ithinkyourecute

So I wrote a Facebook App and released it finally. It’s called ithinkyourecute which was inspired by my friend Andrea. The idea behind it is simple. Say you are seeing someone and are interested in dating him or her, but you don’t know whether to take it to the next level. This app hopes to help people with this predicament. If you mark someone as “cute” and in return that person marks you as “cute” then you know you are good to go.

I wrote it in Ruby on Rails using the rfacebook gem which made it quite easy and only took a few hours. The hard part was design which I have no aptitude for.

I am hosting it on Joyent Accelerator using ngnix and mongrel_cluster. I wanted to use Apache with mod_rails, but that didn’t work out as I was constantly getting an error which I didn’t have time to debug. I hope to eventually move it to that as it’d make deploying a whole lot easier, but I’m not complaining.

The Joyent Accelerator I am using is a part of the free accelerator that is being given out to facebook developers so eventually I might go back to using Slicehost, but for right now it is fine.

Google Friend Connect

Google recently released Google Friend Connect which is supposed to compete with Facebook Connect. Whereas, Facebook is going for the big fish, Google seems to be going after the little guys. Sites that tend to be static, which can now have a bit more “social” added to them.

This is exactly how the technology feels. It is as simple as downloading a few files putting them in the root of your app, and copying and pasting some JavaScript. It uses OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial to do its thing. Further, you can use OpenSocial Apps within your site, so you have an OpenSocial container with little effort.

However, this all comes at a cost: you don’t control the information. Everything is stored on Google’s end. Maybe in the future they will open up to give more access to the various information they collect, but right now it’s a closed box. This makes sense for small sites, but larger sites will want information residing with them and not some third party so it is not advisable for that group.

However, for small sites such as blogs, small merchants and communities this could be a great tool as it makes it possible for every static site out there to now become a “social network.”

No Mercy for Detroit

America should not be paying to bailout the American Auto Industry. With the level of fuel guzzling cars that they have been making in recent years, lack of focus on fuel efficiency, as well as mismanagement they brought the current turmoil on themselves a long time ago. Though other car makers like Toyota and Honda are hurting also their diversity has been a good offset in the current economic crisis. The Detroit automakers focusing solely on SUVs and trucks shot themselves in the foot unable to move away from that market as oil prices quickly rose. It is only appropriate then that they should hit troubled times.

Plus saving the auto makers will set a dangerous precidence to other industries that America is willing to bail them out if they are in trouble. Taxpayers are not responsible for bailouts of profit making industries even one as large as the Detroit automakers. Though I do agree that the $700 billion set out to help banks was in general a good idea since it gave the markets some much needed liquidity.

Phusion Passenger for Traytwo

I moved to Phusion Passenger on traytwo. It looks like deploying rails apps will be a whole lot easier. No longer do I need to worry about maintaining mongrel ports and what not. A simple addition of a vhost file and a restart of apache to launch an new app is all that is needed. Also, apparently it is a whole lot faster than Mongrel so we’ll see if that is true.

Hadoop Pig – IP Access Count Script

This is a Pig Latin script to count the number of times a person has accessed a site. It is a very simple example which took me a while to figure out… I guess being a History major my coding has gotten a bit rusty.


A = load 'access.log' using PigStorage(' ');
site_access = foreach A generate $1, $0, 1;
access_mapped = group site_access by ($0, $1);
access_reduced = foreach access_mapped generate $0, COUNT($1);
dump access_reduced;


Technology for Democracy

Technology is going to play a more prominent role in democracy. We saw this in the way Obama conducted his campaign. He used technology and a grass-roots movement to go from a first term senator no one knew about to becoming the 44th President of the United States. A lot of this can be attributed to how he used technology.

His army of donors were largely just for thousands of individuals chipping in $10 or $15 dollars on his website. This base of donors was made possible by his use of the internet to collect these funds and the ease at which an individual could contribute. He used MySpace and Facebook effectively to get out his message and solicit more donations. I would always have a message waiting from him whenever I went to facebook and his use of emails to send out how he was doing was a steady stream.

The main facet of Facebook and MySpace is that they lets us feel as if we are in the know. It makes us feel like we are part of the lives of our friends, like we know what they are going through. Obama used this effectively on his campaign. His campaign was that of keeping us in the loop as if we are Obama’s friends. This level of personalization let us feel more connected to Obama as we got constant feedback from his campaign trail. By giving us this information we were always in the know as to what his campaign was going through.

