Brian's Waste of Time

Thu, 01 Mar 2007

Cool Visualization!

Martin wrote a great visualizer for our live traffic data. It basically just listens in on ActiveMQ and plots what people are on what apps:

Ning Visualization

Each bubble is an app on Ning, each dot a user :-) More info and a full size version are available.

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Fri, 02 Feb 2007

Rocky and App Core Scaling

So we've gotten the green light to talk about all the fun stuff we're doing in the backend of Ning, which rocks as we are doing some cool stuff. This does mean, however, that I am posting to two blogs now, and I'm not sure the best way to handle that -- to some degree anything I post on the Ning Developer Blog is probably something that would fit well here (though I guess it may not be a waste of tie, so who knows). For now, I'll just post a teaser here and link :-)

So, we recently made a major release of the Ning Core. The Core, as we call it, is the platform stuff which provides all the services used by the playground (the PHP stuff). It is mostly written in Java and is (in my opinion) a fairly interesting distributed system.

The most recent change is mostly in how we handle data for a given application. In the past we have optimized heavily for supporting tons of fairly low load applications (the "Bullwinkle" system). With the "Rocky" core we made the changes to equally well support extremely popular and heavily used applications...

The rest is over there :-)

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Sat, 18 Feb 2006

Ning: Now Really Pretty =)

Whee, now that I am awake again I can can shout about it =) Massive overhaul of Ning went out the door Thursday morning at about 7am. When I woke up again Friday morning it was fiddling the bits that always go funny with a major release. Now that my soul has returned to my body from major-release induced jet-lag like sleep oddities (thank you for the analogy, Mr. Gibson, it is the best way to describe the feeling I have come across) I want to shout about it =)

The first thing I think folks notice is that Ning is now gorgeous =) It isn't only skin deep, though, we worked up some fantastic stuff under the covers. I could try to enumerate a lot of it, but well, take the most productive people I have ever worked with and put them in overdrive for two months on a feature driven release. Use your imagination.

Anyway, that is out. Woot! As exciting as this is, the more exciting is the foundational work that has been laid for what is coming. Open source work has been being short-shrifted for me lately because, well, my day job is too fun =)

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Wed, 12 Nov 2003

It feels nice...
Just pushed an internal release of some tools I am working on and got to add this to the top of the release notes:

Notes for .3 Archived the EJB stuff, we don't get anything worthwhile from it.
It feels awfuly nice =)

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Wed, 23 Jul 2003

Spam From the Other Side
Well, not as a spammer, but as a business that has legitimate email blocked by a spam filter. Today was a sad day, I had to sit down with one of our sales people and figure out how to get the notes from a conference call past the spam filter belonging to one of our customers. The problem is that it wasn't terribly difficult (especially when said customer uses SpamAssassin and includes the point breakdown in the bounce message).

So, instead of weeding through and figuring out how to block the hundreds of emails I get daily (and tuning the company filters to block the thousands we get daily) I had to think like the spammer and figure out how to get sales related material that included tables and fancy RTF/HTML formatting through what is a very good spam filter. It was sort of fun, and as I mentioned, way too easy.

So I am now stuck thinking about a solution and it comes back to the PGP web of trust. It should be decentralized - central monitors don't scale. It needs to allow valid commercial email (ie, notes from a conference call during the sales process) through. It needs to block invalid email. The last two are bloody tough, and as has been proven, pretty much impossible under current systems.

The web of trust and strong identities seem like a good option - but various companies have tried and failed to build systems around every email being signed. You still, also, need to deal with situations where you don't have someone's public key and they need to email you. PGP solved this years ago.

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Fri, 20 Jun 2003

Groupware Woes

So I need to figure out a solution to a small company's groupware woes. The current leader of the pack for me is SuSE OpenExchange (SLOX) which does most of what I want. It isn't especially cheap though - Exchange is cheaper out-of-pocket than SLOX, but SLOX does come with an awful lot more functionality.

basically we just need powerful shared calendaring (publish/free-busy/edit other people's), email that plays nicely with the calendaring, and shared contacts. basic stuff - you'd think. The unspoken requirement is somethign that feels "native" in Outlook since we have a bunch of Outlook addicts. Shame Evolution hasn't been ported to Windows (hah).

Ah well, off to test I go.

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