BadMagicNumber

If you believe what you read on blogs, then dataportability is all peace and light and yayness. Unfortunately it seems someone forgot to tell the rest of the internets.

It seems to be that many people who want data portability are either not representative of the general population or have agendas involving trying to get as many people as possible onto their site.

This isn’t just a privacy concern: I continue to think that the difference in context between different social applications is a key constraint that people are missing.

I’m increasingly of the view that moving contacts from one application to another should require both parties to agree that that they want to be visible to each other in the new context. It isn’t clear to me that this a viable process, though.

(Something that should be obvious but apparently isn’t: portable APIs for web based social application – ie OpenSocial – are extremely good. Moving of personal data – ie, data portability – is something I think still is questionable)

Exhibit A:

Facebook will have a huge leak of personal private information. It will turn out to be due to buggy code, which will finally focus some attention on the fact that Facebook’s codebase appears to be really, really bad.

 Exhibit B:

The Associated Press reported this afternoon that its reporters were able to use an undisclosed method to access private photos on Facebook, including some from Paris Hilton at the Emmys and others from Facebook founding CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vacation in November of 2005.

I still think there’s going to be worse lapses than this by the end of 2008.

I’ve been using Ubuntu at home on one of my computers for close to a year now. I’ve been pretty happy with it, although Gnome struggled on my computer (a circa 2003 Athlon). Switching to Xfce fixed that, and my one remaining problem was Firefox.

For those who haven’t tried Firefox 2 on Linux, it’s pretty bad. If leave a Javascript heavy site (eg GMail) open the browser will slowly grind to a halt over a course of a few hours.

I recently upgraded to Firefox 3 (see this video for how to do that), and it’s made a HUGE difference. The one issue I had was that I could get it to start – I hadn’t realized that the executable was now firefox-3.0 instead of firefox. Makes sense, though.

Every year hundreds of tech pundits go and make their predictions for the year – a trend I’m not immune to either. Alan Kay explained the problem with this the best: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. In a field like computing it is so easy for a single person to build something new it makes trying to make predictions a pointless Lose Weight Exercise.

None the less, here’s something that is less of a prediction and more an Lose Weight Exercise in deduction and rumor mongering. Sun is planning to launch a direct competitor to Amazon’s EC2 in the near future (not sure when exactly, but 2008 for sure). Note that this is different to the existing Sun Grid product (which will presumably continue).

Does it make sense to say that I got podcasted?

Anyway, I did – or at least I had a good conversation when my network connection didn’t drop out. I haven’t listened to it yet – not sure I enjoy listening to myself.. But as I said on twitter – now I’m a legend in my own lunchbox.

In shipping software I spoke briefly about me.edu.au (which is still taking a good amount of my time). Recently, though I’ve been spending a lot of time preparing education.au’s Java based federated search product (the Distributed Search Manager – OpenDSM) for release as an open source product. That’s been an interesting experience – the code is pretty old, and was glued together using static references. I had to pull it part, replace the static references with factories (changing to dependency injection wasn’t realistic for this release at least) and put it back together. It’s kind of odd working on a project like that – the code almost causes me pain at times, but with a product that is stable and reliable I don’t want to make too many changes just because I don’t like the style.

Some readers of this blog may be interested in it, because it allows federating of results from multiple Solr servers (or OpenSearch services) together into a single result set. That’s useful in quite a large set of places.

It’s also the first time I’ve been paid to create open source code as an explicit goal – most of my open source work has been for pragmatic reasons, not as a goal in itself.

It’s Friday afternoon, so here’s some random stuff:

• We live across the road from a park, and most Saturday mornings some guy rides his bike there to do Yoga. He also brings his pet chicken to the park and lets it run around. (This might be normal behavior in San Fransisco or somewhere, but in suburban Adelaide it is kinda odd)
• Alex is now 2, and doesn’t like sleeping at childcare. Fortunately, they have figured out that letting him sleep with a ladder (yes, a full size, aluminum ladder) will calm him down and get him to sleep.
• Paul Keating – no matter if you loved him or hated him – had a unique way with words. From yesterday’s Financial Review: “When push came to shove, McGuiness’s journalism did not add up to a row of beans. He help more political, philosophic and economic positions than would have the Karma Sutra had it been a philosophic text“.
• If you don’t program, and you write about the meaning of programming APIs then your opinion is moot. This also applies if you try and talk about APIs
• The Moth is a cool boat, but has come a long way since my circa-1970 tunnel hulled version. It’s kind of weird that they banned tunnel hulls, but freaking hydrofoils are okay…

Many Java developers complain about the length of time it takes to deploy their webapps for development, or to start the embedded WebTools server in Eclipse, or to use the mvn jetty:run process with Maven.

At work, we’ve created a solution using class which starts up Jetty and gets it to serve your webapp from within the IDE. This means you have start up times of seconds, and can debug without using remote debugging.

Happily, we’ve been able to open source this, too, so people can try it for themselves rather than just here me talk about it.

The source code is here, but you are probably better off using Maven, adding the following repository to your pom.xml:


<repository>
<id>EdAuUtil</id>
<url>http://maven.uat.educationau.edu.au/EdAuUtil</url>
</repository>


and adding the following dependencies:

<dependency>
<groupId>au.edu.educationau.opensource</groupId>
<artifactId>EdAuUtils</artifactId>
<version>0.9</version>
</dependency>

<dependency>
<groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
<artifactId>jetty</artifactId>
<version>6.1.5</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
<artifactId>jetty-util</artifactId>
<version>6.1.5</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
<artifactId>jasper</artifactId>
<version>6.0.13</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.codehaus.cargo</groupId>
<artifactId>cargo-ant</artifactId>
<version>0.8</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

Then you can run the class au.edu.educationau.opensource.devsupport.TestWebServer from your IDE. I need to generate the javadocs and put them up somewhere, but for the moment the code is reasonably well documented.

Last week there was a bit of news traffic about some of the content that is on Ning. Whatever…

I think the really interesting story to come from those Quantcast stats (if you trust them) is the Share of Vists. 86% of the vists to Ning come from regular or addicted visitors?! That’s some pretty good stickiness.

So it turns out that it’s 2008 and the thing to do is to do predictions for the next year. Here’s my 2:

1. Facebook will have a huge leak of personal private information. It will turn out to be due to buggy code, which will finally focus some attention on the fact that Facebook’s codebase appears to be really, really bad.
2. Someone will realize that recommendations are the next search. Some company will work out how to do for recommendations what Google did for search: ie, take what is currently an overly commercial medium (eg, Amazon recommendations etc) and turn it into a consumer facing tool which is generally useful. By 2010 what they did will seem obvious, and by 2011 they will be billionaires.

Update – 1 more thing:

OpenSocial will succeed in a big way – not because of support from the big players (Google etc) but because lots of small open source web projects (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla etc) can easily add support and will finally have a standard way of creating cross-platform compatible software.