Sid Sidberry Reads

Was really happy to learn about this today. MIT has been actively cataloging and releasing their course materials free of charge… wicked. I’ve been trying to find somewhere to learn AI and it’s great that i can at least learn a bit from their course work till i find someone / somewhere to study properly.

Check It Out:
Free Online Course Materials | MIT OpenCourseWare

I’ve been slowly working on moving all of my projects and tutorials to one site. Mainly because there treated like blog posts instead of projects. This of course lead me to start looking at which license to start looking at which license to release everything as.

After a few days pouring over everything on the web I decided to choose the mit license. Why? The mit license fits how I want to release my code. It releases my code openly to anyone, only asking that the copyright in my code remain.

This will probably lead to you ask why not gpl, apache, or bsd?

why I didn’t choose gpl

the gpl license [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License] is restrictive IMO, due to the fact that it forces a user to release anyone that uses what i create under gpl as well. This is not to say that the gpl is wrong, just that its restrictive to end users / developers in a way I choose not to me. If someone takes code that I am openly releasing, I don’t want to limit them in anyway other than to leave a portion giving me credit for my portion of code, that’s it.

If i was working on some huge next best thing (think wordpress) and planned to release it, then I would use a gpl license. why? something like wordpress could easily be exploited commercially. If I take the time to build something like that I would want anyone who decides to change it or build off of it to release it themselves, to also make sure it’s free under the same license. The biggest difference here is intent. If you were to create the next swfobject.js (which uses an mit license), why restrict your users? But if your creating the next wordpress you don’t want to restrict users, just ensure that your work continues to be free.

why i didn’t choose bsd

the bsd license is similar to the mit license, but with an advertising clause. So to prevent anyone from any legal issues (who knows what counts as advertising in the future), why restrict end users?

why I didn’t choose apache

the apache license is the default license for projects at google code (you can select others), so it’s gotta be good. But it feel slightly more restrictive. That said: I’m releasing anything that uses patents. If you are then an apache license might be for you if you’d like to not restrict users.

in a nutshell

I think the best quote I came across was from eagain.wordpress.com:

if you want software to be free GPL is better than BSD. If you want use of software to be free BSD is better.

I think mit/bsd licenses are better for developers when your creating random things that might help someone (think swfobject). gpl is better if your developing an application to help everyone (think wordpress).

sid

*update* – found another good article:

http://fosswire.com/2007/04/06/the-differences-between-the-gpl-lgpl-and-the-bsd/

From: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/googles-new-favicon.html

Back in June, we rolled out a new favicon

From: http://blog.tigerlogic.com/chunkit/the-evolution-of-search/

A look at the History, Vision, Innovators, and Future of Information Accessibility
1. Foundations

A. The Beginning – In the Pre-WWII era, information sharing was in its relative infancy compared to today. Without the help of more modern electronics, we had reached the upper limit in efficiency of how and where information was stored and shared. The organization and cataloging of information within libraries and archives had been well perfected, but the retrieval and dissemination of that information was being hindered by technology.

B. The Vision – In the burgeoning world of scientific advancement that characterized the United States during and after WWII, astute observers like Vannaver Bush began to realize the need for a better system of information sharing. In an article published in The Atlantic Monthly, Bush observed that:

Check It Out:
» The Evolution of Search ChunkIt!: TigerLogic ChunkIt!

Nominations for the 2008 crunchies are open, get to nominating

Readers are invited to nominate their favorite product or company in each of the fifteen award categories below. Readers can vote once a day until nominations end Wednesday, December 10, 2008 Midnight PST.

Five finalists will be selected for each award category and popular voting will run from December 15 – January 5, 2009 Midnight PST. The winners will be announced live at the award ceremony on January 9 in San Francisco.

Both start-ups and established technology companies are invited to submit themselves for consideration. Finalists will be selected by the Crunchies Committee based on their specific business accomplishments achieved during calendar year 2008.

