Frank Carver's musings about software and life
Looks like facebook is moving to a model where by default it shares your information with thrird party sites and applications unless you explicitly say “no”
Privacy issues? Google engineers leaving Facebook in droves.
From the comments on that page:
Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites and uncheck “Allow”
The news was pointed out to me by a friend before I could blog about it, but Google App Engine supporting Java and servlets is a massive move forward for server side Java.
I’m currently experimenting with my own evaluation of this, but in the meanwhile, here’s Michael Yuan’s take on it.
Michael Yuan » Blog Archive » Google App Engine for Java — First Impressions
I’m deep in some spatial/geographical work at the moment, so I thought I’d jot down a couple of useful links:
Using the Google Maps gadget with Google Docs – Microsoft Excel – Zimbio
Interesting post about the different usage and expectations of mobile search and general search. In short, location matters.
ShareMe -The Mobile Future : Mobile Search is Not GOOGLE SEARCH
This article really helps join the dots for a project I’m thinking about a lot at the moment.
Connecting Apple’s iPhone to Google’s cloud computing offerings.
With digital image sizes growing faster than screen space, it’s hard to put any kind of picture on the web without resizing it. There’s a great trick to use the Google Maps interface and a free “image cutter” to make zooming and panning across huge images easy.
Put Your Large Pictures in Web Pages without Resizing Them – Google Maps Image Viewer
I’m sure I could have made use of this if I had known of it sooner.
A lot of the cloud computing hype is grabbed by Amazon and Google, but alongside those giants of the field there are a lot of smaller projects and organisations trying to push and grow cloud concepts. Here are a few which I have bumped into recently.
Cloud platforms of the future: Hadoop and Eucalyptus | Negative Approach – CNET News
My link queue is filling up again. Here’s two links on commercialising video content.
Hey, Grandma, Let’s Put Up a Video Portal! – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com
I’d not encountered this before, but it does kind of make sense. Showing a bright pixel consumes more energy on most display technologies. so choosing a black background for applications and web sites can help save both your own energy bills, and the planet!
ecoIron – All these whirring boxes.: The Full Story on Black Google, Blackle, etc.
“Cloud computing” is still very high on my list of things I need to get up to speed on. One trouble is that innovation in this area seems to be coming faster than I have time to experiment. Still, this article seems a useful summary of the current state of play.
InfoQ: Comparing Amazon’s EC2, Google’s App Engine and Microsoft’s Azure
Initial reviews from Ars technica and the New York Times.
Lots of people seem to be writing about this today. Google have released an initial beta of their new browser “Chrome”. It’s designed to be pretty much crash-proof and to run complex JavaScript applications fast and robustly. It’s also designed as a poke at Microsoft.
My initial impression is that it looks and works generally nice enough, although I really miss all my favourite Firefox plugins. It also seems somewhat flaky (or at least, out of sync with its own help docs). I tried dragging a tab to the Windows task bar to create a new browser, and all I ended up with was a weird task bar icon which animated but would not open up into a window. There is also supposed to be some feature which lets you enter the name of a search engine in the location box, press tab, and enter some search terms. For me that simply refuses to work – when I press tab it either takes me to the first input field in the current page, or to the next page tab. What’s up with that?
I had great hopes for this when I saw the title. I normally use TDD (Test Driven Development) exclusively, but have been finding it difficult to get into the rhythm of TDD when developing in Python for Google App Engine. I’m just not familiar enough with the Python unit-test ecosystem. So a general purpose Mock Object framework looked as if it would be a useful tool for the toolbox.
Google Open Source Blog: Check Out Mox, Our Mock Object Framework for Python
Unfortunately, it uses my least favourite approach to Mock Objects: switch the Mock into “record” mode, manually perform a sequence of actions, then switch the mock to “replay” mode and run the real code to compare it against the recorded expectations.
In the Java world this is the approach taken by EasyMock. In a strongly-typed, pre-compiled language such as Java, this is just about excusable in order to gain method call validation in the IDE or compiler. But in a more flexible language I really can’t see the point.
For me, the overwhelming disadvantage of the record-replay approach is that it implies that there is only one complete correct sequence of collaboration calls, and that anything else is an error. In real systems this is simply not true. Some calls might be optional (such as a “getter” which may be cached”); some calls may be unimportant to a particular test; some calls may be happily repeated many times (such as a “hasMore” or equivalent status call); and most importantly, some calls may occur in any order.
Although typical record-reply frameworks try to address some of these issues, every such attempt makes the operation of the framework more clumsy and less obvious. It’s very hard to address the fundamental problem.
In my opinion, a much better approach to mock objects is for the Mock object to simply record all the calls made during the running of the test, and then provide a flexible set of accessors and assertions to apply to the result. That way, whoever writes the test case can also easily write specific assertions, such as asserting that the count of calls to “hasNext” is always one more than the count of calls to “next” without requiring special support in the framework.
Does anyone know of a more sensible Mock framework for Python?
Obviously Yahoo is still trying to fight back against Google’s dominance of all things big and cloudy. It will be interesting to see if their approach of trying to claim some sort of ethical high ground by pitching their new cloud system at research and education pays off.
Plenty of other people are commenting on this, so I might as well join in. Google have released what seems to be essentially a 3D chatroom environment. I’m guessing that the folks at Google are making use of their software portfolio, so this is probably some sort of visual wrapper round XMPP, as used for Google Talk. The 3D design of the rooms looks as if it hails from the approach used in SketchUp, so I would not be at all surprised if some sort of integration with Google Earth were to come along in a while and add a geolocation aspect to this system.
What it most definately is not (at least right now) is a central collaborative environment in the vein of Second Life or World of Warcraft.
Rowin’s blog » Blog Archive » Lively start for 3D mashups
Ted Neward has posted a long and detailed discussion of the potential merits and disadvantages of Google’s “protocol buffers” approach compared with XML as a way of offering rich remote APIs.
I learned a lot from this article, and I’m still digesting it, so no snap opinions this time …
Interoperability Happens – So You Say You Want to Kill XML….
And adding to the pot, InfoQ have also written about the same subject:
InfoQ: Google Introduces Binary Encoding Format: Protocol Buffers
InfoQ is currently posting a bunch of presentation videos from conferences. Here are a couple which appealed to me.
InfoQ: Presentation: Agile Project Management: Lessons Learned at Google
InfoQ: Building Large AJAX Applications with GWT 1.4 and Google Gears
Distributed code reviews are a tricky task to deal with. Google use an internal tool named “Mondrian”, but now leading Python guy Guido van Rossum has released something similar for the rest of us.
A fairly comprehensive Wired article about Google Android
A lovely, literary article about the effect whereby the abundance of excerpts and highlights which comprise the web are affecting our ability to immerse ourselves in longer, deeper writing.
Of course, this blog post is just such a staccato, short-attention-span snippet. Go read the whole article.