Aehso’s Output

A bit of Friday fun, this one should ring true for anyone who has ever had to introduce a new technology to a family member, friend, colleague or (worse of all) a boss. From Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) way back in 2001 (thanks Liz!):

aehso books, fun, help, youtube

The Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) is gaining some serious traction since it went final a few weeks ago. YouTube have announced that their new APIs are APP/GData based and now Pete Lacey, Sam Ruby and Tim Ruby Bray have finished adding support for APP to WordPress, in time for WordPress 2.3.

This bodes well as APP and GData are two of the the core protocols supported by the new feed commerce platform that we (nooked) are busy building. Anyone working on services that exposes collections of resources should read the APP spec – the RESTful approach for publishing collections works so well…

aehso app, atom, wordpress, youtube

Cuong Do, one of the original YouTube engineers, gave a great talk (50+ minutes but well worth it) at Google’s recent Seattle Conference on Scalability.  Some takeway thoughts:

• Pre Google, YouTube had 2 sysadmins, 2 scalability software engineers, 2 feature developers, 2 network enginers and 1 DBA.  Yowza! talk about a productive team!
• Python is fast enough.  In their small team, development speed was as important as execution speed.  I’m confident the same applies for Ruby on Rails too (this was a primary consideration for our choosing RoR instead of Java for our new nooked platform).
• MySQL replication works, to the point when replication of writes starts to significantly impact reads from the replicas.  Once you hit that point start working at night to develop an alternative middle tier that relies on partitioning the data into multiple shards.  You work on the alternative middle tier at night because you’ll spend all day trying to keep the replicas up to speed with the master. Map incoming requests to the correct shard by doing a user id lookup on a dedicated table (in a heavily cached local database) to redirect requests to the correct shard.

Of course they now get to play with all of Google’s in-house toys (MapReduce, GFS etc) so doubt if he gives another presentation next year it’ll probably be a very different one.

Speaking of MapReduce, I see that Ruby has an implementation – Starfish.  Cool.

aehso google, mapreduce, mysql, python, rails, ruby, scalability, youtube

From Read/Write Web (comment # 2 was NOT from me):

The core future media concept is the Agav – an Agent-Avatar, which “finds information, people…

I love these videos, Lawrence Lessig (a future US Secretary of Justice) declares copyright illegal, Google buys Microsoft, Google buys everyone and so on. But it has some style so it is worth watching:

The concept of the avatar has been around for centuries, long before Ultima IV – man, that was a blast. This video extrapolates the concept nicely into derivatives of digital properties that most computer users should now be familiar with, now that social networking and MMORPGs are the prevelant forms of online communication.

The evolution of the prosumer will continue. I for one like being a prosumer – or maybe it’s just that I like knowing that I’m a prosumer. I’m not sure, best be aware of these things though…

aehso amazon, avatar, future, google, internet, media, microsoft, yahoo, youtube