The Crunchies 2008 » Nominations

With the release of RC1, we’re in the final leg of development before the release of 2.7. 280 commits since beta 3 have polished the new admin UI (including new menu icons created by the winners of our icon design contest) and fixed all known blocker bugs.

We think RC1 is ready for everyone to try out. Please download RC1 and help us make the final release the best it can be. As always, back up your blog before upgrading.

WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate 1

If you don’t know: I’m anti Mac. I love ipod, tempted by iphone, but my main issue is with the mac os and pretty much anyone I know that has switched. I’ll admit some of the newer laptops are oh so shiny, tiny, and have made me drool on occasion. Anyways more on my anti mac crusade: Apple is advising users to install anti virus software. Oh yeah freebsd users are still safe

We are all notoriously snobbish when it comes to not installing anti-virus software, but largely because we all know that malware is essentially non-existent when it comes to the Mac. Yes, yes, there’s the occasional scare, but seriously: when was the last time that you noticed an actual piece of malware on the Mac of someone you know that actually did any harm? Yeah, exactly.

Nevertheless, the Washington Post’s Brian Krebs noticed a November 21 technical note published on the Apple website that reads:

Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple anti-virus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.

Of course, Apple has long-touted the fact that Macs just, simply don’t get viruses. Remember this ad?

Apple says users should install anti-virus software | MacUser | Macworld

I’m a BC fan, but have to admit there are more than enough times that it feels lacking. I recently started playing around with pivotal tracker which is follows the agile method.

It took me about 10 minutes to go holy crap this rocks… I don’t think it’d be to client friendly, but it definitely works for team use: http://www.pivotaltracker.com/

When I first started this experiment I planned on using a custom php framework. Recently I realized that its kinda pointless to attempt to do something like this and at the same time lock myself into something that may not be the best solution….

enter google, research, testing, and little sleep. Result: codeigniter was the best choice. Huh? Here’s why.

snakes not on the plane

I should say from jump: If I knew and had the time to learn python / django it would have been the winner, sadly I do not.

ruby, rails, hype

I’m a fan of ror, and of course when I decided to take what I’ve created so far and migrate it into something usable I of course thought of ruby on rails. Sadly I saw more than a few hurdles.

First off ror doesn’t play we’ll with others, meaning you shouldn’t run rails in a shared environment. The whole concept behind this experiment is a small start-up with a shoe string budget and 2-3 websites / apps. Yes its possible to host multiple rails apps on one server / vps, but it’s not recommended. There is of course passenger, but that leads into the next point. php +1

Ror is a resource hog, there I said it. When compared to php, rails is more resource intensive than php. Of course the answer is to optimize and scale out, but remember I’m trying to keep the monthly hosting budget under 100-120 bucks (yes seriously shoe string). So php was the choice here.

So far php seems like the best choice for what I’m trying to do, but I needed more than just a few issues I could work around. You can’t work around speed and optimizing. ruby is faster than php via command line, but ror is not amazingly faster when used via web. When you add an opcode cache into the picture ror gets is butt kicked hands down. Of course this is comparing a language to a framework, enter codeigniter.

Codeigniter still out performs ror with an opcode cache. That is just one optimization and php shows drastic improvement.

I wasn’t ready to abandon ror yet, simply put: why use an imitator if you can have the real deal. Codeigniter is a great framework, but it makes more since to actually use rails right?

In the end the answer is no. Rails has a higher level of maintainability out the box, but does less code, easier maintenance, and of course the ror cool factor out weight slower speed, higher cost to deploy, and fewer production optimizations? No.

MVC while not as strict in codeigniter, is there. That combined with OOP will make using a php framework easier to maintain, not ror easy, but easy enough for production imho.

framework, shamework

So we now know why php won over ruby, but why pick codeigniter? I originally started out writing a custom framework, which is always fun to do from time to time to push yourself, but in the end you see the downside and benefits of doing so. Since this entire idea revolves around a small start-up we also need to take development time into consideration.

