Matt Raible created this great visualization of the history of Web frameworks. Here’s the image:

Originally uploaded by mraible.

History of Web Frameworks

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide and I love playing with it. Every couple of weeks, I’ll stumble onto Wordle again and fall in love all over again . Here is a tag cloud of all of the tags from my del.icio.us bookmarks.

I love Wordle

Go create your tag/word clouds at http://www.wordle.net/.

I love Wordle

Thanks to Greg Luck, I discovered something new in iTunes called My iTunes that lets you export your purchases out as RSS or as a widget to display on your website. Check out a sample of my purchases below – With DRM free music from Amazon, I’m not buying anything from iTunes that’s available on Amazon. By the way, Greg Luck is one of the lead developers of Ehcache, which IMHO is the best and most widely used Java distributed caching framework.

iTunes & Ehcache – You figure it out

As I’ve said before, I am a voracious book collector and (usually) reader as well. I love books and could spend hours reading. With a demanding job, a wife and a young daughter, I’ve built up quite a backlog and hope to get to most of these books in the next few weeks. Here are the books on my current ‘reading’ list:

Technical Books

Scripting in Java: Languages, Frameworks, and Patterns
By Dejan Bosanac
Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN: 0321321936
Publication Date: August 2007
Price: $49.99   $25.97
Rating: (Total Reviews: 2)
Sales Rank: 355093

Spring in Action
By Craig Walls, Ryan Breidenbach
Manning Publications
ISBN: 1933988134
Publication Date: August 2007
Price: $49.99   $28.43
Rating: (Total Reviews: 43)
Sales Rank: 6432

iText in Action: Creating and Manipulating PDF
By Bruno Lowagie
Manning Publications
ISBN: 1932394796
Publication Date: December 2006
Price: $49.99   $31.06
Rating: (Total Reviews: 4)
Sales Rank: 30402

Next Generation Java Testing: TestNG and Advanced Concepts
By Cédric Beust, Hani Suleiman
Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN: 0321503104
Publication Date: October 2007
Price: $49.99   $29.94
Rating: (Total Reviews: 2)
Sales Rank: 140707

Prototype and script.aculo.us: You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This!
By Christophe Porteneuve
Pragmatic Bookshelf
ISBN: 1934356018
Publication Date: January 2008
Price: $34.95   $23.07
Rating: (Total Reviews: 0)
Sales Rank: 49628

Non-Technical Books

The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
By Nicholas Carr
W. W. Norton
ISBN: 0393062287
Publication Date: January 2008
Price: $25.95   $17.13
Rating: (Total Reviews: 1)
Sales Rank: 1672

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
By Jeffrey Toobin
Doubleday
ISBN: 0385516401
Publication Date: September 2007
Price: $27.95   $16.22
Rating: (Total Reviews: 67)
Sales Rank: 9

Books I am currently reading

• From Java EE security to Acegi – The right way to protect your Web applications – This article is an in-depth introduction and comparison of Java EE security and Acegi. They both offer a variety of security services to make application security programming easier. The declarative and annotation-based programming methodologies let devel
• Microsoft Watch – Games & Consumer – What Apple DRM-Free Means to Microsoft – Apple will offer EMI music free of DRM for 30 cents more a track; album prices will remain the same. Apple makes the EMI catalog more attractive than other iTunes music in two ways: No DRM and higher encoding
• BEA cites Java, availability in app server upgrade | InfoWorld | News | 2007-03-30 | By Paul Krill – WebLogic Server builds on Spring internally, said Rod Johnson, founder of Spring and CEO of Interface21. "The architecture that they’ve adopted, building on Spring, enables them to move to a situation where Spring components can be deployed natively to We
• The Aquarium: GlassFish Components in BEA’s WebLogic Server 10.0 – BEA has released WebLogic Server 10.0, as a Technology Preview for their Java EE 5 support. BEA is using the GlassFish implementations for JAX-WS 2.0, and JAXB 2.0, which were part of GlassFish v1 UR1
• The Impact of Emerging Technologies: Media Viewer – Tim Berners-Lee explains how the Semantic Web works and how it will transform how we use and understand data.
• JScrape – Simple Java & Xquery based HTML Scraping API – JScrape is a simple yet powerful java api for scraping (aka screen scraping) data from a web page using XQuery. This API makes it simple to pull data from other sources and maintain them in a simple way
• Dev2Dev Editor’s Blog: WebLogic Server 10! WebLogic Portal 10 and Workshop for WebLogic 10 too! – BEA WebLogic Server 10, BEA WebLogic Portal 10 and BEA Workshop for WebLogic 10 are all available now
• Performance Research, Part 3: When the Cookie Crumbles – Yahoo! User Interface Blog – This article, co-written by Patty Chi, is the third in a series of articles describing experiments conducted to learn more about optimizing web page performance
• Performance Research, Part 2: Browser Cache Usage – Exposed! – Yahoo! User Interface Blog – This is the second in a series of articles describing experiments conducted to learn more about optimizing web page performance.
• Performance Research, Part 1: What the 80/20 Rule Tells Us about Reducing HTTP Requests – Yahoo! User Interface Blog – This is the first in a series of articles describing experiments conducted to learn more about optimizing web page performance.
• Blogbody: IDEA Really is That Good – I consistently find myself trying to explain why IDEA is so good. This is my attempt to explain my favorite "features". I say "features" because many of these aren’t the type of bullet-point features you might see in a direct comparison (ie: "EJB3 Support

