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As trailblazers in the world of ethical hacking, hackdays and providing free APIs and data for mashups It is pretty amazing to see exactly the same ideas being taken on by sources you wouldn't have expected.
Show us a better way is a web site and competition by the UK government that asks ethical hackers to come up with ideas to use a wide range of public data for the good of the public. Straight from the horse's mouth this sounds like this:
The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government's behalf, and we have a 20,000 pound prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level. You can see the type of thing we are are looking for here.
To show they are serious, the Government is making available gigabytes of new or previously invisible public information especially for people to use in this competition. Rest assured, this competition does not include personal information about people.
We're confident that you'll have more and better ideas than we ever will. You don't have to have any technical knowledge, nor any money, just a good idea, and 5 minutes spare to enter the competition.
There is a vast amount of APIs available to play with so what stops you from giving it a go?
Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network
The last two days an old and historic school in London, England hosted 2gether08, a "festival of ideas, popular technologies and progress". Predictably during Wimbledon season, the weather was a glorious English summer as the photo of Steve Moore's final "thank you" talk shows:
The event had an immense amount of illustruous sponsors, with Channel4 being the leader and also covering the whole event and happenings around it.
The short tagline of the event was "solving bigger problems", the larger vision is much more wordy and available at the 2gether08 site.
The main mantra is the following:
The first 2gether Festival will bring together over 300 innovators from a wide range of fields to focus on how using digital technologies we can generate real social benefits. 2gether08 is not just about wise words and rousing presentations. A defining hallmark of the Festival will be how we frame problems and work towards solutions. This is happening now in advance of the Festival and will continue during and after the event. Imagine what we might be able to achieve…
This is all part of a larger movement right now called social entrepreneurship, especially in the world of media and IT. A lot of successful specialists in these markets feel that they are not having much impact in the world with what they do and want to concentrate on solving real human issues and save the environment instead. There are a lot of government and otherwise funded awards and competitions going on in this sector in the UK at the moment with the UK catalyst awards and Channel Four's 4IP - Innovation for the public fund being the leading lights and smaller funds like Show us a better way asking for more concrete hacks.
As a geek and developer evangelist I was a bit out of depth at the event. Yes, as lot of the talks and discussions revolved around using internet technology to change real social issues and environmental problems but not much was hands-on. The Social Innovation Camp, who were one of the co-sponsors did a better job at that, but the main idea of 2gether08 was to allow people to meet, collaborate and inspire another to do their share to spark social change by using technology.
That said, what I found was that there is a massive gap between all these great ideas and funds and IT and web experts available to deliver web solutions. I spent most of my time explaining mashup opportunities, already existing systems to host and remix videos online, create your own social networks or just host photos and make it easy for people to comment and tag them (yes, Flickr).
Case in point was that the organizers tried hard to make the participants network before the event via Crowdvine and Twitter, but it just did not catch on. I went home with around 50 business cards, about 20 of them from people that already connected with me on both of these systems.
As expected, the media coverage was great. Channel4 filmed the events, numerous film crews and reporters walked around and interviewed people and in general we'll find a lot of the things that happened and were said in the media soon.
The main social issue I subscribed to solving at the event and the nearer future is try to make the gap between the geeks and the people with great ideas a little smaller. Geekyoto earlier this year had a similar agenda as 2gether08 - on a more technical level. The 2gether08 people went to this event, too and started merging the groups of skilled and concerned geeks and more "wider picture" thinkers. There is much power in this merger, so let's make that happen.
Christian Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network
Editor's note: This post was originally published on hueniverse: thoughts on technology & open standards.
The first OAuth Summit hosted by Yahoo! last week was a huge success.
Fifty (!) OAuth community members attended, representing 20 companies, large and small, as well as a couple dedicated individuals. The list of companies represented is extremely gratifying to see
considering that OAuth remains a community-driven
effort: Agree2, AOL, BroadOn, Bubble Labs, Eye-Fi, Facebook, Garmin,
Google, LinkedIn, Ma.gnolia, Microsoft, MySpace, Plaxo, Pownce,
SafeMashups, Salesforce, Songbird, Veodia, Vidoop, and Yahoo!.