However, Obama wants to use this technology based campaign further in his presidency. He launched a website where details on his appointees as well as a blog detailing his choices are going to be made. Further he is going to use his list of existing supporters to get their support for issues during his presidency so expect a message from President Obama sometime in the future if you were a donor.

Therefore, not only is Obama a 21st century president, he is using using 21st century technology and new media to his benefit and hopefully ours too. The connection we have with out government is going to get a lot stronger.

Meditation

I have started meditating lately as a way of self control, attempting to limit my desires and ego while striving to do what I need to do. I have been doing this after reading the Bhagavad Gita which goes into a metaphysical description about ones connection with God. However, what interests me the most is Chapter 6 about meditation.

Meditation as I do it involves the combination of a mantra and the breath. I attempt to follow the three stages of existence when I breathe: creation, preservation and destruction. Therefore, coorelating it with meditation: inhaling, holding the breathe, and exhaling. While doing this I have a mantra that coorelates with the different parts of these states.

My posture is that of a half lotus with my left leg above my right as that is the most comfortable for me with my back straight. I attempt to gaze at the tip of my nose as recommended in the Gita. It is a good spot to focus on as whenever thoughts come up there tends to be a waivering from this spot. When you realize that you have lost this spot just come back to it.

The point of meditation is to connect with nature, the oneness of all existence, so I like to meditate on the grass when possible.

Now the hard part in all this is following the breathe. The mind is like an ocean throwing wave after wave. Sometimes these waves are large and throughout the meditation calmness doesn’t exist, sometimes these waves are short allowing you to see the calm in short glimpses.

As a reminder for myself and anyone else who is striving for this goal the point of meditation is practice. Calm the ocean of thoughts letting them go one by one until you see the calm and your connection to existence as a whole.

Outsourcing Site Elements

I am working on a website where I am outsourcing key elements having to do with handling RSS feeds to the Google AJAX Feed API. The outsourcing of this component is great for a several reasons. First, I don’t have to worry about caching and updating the RSS feeds, that is handled by Google. Second, it allows me to focus more on the major components of the site leaving the mundane tasks of updating rss feeds to a company that is actually competent at it.

This move to a component architecture will probably be the way the web will move especially with OpenID and OAuth making such headwinds. This is economical since sites can specialize allowing the more mundance components that take up resources to be outsourced.

Death of the Printed Newspaper

I grew up on the internet! When the net was taking off it became my haven for information. As my generation grows up we are not going to be turning to printed newspaper for news. This is not a fault of the newspapers, but their inability to understand this change taking place.

The printed newspaper had been a fine way to transmit news and opinion in the analog world. However, we no longer live in a analog world and increasingly the death of the printed newspaper is imminent. My generation is tied to the online world in ways that people could not have imagined when the web becoming commonplace in the 90’s. We increasingly have short attention spans where the speed at which we get our information is limited to the speed of the internet connection that we have.

News and information, from gossip to business news, travels at such speed that the printed newspaper will not be able to weather it. The printed newspaper is a static entity: once printed we don’t see updates until the next one comes out. However, how do you deal with news in an ever changing society when news becomes obsolete five minutes after it comes out? Printed newspapers can’t deal with that.

When I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal I was hoping that the paper would be something I’d read everyday. However, there is so much information that I don’t digest in the paper that increasingly I feel like a large part of the paper is just a toilet for Stalin. I tend to read the paper online because it gives a convenient way to cherry pick the information that you want to read or feel interested in without feeling like your destroying the environment by not reading everything in the paper.

In the next 10 or so years the printed newspaper will largely die off in the form that it is now and will be a comodity that one goes online to find. The problem as it is now is how do you monitize print journalim in an online world where people are largely appatetic to paying.

Google App Engine

Google makes its foray into web infrastructure with Google App Engine. So what the cool and what’s not?

The cool thing is that it gives you access to to Google’s Authentication System, a DataStore that is probably using BigTable, and there is a “free account [which] can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.” Also, it has support for Django which is a pretty nice web framework.

The not so cool things are that it is currently limited to Python, which I don’t really mind, but Ruby and other languages would be nice to have. Further, Django’s model framework is useless if you are trying to deploy an app on here and elsewhere. Hopefully, Django will add that abstraction sometime soon.