Daily del.icio.us for Apr 03, 2007

A couple of months ago, I noticed that I was getting pretty close to using up all of my monthly bandwidth allocation for my server and that was a surprise. I run several blogs that get quite a few hits but I didn't think I was anywhere near going over my 250 GB allotment. So I decided to spend a little time to optimize my server and figure out the best way to utilize what I had and optimize it to get the most performance out of my little box. Jeff Atwood's wonderful blog entry about Reducing Your Website's Bandwidth Usage inspired me to write about my experience and what I ended up doing to squeeze the most out of my server.

I had done some of the obvious things that people typically do to minimize traffic to their site. First and foremost was outsourcing of my RSS feeds to FeedBurner. I've been using FeedBurner for several years now after I learned the hard way how badly programmed a lot of the RSS readers were out there. I had to ban several IP addresses as they were getting my full feed every 2 seconds – Hoping that was some bad configuration on their side but who knows. Maybe it was a RSS DOS attack . After taking a little time to see what was taking up a lot of the bandwidth, I discovered several things that needed immediate attention. First and foremost was the missing HTTP compression. Looks like an Apache or PHP upgrade I did in the past few months had ended up disabling the Apache module for GZIP compression and so all the traffic was going out in text. HTTP Compression delivers amazing speed enhancements via file size reduction and most if not all browsers support compression and so I enabled compression for all content of type text/html and all CSS and JS files.

Some older browser don't handle JS and CSS compressed files but anything of IE6 seemed to handle JS/CSS compression just fine and my usage tracking (pictured above) indicated that most of my IE users were using IE 6 and above.

Enabling HTTP Compression compressed my blog index page by 78% resulting in a statistical performance improvement of almost 4.4x. While your mileage may vary, the resulting performance improvement got me on the Top20 column at GrabPERF almost every single day.

Another issue I had was the number of images being loaded from my web server. As most of you already know, browsers will typically limit themselves to 2 connections per server and so if a webpage being loaded has 4 CSS files, 2 JS files and 10 images, you are loading a lot of content over those 2 connections. And so I used a simple CNAME trick to create an image.j2eegeek.com to complement www.j2eegeek.com and started serving images from image.j2eegeek.com. That did help and I considered doing something similar for CSS and JS files but decided instead to outsource image handling to Amazon's S3.

Amazon's S3 or Simple Storage Service is a highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that is fast and relatively inexpensive. S3 allows you to create a 'bucket', which is essentially a folder that must have a globally unique name and cannot have any sub-buckets or directories and so it's basically emulates a flat directory structure. Everything you put in your bucket and make publically available is accessible via http using the URL http://s3.amazonaws.com/bucketname/itemname.png. Amazon's S3 Web Service also allows you to call it using the HTTP Host header and so the URL above would become http://bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com/itemname.png. You can take this further if you have access to your DNS server. In my case, I created a bucket in S3 called s3.j2eegeek.com. I then created a CNAME in my DNS for s3.j2eegeek.com and pointed it to s3.amazonaws.com. And presto – s3.j2eegeek.com resolves to essentially http://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.j2eegeek.com/. I then used John Spurlock's NS3 Manager to get my content onto S3. NS3 Manager is a simple tool (windows only) to transfer files to/from an Amazon S3 storage account, as well as manage existing data. It is an attempt to provide a useful interface for some of the most basic S3 operations: uploading/downloading, managing ACLs, system metadata (e.g. content-type) and user metadata (custom name-value pairs). In my opinion, NS3 Manager is the best tool out there for getting data in and out of S3 and I have used close to 20 web based, browser plug-in and desktop applications.

In addition, I also decided to try out a couple of PHP Accelerators out there to see if I could squeeze a little more performance out of my web server. Compile caches are a no-brainer and I saw decent performance improvement in my PHP applications. I blogged about this topic in a little more detail and you can read that if you care about PHP performance.