The summit would not have been half as good without the help of a few individuals. Stacy Milman from Yahoo! Developer Network did an outstanding job organizing the event on behalf of our host, setting the location, helping with registration, and making sure everything was just right. Cindy Li designed our super cool schwag: the OAuth T-shirt and stickers – look out for the OAuth cat on a laptop or co-worker near you.
Eric Sachs helped create the agenda for the event and organized the demo session that kicked off the rest of the day. Chris Messina set up the wiki and registration page.
The summit started with an update on the OAuth IPR (intellectual property rights) agreement, which is in its final approval stages (more news on OAuth licensing to follow); the current proposal for revising the Core specification; and the list of proposed extensions for the community to consider. The update was followed by a demo session which included:
It was great to see real products coming out with OAuth support as well as existing players transitioning to use the protocol. After the demos, we dived into a four-hour technical roundtable session about the future of the protocol. The discussion covered a wide range of topics and included:
The day concluded with dinner and drinks and some interesting casual conversations about where the community is headed and projects people are interested in working on. The summit provided much needed energy and got the community excited about the work ahead, which is already taking shape on the OAuth list. If you are new to OAuth or just could not make it to the summit, please join us and participate.
Eran Hammer-Lahav
Open Standards Evangelist
Kai Hansen, Tony Ralph, Eric Goldsmith, and Artur Bergman during, This is Your Page with Ads, a panel moderated by Steve Souders.
It turns out I’m not the only person who thinks micro-optimization of CSS files is cool. I learned this lesson a year ago when I joined the Exceptional Performance team at Yahoo! and had it reinforced by the quality of both the presentations and the hallway conversations at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference last week.
Attending Velocity Con was fabulous. I was especially impressed that the sessions on web performance were packed. There were a ton of Yahoos at the conference, Julien Lecomte from Yahoo! Search spoke about “High-performance Ajax Applications”.
“In the past few years, Ajax has become very popular because it has enabled developers to build more complex web applications. However, in the rush to push the browser to new limits, we have created a monster. “ – Julien
Julien suggested several detailed strategies and patterns that developers can use to accelerate their applications. Stoyan Stefanov, the lead developer of YSlow, and my colleague in the Exceptional Performance team, spoke about Image Optimization, including the 7 mistakes most sites are making. He showed non-designers how to automate image optimization and reduce image bloat by as much as 30%. After attending the talk, Douglas Crockford shared some love.
“It is good to be able to point with pride at something that Yahoo does that is extremely smart. The Exceptional Performance Team is one of the things that makes me proud to be at Yahoo.” – Doug
John Allspaw from Flickr joined a panel about Surviving Success by preparing to be TechCrunched, Dugg, Slashdotted, or even “Oprahed”. He also presented Capacity Management.
“Your process of capacity planning should be adaptive, adjustable, and include more than just system statistics. Measurement, architecture, and economics are all equally important to having your site perform. Becoming popular doesn’t have to mean being afraid your site will fall over from too much load.” – John
Adam Bechtel, the chief architect covering network, storage and systems infrastructure at Yahoo! presented “Performance Plumbing”. He believes that scale provides unique opportunities to leverage the network to improve performance.
“As your site scales, don’t overlook the performance opportunities that the plumbing creates.” – Adam
Tony Ralph who works on ad quality and performance for Yahoo! participated in a panel, This is Your Page with Ads. He made an important point that I hadn’t really thought of before. He indicated that the ad industry and engineers measure performance in very different ways; one via monetization, the other via impact on response time. He emphaiszed how important it is for engineers to understand both points of view, so that we can effectively measure and convey the impact of end user experience on revenue.
Kai Hansen from Google Ireland also mentioned the need to properly advocate this point of view from within our companies so that quality metrics such as keyword relevance and performance are tied to the cost of displaying ads.
I look forward to Velocity Conference 2009. I do hope that it will focus on the front end with more talks about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ajax. These sessions were the most popular of the conference, and front-end performance is still in its infancy. Douglas Crockford expressed it very well.
“By showing the browser makers how web applications actually perform, the browser makers are now able to make effective changes to the platform. As the platform evolves, we will need new rules and new tools. There is still much to do. (Emphasis mine)” – Doug
Exceptional Performance Yahoo!