A custom framework takes alot of trial and error, coding, and recoding, and still more coding. Using a php framework I can reduce the time it takes to get up and running, while still building what I want and need. Yes there’s some overhead compared to a custom framework, but in the end a start-up isn’t yahoo. You should be back at the planning table long before you reach yahoo numbers. Thats not to say you shouldn’t plan for massive growth (hence scalable), just that traffic / users / data on yahoo’s scale is far beyond my scope of experience and even I know its another elephant to eat.

When comparing php frameworks, i was originally looking at cakephp, but after some research found it to slow and with to much overhead. There are other frameworks, but only codeigniter and cakephp met my needs. 2-1=1 (or less than one mr. V), so codeigniter was the winner.

One thing I should note is how poor most of the php frameworks I looked at perform out the box. Yes rails (and merb) are better out the box. Luckily a few simple optimizations speeds things up.

all your base are belong to theory

So far everything has been pretty much all theory, research, and testing. No worries, the meat and potatoes are coming shortly.

the next few posts will cover setting everything up(centos5): memcached / memcachedb, ngninx, apache, varnish, mysql, s3 + rsync, varnish -> s3 relations, etc.

If you feel like following along head over to http://linode.com and setup a few machines, or setup a team in vmware.

Worth Reading

Here are few articles that I came across while researching, some are more on topic than others, but all have some value.

PHP vs Java vs Ruby:
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/industry-news/php-vs-java-vs-ruby-000887.php

Ruby vs PHP performance (cli)
http://izumi.plan99.net/blog/index.php/2008/01/17/ruby-vs-php-performance/

Ruby on Rails Fans
http://shiflett.org/blog/2006/feb/ruby-on-rails-fans

The performance test of 6 leading frameworks
http://www.alrond.com/en/2007/jan/25/performance-test-of-6-leading-frameworks/

today one of the projects I work on tracked a user repeatedly trying to get contact information from our younger members, actually only our younger female members. We’re kid friendly so always watch out for certain types of communcation.

After repeat bans we then did an ip ban, because he keep coming back to try and contact more users. To me that seems like a red flag, so after a bit of googling and reverse lookups I contacted verison as they would know whether this was some hopeless kid or an actual threat.

The first number listed is a voicemail telling you were to email, the next number agreed with me and put me through to the non voicemail number for verisons online security team.

Their security team turned out to be something that sounded like a call center in some country, their response? call the police. WTF?! No offense but I’m bring this to your attention, because you have the account information and can confirm if this is an action item as soon as I’m off the line and you look at the account… right?

30 minutes later I get a call back from the call center saying: “Hi you just called called, now what type of child pornography does this user have?”. How me trying to simply pass on a possible threat goes to me reporting child porn I have no idea.

after 20 minutes of explaining again the situation the call center employee finally understood why I was calling, and submitted a request to check out the account because of what happened on that site.

This took about 1 1/2 hours and 4 calls – Holy Crap! It really takes an hour and a half + 4 phone calls to submit a BOLO. There has to be an easier way to simply pass on information like this to isp’s.

There seriously needs to be a better way for admins to notify isps when one of their users is aggressively displaying strong indications of being a child predator. Or at least some form of SOP.

I propose they do the following:

1. Admin contacts ISP, tells them situation. (2-5 minutes)
2. Verify the admin is actually an admin of the site mentioned via email ( 3 – 7 minutes )
3. Verify the site is active and general content of site. Already done
4. Verify the ip (30 seconds)
5. Verify household / age of user
6. Notify whoever needs to be notified and request documentation if needed
7. Send follow up thanks for the heads up email

Maybe I’m to used to SALUTE’s, BOLO’s, etc. But it seems like common sense to make it easy for the people who run these sites to be able to report activities like this. Maybe I’m the only one that thinks that.

Anyways his ip’s blocked and the iprange as a whole is getting extra careful watching.

elsid out – I got deadlines to hit.