The last thing I did probably had the biggest impact after enabling HTTP compression and that was moving my Tomcat application server off my current Linux box and moving it to Amazon's EC2. Amazon's EC2 or Elastic Compute Cloud is a virtualized cloud of computing available to you for $0.10 per hour of CPU utilization. I've been playing around with EC2 for a while now and just started using it for something real. I have tons of notes that I taken during my experimentation with EC2 where I took the stock Fedora Core 4 images from Amazon and made that server into my Java application server running Tomcat and Glassfish. I also created my own Fedora Core 6, CentOS 4.4 image and deployed them as my server. My current AMI running my Java applications is a Fedora Core 6 image and I am hoping to get RHEL 5.0 deployed in the next few weeks but all of that will be a topic for another blog.

In conclusion, the HTTP Compression offered me the biggest reduction in bandwidth utilization. And it is so easy to setup on Apache, IIS or virtually any Java application server that is it almost criminal not to do so. Maybe that's overstating it a bit – but there are some really simple ways to optimize your website and you too can make your site hum and perform like you’ve got a cluster of servers behind your site.

Website Performance and Optimization

I have been building AJAX applications for a while now and absolutely love AJAX and the improvements it can offer in user-interface design, making applications easy and fun to use. But AJAX does have limitations and I, like many others have come to the realization that while AJAX is great for most things, it is not the silver bullet. For data-intensive application, specifically that involve dynamic charting with vector graphics and mining, AJAX falls short.

There are a couple of alternatives out there that fill that niche that AJAX still hasn’t successfully filled and Adobe’s Flex 2 framework is definitely one of the them. Adobe Flex 2 software is a rich Internet application framework based on Adobe Flash that will enable you to create applications that are cross-platform and browser independent as they run inside the Flash VM. Flash has fulfilled the promise that Java applets never delivered for a variety of reasons. The Flex programming model is fairly simple where developers write MXML and ActionScript source code and the source code is then compiled into bytecode by the Flex compiler, resulting in a binary file with the *.swf extension. Developers use MXML to declaratively define the application user interface elements and use ActionScript for client logic and procedural control. MXML provides declarative abstractions for client-tier logic and bindings between the user interface and application data. ActionScript 3.0 is an implementation of ECMAScript, and it provides support for strong typing, interfaces, delegation, namespaces, error handling, and ECMAScript for XML (E4X).

Adobe gives away the Flex 2 SDK for free and so anyone can create Flex 2 application and compile them into SWF bytecode files. Adobe sells Flex Builder, which is the Eclipse based IDE for Flex development and Flex Data Services, which is a J2EE component deployed inside a container. It provides adapters to connect to EJB’s, JMS queues, backend data stores, etc.

One of the barriers to wider Flex adoption is the proprietary nature of the technology. Flex is closed technology and Adobe controls every aspect of it. There’s nothing wrong with that but I and I am guessing a lot of people prefer open architecture, open systems and open platforms for application development to prevent vendor lock-in. Adobe has taken some positive steps by releasing the Flex-Ajax Bridge (FABridge) library, which automatically exposes the public data and methods within a Flex application to the JavaScript engine and vice versa. This enables developers to easily integrate Flex applications with existing sites as well as to deliver new applications that combine Ajax with applications created in Flex. A great example of the Flex-AJAX interaction is the charting application on Google Finance. It was interesting to see that Yahoo also decided to use Flash for charting when they deployed the new version of the Yahoo Finance portal.

Open sourcing Flex would certainly lead to wider adoption of Flex as an application development framework. So why doesn’t Adobe do it? It seems to fit the Adobe business model – If you take a look at Acrobat or Flash or really any of the other Adobe products. They give away the client for free and monetize the creation part of process. Take a look at PDF and Acrobat – Adobe gives away the reader for free but makes money by selling Adobe Distiller. Why couldn’t that model work for Flex? Open-source Flex and continue making money on Flex Builder, Flex Data Services, training, consulting, support and custom components. I’m sure there is already a fairly robust marketplace for Flex components but Adobe can take that to the next level. I know Adobe has spent significant amount of time, money in terms of engineering effort to create Flex but the proprietary nature of it will always be a limiting factor and never let Flex be the premier platform for RIA’s. If Adobe waits too long, the browsers will get better and fully support SVG, CSS3, JavaScript JIT compilers and the advantage Flex offers will narrow. The next generation of AJAX frameworks are also just around the corner and they will compete with Flex. OpenLaszlo is another dark-horse in this race that may eat Flex’s lunch. OpenLaszlo is everything I want Flex to be – OpenLaszlo programs are written in XML and JavaScript and transparently compiled to Flash. The OpenLaszlo APIs provide animation, layout, data binding, server communication, and declarative UI. And what sets it apart from Flex is that OpenLaszlo is an open source platform. Adobe – Are you listening?