This Wednesday, Yahoo!'s London-based SearchMonkeys hosted a evening to show the developer community just how ridiculously easy it is to build enhancements to their Yahoo! Search results using Search Monkey. Even though we were up against one of Radiohead's concerts, and a Girl Geek Dinner, some fifty people came along to monkey around with us in the loft space of a lovely rambling building just off Covent Garden in London.
We were lucky to have Paul Tarjan, the Chief Technical Monkey from America along to give an overview of the inner workings of SearchMonkey. This was followed by Neil Crosby (that's me!) giving a live demo to show just how simple SearchMonkey makes enhancing your search results. Thankfully, the Internet stayed up, and the demos went without a hitch.
After the talks, the floor was opened for questions, and then people got down to the important task of eating pizza and making monkeys. Walking around the room, it was clear that people had interesting ideas about things they could make. I look forward to seeing them shared in the gallery soon.
The one recurring question I was asked during the evening was, "Are your slides available?" The good news is they're now up on Slideshare, and they walk through the process of creating a couple simple monkeys as I did for our live audience.
All in all, a good time was had. We gave out a whole bunch of toy monkeys that make a ridiculous amount of noise as they fly through the air (sorry if they've shown up in your office), as well as a bunch of hats and stickers to remember us by. The biggest takeaway of all: Enhancing your search results is really easy with SearchMonkey.
We're planning more of these developer evenings in London over the coming months, so keep an eye on the YDN blog and come along to the next one!
Neil Crosby
Engineer, Yahoo London
A lot has changed since the first publication of High Performance MySQL in 2004. At some point, the web turned 2.0, startups became cool again, and SQL became a bad word (regardless of how you pronounce it). For many in this new generation of web development, hand-writing SQL has become a sort of vestige--something to suffer through only as a last resort. Frameworks like Django and Ruby on Rails provide a clean abstraction to the database called an ORM, or Object-Relational Mapping, which makes it possible to develop an entire application without writing a single line of SQL. Developers end up learning the hard way that reliance on database-agnostic development can have tremendous consequences once the application has to scale to thousands or millions of users.
High Performance MySQL, by Baron Schwartz, Peter Zaitsev, Vadim Tkachenko, Jeremy Zawodny, Arjen Lentz, and Derek J. Balling, is a high-level introduction to the most powerful aspects of MySQL that's still accessible to anyone who's worked with a database before. Although this book focuses on MySQL, many of the concepts like transactions, locking, and query optimization are important to an understanding of any database system. You can get through the book on just a basic literacy of SQL, but it might be helpful to have a companion reference lying around in case something comes up.
The book starts out with a detailed overview of the MySQL architecture, with careful attention to MySQL's selection of storage engines, which offers a lot of flexibility in how you can optimize performance. As a way to explain the differences between each of these storage engines and when it might make sense to use InnoDB rather than MyISAM, for instance, the book provides a thorough explanation of how they implement locking and transactions.
Chapters 3 & 4 are also fairly specific to MySQL, as they explain the finer details of how it processes queries. MySQL does a fair amount of heuristics-based optimization on incoming queries depending on the nature of your data, and understanding what's going on under the hood can not only help you fix queries, but start writing better SQL. If you've ever added column indices because it seemed like the cool thing to do, or couldn't quite figure out how that simple query could be taking a few seconds, these two chapters especially will set you straight.
The rest of the book covers general best practices for optimizing server performance. These chapters provide a good reference for how MySQL best implements practices like benchmarking, load balancing, backups, and hardware scaling. Since most of these optimizations are external to MySQL itself, much of the information is important for any production environment.
Without a doubt, High Performance MySQL belongs on any serious developer's bookshelf. Like the original, it's an enjoyable, engaging read that provides battled-tested solutions to real-world problems that engineers face in scaling their applications. The second edition covers the new features of MySQL 5, including stored procedures, cursors, triggers and views, as well as a deeper comparative look into the various storage engines. Perhaps more importantly, the second edition brings with it a reminder of how important database design is to web development.
Mattt Thompson
Technology Evangelist Intern
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