ;).

How many pages per visit?

Published by ugo on December 6, 2005 in web. 2 Comments

Darren Rowse: “While my “research” is far from scientific or accurate it’s an interesting figure. The average blog reader spends looks at less than two pages per visit.”

My statistics, as exemplified by the graph shown below (thanks to Google Analytics) are remarkably similar to those computed by Darren. I’ve tried to increase this ratio by linking to older articles in most entries here and this worked, to a point. Now I know that this is typical of most blogs: they just aren’t “sticky”.

If you have a blog, what is the average number of pages per visit that you see?

Partial content feeds headed for irrelevancy

Published by ugo on December 6, 2005 in web. 3 Comments

Alex King: “Remember in the early days of the web when newspapers wouldn’t put their content online? Same thing here… eventually enough quality content will be in full content feeds and the partial feed folks will have to play along or they will become irrelevant.”

Hell, yes! I was trying to put my finger on the real motive why I dislike partial feeds, and Alex’s post pretty much nailed it. There’s so much content in RSS/Atom nowadays that I’m spending far more time in my aggregator than in my web browser (excluding the time I spend developing web apps). If you publish a partial feed, you are forcing me to first look at a snippet in the aggregator and then open the browser (or a new browser tab in NetNewsWire, which is not that much different). This makes my news reading much slower and, in the end, it sucks.

The RSS web is going to be as relevant as the HTML web. For us early adopters, it already is more relevant. Get over it and start providing full feeds.

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