Will (Or Should) Adobe open-source Flex?

As I deployed more applications and web sites on my server, I started running into resource issues. Since most of the applications I write are in Java, I run Tomcat on my Linux server. But I also run Apache as a front-end host for Tomcat as well as several PHP applications like WordPress, Vanilla and a few other PHP applications that I’ve written. I am not an expert PHP developer by any stretch of the imagination but I tinker with enough PHP that I decided to take a look at PHP Acceleration software.

For the uninitiated, PHP is a scripting language that is interpreted and compiled on the server side. PHP Accelerators offer caching of the PHP scripts in their compiled state along with optimization. There are several PHP optimization products out there and I decided to give eAccelerator, XCache and APC a try on my Linux machine. For the record, the box is running CentOS 4.4 which is essentially a distribution that is repackaged Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.x.

• eAccelerator – eAccelerator is a free open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, and dynamic content cache. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times.
• XCache – XCache is a fast, stable PHP opcode cacher that has been tested and is now running on production servers under high load.
• APC – The Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a free and open opcode cache for PHP. It was conceived of to provide a free, open, and robust framework for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code.

I compiled and installed these PHP accelerators and found APC worked the best for me. XCache seemed to work well and actually provided a nice admin application that lets you peek inside the cache to see what’s cached, the hit/miss ratio, etc. eAccelerator also seemed to work well and offered a great performance boost but caused segmentation fault and made the Apache web server unusable. It could have been bad PHP code that was causing the segmentation faults but I didn’t really spend any times getting to the root cause. APC just worked, pretty much like XCache but seemed to offer a little better performance. Now I didn’t really perform any empirical testing here – I simply relied on my website monitor GrabPERF as I ran each PHP extension for a few days. Your mileage may vary based on your server architecture, application, lunar phase, etc but PHP APC seemed to work the best for me.

PHP Acceleration – Pick Your Poison

Red Hat shares jumped about 25% after they reported a quarterly profit and outlook that topped Wall Street forecasts. After the close, the stock is still going up in after-hours trading. Kudos to Red Hat whose stock had been hammered after Oracle announced that they were going to redistribute Red Hat’s Linux under the name Oracle Unbreakable Linux and include complete support for cheaper than Red Hat at Oracle World. Here is Red Hat’s stock chart over the last 3 months.

Hopefully Red Hat will send Larry Ellison one of those cool Unfakeable Linux T-shirts

Red Hat to Oracle (and market) – Oh No You Didn’t!

The day started off fairly normally – Check GMail for anything that needs immediate attention, then move to blog stats and then hit GrabPERF to see how my sites are behaving. And much to my very pleasant surprise, my blog made it on the front page of GrabPERF and it was on the good (Top 20 performance) side, not the bad side. Check out the screenshot below and squint really hard to see Vinny’s blog in there at #17 with an average page load time of 0.4739 seconds.

If you haven’t heard about GrabPERF, it is an awesome free (community supported) service created by Stephen Pierzchala that provides distributed measurement services and monitoring for tracking key performance benchmark of many sites including my blog. The GrabPERF agents gather detailed component, page size, and response code data for the sites they monitor on a regularly scheduled interval and ship it to the central database in real-time where it is available for presentation in the GrabPERF interface. I’ve been a big fan of GrabPERF for a while now and use it as THE key measure for my sites performance.

It was really exciting to see the latest performance results as I’ve had a rough couple of months in terms of hosting. For a while, I had this blog hosted at Kattare to see how their Java/JSP (Tomcat) hosting services stacked up. While my blog was hosted there, I ran into a bug in the awesome Ultimate Tag Warrior 3 WordPress plugin where the plugin filled up my wp_postmeta database table with empty value of meta_value for every post that was viewed and didn’t have one of more tag defined. I had just started using the tag plugin and so not all my posts had tags defined and with the traffic I get, I was causing major issues for Kattare’s shared MySQL database server and so they disabled my site. Since I already had an account with TextDrive and a reliable daily MySQL backup, I moved my site to TextDrive. With the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin fix, my blog worked for a while but it started causing problems for the folks at TextDrive as I was using the shared hosting feature and the traffic I was getting was adversely affecting other people on my server. So I decided to move to A Small Orange to check out one of their virtual (VPS) offerings to see how they compare to traditional dedicated server. I picked the professional plan which got me 512 MB of RAM, 20 GB of disk space, and 250 GB of bandwidth running CentOS (RedHat Enterprise Linux 4) on a quad 2GHz CPU box for $90 a month. I have been incredibly happy with the performance of the server, the support team and the overall performance of their network and the results from GrabPERF show it.

