Ben Cooper’s Weblog

• Apologies for lack of show notes in last episode (Ben)
  
  • Tried publishing from Google docs and didn’t quite like the formatting
  • Tried changing using Wordpress’ visual editor and got strange results
  • Upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 this week which includes a much improved editor
    • Supposedly doesn’t interfere with crafted HTML in the code editor
  • Attempted the same for these show notes without success. Here is the error from Google docs

    

    (perhaps those extra checks broke something for Google?)

  • Pasting Google docs generated HTML looks OK
• Cut myself on the MacBook Air (Pete)
  • Really!
  • My USB ethernet adapter has failed
  • Overall, very happy with the laptop
  • Sometimes would like it to be faster
• Websites: Everyone’s doing APIs (Ben)
  
  • FaceBook – with some controversy about the data it shares
  • LinkedIn are supporting Google’s OpenSocial
    • as are Friendster, MySpace (late to the party), Ning, Plaxo, Salesforce, Six Apart

    YouTube – offers access to the YouTube video repository and community features via a GoogleData (”GData”) API.

  • Google apps for your domain
    • Provisioning API is quite compelling
    • Only for paying users:

      

    • Get a strange exception when trying to use the provisioning API on a free service, that contains no information.
      • (’status’, ‘body’, ‘reason’)
        
    • Signed up for 30 day trial to test out
      • You need to enable it before it works

        

      • What the python library docs don’t tell you is that you need to make an explicit client login before you can do anything (otherwise you get the strange exception above). Kind of bizarre since you need to put authentication information in the AppsService object. e.g. to create a user:

      #!/bin/python

      import gdata.apps.service

      service = gdata.apps.service.AppsService(email='ben', domain='bgcooper.com', password='password')

      user_name = "me"

      family_name = "Cooper"

      given_name = "Benjamin"

      password = "secret"

      try:

          service.ClientLogin('ben@bgcooper.com', 'password')

          user = service.CreateUser(user_name, family_name, given_name, password)

          print user

      except gdata.apps.service.AppsForYourDomainException , e:

          print e

      • The result is:

        

        
        

  • Twitter – Restful api here
  • Perhaps the symantic web is really happening?
• Searchme Visual Search (Ben)
  • Got an invite to the private beta
  • Fairly novel interface to searching:

    

  • Suggests categories in searching as you type:

    

  • It’s novel for sure, but all I see with this is one of the big players licensing the technology, not actually competing in this field.
    
• Apple WWDC sessions announced (Pete)
  
  • Huge iPhone track this year
    • 40 Mac sessions
    • 27 iPhone sessions
    • 10 IT sessions
  • I try to go about every other year, not this year
  • Apple Australia no longer puts on sessions?
    
• Scalr, open source AWS management tool (Ben)
  
  • Write-up here
  • At google code here
  • TechCrunch has a good writeup
  • Interesting that the creator is a ruby shop and it’s a PHP app.
    
  • Rumours are that Google might release BigTable to compete with Amazon’s SimpleDB

• Sydney Horological Centre (Pete)
  • Pete’s blog post here
  • Clock repair supplies
  • Good collection of Cuckoo clocks
  • Amazing that these places still exist
• New linker for GCC released (Ben)
  • It’s a total re-write of the linker
  • 5 times faster at linking large c++ projects (but will it improve Gentoo’s 3 day install?)
  • Developer Ian Lance Taylor works for Google and has just finished the project
  • It’s being widely tested within Google
  • Shows the excellent computer science being done at Google (if only to solve their own problems)
    
  • Called “gold” which could be confusing
  • The speedup effects of this will ripple through everything that uses gcc
  • Currently beta quality, if you link the Linux kernel it won’t boot, presumably this bug will be found pretty quickly
• Visualising WSDL with GraphViz (Pete)
  • Pete’s blog post here
  • Hard to read xml for humans
  • Wanted a way to visualise the wsdl api
  • Wrote a little python tool that reads wsdl and outputs dot format
  • Doesn’t scale up well, needs some sort of “pagination” to divide the api into parts
  • (as a side note, I’ve never seen google ad words respond so quickly to a post)

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