I am still continuing to ‘play’ with Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) offering to see if it could really become the killer solution that will change the hosting landscape. A dedicated (albeit virtual) machine for $70.00 a month is a really compelling story and if Amazon can back that up with additional offerings where you can geographically distribute your applications in multiple datacenters and still scale up/down with computing capacity as needed, why would you host anywhere else? I know Amazon’s EC2 offer is ‘bare-bones’ on purpose where you have to build your server from scratch; you don’t get a web interface like cpanel or plesk to manage your server instance or help with your server configuration once you get up and running. This has to open up opportunities for VAR’s to offer value on top of the EC2 platform by creating ‘hosting-in-a-box’ service where they will build custom Linux deployments, manage them and offer simple management tools. S3, the Amazon storage service has created a huge marketplace for storage, backup tools, online backup vendors and other niche products. I think ECS is going to do the same for the hosting market.

Almost forget: I am running WordPress 2.0.5 with a ton of plugins that are listed on my colophon page and the real difference maker is WP-Cache with this fix to wp-cache-phase2.php that makes it compatible with WordPress 2.0.x.

Hosting Woes Over

Looks like TechCrunch is down because the MySQL database server is either down or inaccessible.

Mike really should look into VIP Hosting at WordPress.com.

TechCrunch is down

I apologize as this is a little off-topic for this blog but I wanted to bring as much attention as I could to the Save Baby Gavin website and blog. My wife's cousin Jill has a beautiful little boy named Gavin. Gavin was born on February 23, 2006 with end-stage renal failure, or congenital kidney failure. Gavin was born with only 10-15% function in one of his kidneys, and 0% function in the other. He was admitted to Children's hospital of Wisconsin immediately after his birth and started on peritoneal dialysis. Peritoneal dialysis means that he is hooked up to a machine at home every night for 10 hours to “clean out” his blood. Without a kidney transplant, Gavin will not survive.

We are launching an initial fundraising campaign to help Gavin's family with costs not covered by private insurance. Our goal is to raise $100,000 for Gavin's account, which is managed by the Children's Organ Transplant Association (COTA). COTA is a national, nonprofit 501©3 charity dedicated to helping families raise funds for transplant-related expenses.

Please visit the Save Baby Gavin site and donate anything you can. If you can, please blog about this and link to Gavin’s site to get a wider distribution of this. Thank you.

Save Baby Gavin

I first discovered OpenDNS on Chris Pirillio's blog – OpenDNS is a free service that is designed to make your Internet browsing faster, safer and smarter. And guess what - it does that. OpenDNS is essentially a set of massive distributed DNS caches that allow faster name resolution and yet obey the TTL rules for each domain. They have a very fast geographically distributed network of DNS caches that allow for blazingly fast lookup times which allows for faster connections to those sites. The traditional ISP DNS lookup connects to one of the root name servers which in turn send you to the name server for the top-level domain which will then probably get you to the name-server that is hosting the DNS entry for the site you are trying to connect to. OpenDNS skips all of that and return the IP address of the site you are attempting a connection two in a single request.

The safer surfing part comes into play with the phishing filter built into OpenDNS. OpenDNS intercepts connections against known phishing sites, based on network analysis and feeds from other network operators including their new venture PhishTank. PhishTank is a community anti-phishing Web site where anyone can go to submit suspected phishes, track the status of their submissions and help verify others submissions.

The smarter bit comes in the typo-correction feature of OpenDNS. So if you're going to google.com and misspell Google, OpenDNS first attempts to correct the typo and get you to the right site instead of the squatter sites that are just waiting for that misspelling to land you on their site.

I have been using OpenDNS for months now since I first read Chris's blog entry about OpenDNS and have been extremely happy with the free service. Can't beat the price – I can't really tell if my surfing is any faster but cognitively I know it is and that makes me happy.

Another thing that really stands out about OpenDNS is the service - I've had two occasions where I've contacted support to check on some DNS changes I made to move my domains from one hosting vendor to another and I got an almost immediate response both times. John Roberts, who is the VP of Product Development responded back in minutes to my query on both occasions and helped me by force clearing the cached entries for my domain.

Anyone and everyone can start using OpenDNS to surf smarter, faster and safer. Check out their Getting Started page for more information on how to change your router or computer DNS settings to start using OpenDNS.

OpenDNS Rocks

Just found the Pictobrowser from Thomas Hawk's blog and it is an amazing way to embed pictures in your blog. Pictobrowser is a simple widget that allows you to display sets of pictures from Flickr directly on your site or blog using Flash and the users never leave your site. Pictobrowser is the brainchild of Diego Bauducco. Check out a sample below from one of my sets:

Pictobrowser Rocks

You know the old routine – You get a new machine and then you spend weeks looking for and installing all the applications, tools, utilities, etc that you had on your old computer that made you so productive. There is always that utility that you use once in a while but you just can’t seem to find it.

I recently bought a new computer and decided to make a list of all the software I installed on the new computer so that I’m ready to do this again for my next machine. I wish I had discovered Belarc Advisor before I rebuilt my old desktop as a Linux (Ubuntu) desktop. So here is a fairly complete list of what’s installed on my machine and if you see something that I should have, please leave me a comment:
The Essentials

• Windows XP Media Center
• Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003
• McAfee VirusScan & Personal Firewall

Development

• Java 1.4.x and 1.5.x SDK
• IntelliJ IDEA
• BEA WebLogic Server 8.1 and 9.2
• Apache Webserver
• Apache Tomcat 5.5
• Glassfish
• WebLogic Workshop Studio (NitroX M7 based on Eclipse 3.2)
• NetBeans 5.5 Beta
• MySQL 5.0 database server
• MySQL Administrator, MySQL QueryBrowser and MySQL Workbench
• DbVisualizer
• XAMPP (LAMP for Windows – PHP, Perl, Apache, MySQL)
• Aptana – HTML, CSS IDE based on Eclipse
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
• Ruby for Windows

Audio, Video & Graphics

• Nero 7 Ultra Edition
• Google Picassa
• Paint.NET – Photo manipulation software
• PIXELA ImageMixer for the Sony DVD HandyCam
• iTunes
• RealPlayer
• Microsoft Media Player 10

Browsers & Extensions

• Internet Explorer
  • TamperIE Web Security Tool
  • Fiddler – HTTP Debugger
  • Google Toolbar
• Firefox (List of extensions below)
  • Adblock Filterset.G Updater 0.3.0.4
  • Adblock Plus 0.7.1.2
  • All-In-One Sidebar 0.6.4
  • Compact Library Extension Organizer (CLEO) 1.0
  • Copy All Urls 0.6.2
  • del.icio.us 1.1
  • DOM Inspector 1.8.0.7
  • Download Statusbar 0.9.4.1
  • FireBug 0.4
  • Firefox Extension Backup Extension (FEBE) 3.0
  • Firefox Showcase 0.8.0.2
  • Gmail Skins 0.9.6
  • Google Browser Sync 1.2.20060911.3
  • Google Send to Phone 0.4
  • Google Toolbar for Firefox 2.1.20060807W
  • IE View Lite 1.2.5
  • Image Zoom 0.2.7
  • InfoLister 0.9e
  • Live HTTP Headers 0.12
  • PDF Download 0.7.5
  • Professor X 0.4
  • ScrapBook 1.2.0.4
  • Tab Mix Plus 0.3.0.5
  • Tabbrowser Preferences 1.2.8.9
  • Tails 0.3.4
  • Talkback 1.5.0.7
  • TinyUrl Creator 1.0.1
  • Update Notifier 0.1.4
  • Web Developer 1.0.2
  • X-Ray 0.8
• Opera

Utilities

• Ultraedit (I know there are quality free editors out there but I’m just too used to UltraEdit)
• FeedDemon – The BEST RSS reader for Windows
• 7-Zip
• Cygwin – UNIX shell and more for Windows
• Sysinternals (DiskMon, FileMon, Process Explorer, RegMon & pretty much every other utility on that site)
• Putty – SSH client for windows
• WinSCP
• Microsoft Money
• Avvenu – Remote access to your computer
• QuickResNT
• KeePass Password Safe
• Free Download Manager
• Google Earth
• Google Talk
• Yahoo Messenger
• MSN Messenger
• Jungle Disk
• Lavasoft Ad-Aware
• Flickr Uploadr
• CCleaner
• VNC Server & Client
• Microsoft Virtual PC
• TortoiseSVN – Subversion for Windows
• Auslogics Disk Defrag
• TaskSwitchXP – ALT-TAB manager for Windows
• Windows Live Writer
• Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Yahoo Widgets
• Skype

Essential Software for Windows

• Geek Smithology – The State of Enterprise Ruby

  The real takeaway is that if you truly believe in using the best tool for the job, then you will be using Ruby at some point in the future.

  (tags: rails Ruby Enterprise dave+thomas scalability)

• StorageMojo – Mission Impossible: Managing Amazon’s Datacenter, Pt I

  Unlike Goole�s clean sheet approach to creating internet-class infrastructure, Amazon has made every mistake in the book. The original site was one hairball, database, OLTP and web server all on one system

  (tags: amazon it google datacenter soa WebServices)

• Google Research Publication: BigTable

  Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers.

  (tags: google database distributed bigtable storage research technology scalability Cluster)

Daily del.icio.us for Sep 20, 2006

Amazon launched their latest offering entitled Unbox Video which is essentially a video (TV shows, movies, etc) download to buy or rent service. Rumor is that Amazon rushed this out on Friday, September 8th to beat some super secret announcement coming from Apple later next week.

The Unbox video service doesn’t offer anything new and is in fact more of the same. I can buy a movie but I can't burn it onto a DVD to watch it on my TV. Media center PC's are exceptions if you have a Media Center PC hooked up to your TV or are using something like Media Center Extender to broadcast the output to a TV. The videos that you download from Amazon are DRM'd Windows Media (WMV) files and so you cannot put in on your video iPod. Apple essentially works the same way with their DRM but you since they control the mobile music and video player market; it's less of an issue. I'm guessing you've probably already got the sense that Unbox video is only for Windows and you would be right. No MAC or Linux support at this time.

There are 2 new concepts introduced that set Amazon Unbox video apart from iTunes and other similar services. To my knowledge, Amazon is the only one that will let you rent a movie by downloading it to your computer. You have 30 days to watch it and 24 hrs to complete watching it before the video is automatically deleted. I know Netflix is working on a download-n-rent but I don't believe that's available at this moment. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Another concept that I consider a move in the right direction is the concept of the Media Library. Everything you buy or rent is in your Media Library on Amazon and so you can buy an item on 1 machine and download to watch it on another registered machine. Both machines must have the Unbox video player and be registered on Amazon as your machines. As an experiment, I bought a TV show on my laptop and downloaded it. I then copied the video over to my desktop and dropped it the directory where Amazon would expect its videos to reside. The Unbox player didn't see and I wasn't able to play it directly without downloading it from my Media Library to the desktop. The video player was smart enough to realize that the file was already there and started playing in seconds after it marked the video as downloaded on the desktop. The subtle point here is that if your computer crashes and you lose your purchased content, you will be able to download it from your Amazon Media Library. It would be interesting for Amazon to make this a paid-service and use their S3 service to automatically back-up your purchased content for you.

The video quality of the TV shows that I purchased was good and the sound was fine as well. I guess a true test would be to buy a widescreen movie and see if the Dolby 5.1 surround-sound works as advertised. All in all, the video service is nice but nothing earth shattering and left me wanting more. Another major issue with this offering is the licensing agreement that you agree to as part of the software installation and it requires you to apply all patches from Amazon whether you want them or not and Amazon can delete your movies if you uninstall their video player. Yikes! Doesn't like a lot like that Amazon we know and love, does it? More information at the uninnovate blog and CNet.

Why is it so hard to come up with a video service where I can buy a movie and burn it onto a DVD to watch it on my TV? I hate DRM but I understand the need to protect copyrights but there has to be a way to protect content and allow me as the purchaser fair-use of that purchased piece of content. I guess the key here is purchase – I am paying for something. Don't put limitations on my personal usage of that. Anyone that can produce a service that allows that will eat everyone's lunch. I hope Apple or Netflix or YouTube or dozen of the other YouTube clones/wannabe's out there come up with a way to legally distribute video content but allow the purchaser some flexibility on where they can view that piece of content. It would also be great if they could include some future-proofing on your purchase and so if you bought 2nd season of The Office with some proprietary DRM, you could exchange or upgrade it for any future format that's different without having to repurchase the movie all over again. Ah to dream…..

Amazon Unbox Video – More of the same

Now that the blogosphere has settled down after the launch of Amazon’s EC2 beta program, I figured it was time to talk about something that I found missing in all the blogs and online discussions.

Before we get to the Enterprise implication of EC2 and S3, I should probably let the people that haven’t heard about them a little background. Amazon S3 is a service that launched a few months ago that provides a simple web services interface to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives you access to a highly scalable, reliable, fast data storage infrastructure without spending the millions it would take to create a redundant, fault-tolerant SAN environment. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a new service that launched last week that finally realizes the promise of grid computing for me.

Amazon EC2 gives you access to a virtual computing environment in the cloud. Your applications run on a “virtual CPU”, the equivalent of a 1.7 GHz Xeon processor with 1.75 GB of RAM, 160 GB of local disk and 250 Mb/second of network bandwidth. You pay 10 cents per hour (per instance) which would amount to about $72 per month. You can provision one, hundreds or even thousands of servers or grow capacity as needed as your application grows. Can you imagine being able to provision 1, 2 or 500 additional servers in minutes for your application programmatically?

To setup your instance, Amazon gives you tools to create your own Amazon Machine Image (AMI). An AMI is simply a packaged-up environment that includes all the necessary bits to set up and boot your instance (Currently Fedora Core 3 and 4 systems based on the Linux 2.6 kernel are explicitly supported, although any Linux distribution which runs on this kernel version should work.) that can include a webserver, database server, etc. Once you create your AMI, you upload it to Amazon S3 and your instance is ready to go. You can target that image to multiple instances or build out your web tier on a set of machine, your middle tier on another set and your database on another set as well. Since this is essentially virtualized Linux, any applications that work on Linux should work here including Java applications. Amazon EC2 is a closed-beta program and I haven’t gotten access to the beta yet but Edwin Ong over at castblog has a nice review with some great screenshots that will demonstrate the potential here.

Now that you have the background on S3 and EC2, you can just imagine the potential for startups. Instead of having to pay for terabytes of storage if you are the next Flickr or YouTube killer, you can simply use S3 for all your storage needs and have a redundant, encrypted file system that’s fairly bulletproof and grows with you. Instead of having to forecast your storage needs, you can focus on other real tangible problems. EC2 now provides the same on the computing side of the house. Not sure how many dedicated managed servers to get at your ISP? Well, just use EC2 and grow your farm of dedicated virtual boxes you as need them. And so if Digg, Techmeme, Reddit or TechCrunch or the meme of your choice is sending you millions of hits, add a few virtual servers to support your application and then scale back as traffic dissipates.

The advantages of this virtual platform are pretty obvious but I see major potential of this model for the enterprises. Take any of your Fortune 1000 companies or millions of other smaller companies than that. Most of them are required either by regulation or competitive landscape to have BCP (business continuity) plans, especially if they are in a highly-regulated industry like banking/finance, insurance, health-care etc. So what if you could build out a virtual BCP environment where you test, build and deploy your applications on a few EC2 instances to validate your applications and scale up by adding additional instances if you really need to failover your applications. The traditional model of BCP is building out another datacenter or leasing space (colocation) in an established datacenter center that meets your power, telecom/network, security and service needs which costs anywhere from several thousands to millions depending on the scale. What if you could completely eliminate that cost by using Amazon’s virtual computing grid? What if you could deploy all of your applications that are critical to running the business in case of a disaster on a virtual cluster of servers without paying the cost of a full-physical build-out? The question of privacy, data encryption and access controls would need to be flushed out but Amazon could potentially be the solution for companies that are struggling to justify exorbitant BCP costs.

I think S3 has already changed the competitive landscape and realized the dream of the virtual storage network and EC2 is going to be type of disruptive change that will turn the market on its head. I cannot wait to see the tools that are going to pop around the EC2 space to make the creation and deployment of your virtual server easier than the current command line process. S3 is a great example with some great applications that have popped up to take advantage of S3 and my current favorite is JungleDisk. S3 over WebDAV � brilliant. As an aside, I am working on my own version of an AJAX enabled S3 web application but it’s more for personal use that will end up being used as tutorial-ware more than anything. It’s interesting to see the mini-industry that has popped around S3 and EC2 will draw even greater interest. It will only be a matter of time before you will have your vendors offering one-click setup of your Amazon EC2 server preloaded with the Linux flavor of your choice along with applications you need. I can also see a new group of hosting providers jumping as VAR vendors to resell the many virtual instances they pay for as shared host servers slices. The potential is limitless – Now I just need to get into the beta so I can see it for real.

Amazon EC2 and S3 – Implications for the Enterprise

Is there a known issue with Subversion and proxy servers? I guess I should have run into this years ago but I don’t ever remember having an issue. I just got a new laptop with a fresh install of Windows XP and connection out to the Internet is using a Squid proxy server. When I connect to my Subversion server using TortoiseSVN (1.4.0-RC1), I get a following error message:


svn: REPORT request failed on '/svn/!svn/vcc/default'
svn: REPORT of '/svn/!svn/vcc/default': 400 Bad Request (http://www.vinnycarpenter.com)


I know the issues isn’t with TortoiseSVN as I get errors connecting using command line tools, IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse with the Subclipse plugin. Is this a known issue? The Subversion FAQ doesn’t really have any answers and the recommendation of adding extension_methods in the FAQ didn’t work. Anyone else run into this?

Subversion & Proxy Servers

BEA is hosting a webinar on September 20, which will discuss the existing integration points between WebLogic Server and Spring and what is coming down the pipe for Spring 2.0, WebLogic Server 9.2 and beyond. The webinar will also discuss new technologies introduced with WebLogic 9.2 that support the use of the Spring Framework and how they work with Spring to make your development easier. The webinar will be hosted by Andy Piper, who worked with Rod Johnson and crew to implement the initial Spring support in WebLogic and the MedRec example to illustrate best practices in developing Spring application under WebLogic. The new version of MedRec that’s Spring enabled was re-architected from an EJB-based architecture to a Spring-based architecture for the handling of transactions, data access, and remoting.

Webinar> Spring Framework in WebLogic Server 9.2