Skip to content

All posts by moore - 70. page

Advice for Attending Technical Conferences

I just got back from Google I/O.  This two day conference was the successor to Google Developer Day. There were a wide variety of topics covered.  I hope to get my notes written up, but for now, I just wanted to capture some advice on conference-going, mostly for my future reference.

  • Go to more conferences, at least one a year.  Sure, they take time and money away from real work, but they refresh you, expose you to new technologies and people, and recharge your batteries in a different manner than a typical vacation.  If you are not excited by the end of a technology conference, maybe you shouldn’t be in technology.
  • Realize that you probably won’t find a solution to a specific problem you have.  Why?  Because your problem is probably very specific to your current situation.  Talks at conferences tend to focus either on general introductory material, or very specific, in depth explanations of other people’s solutions to problems.  Chances are their problems weren’t yours.
  • That said, come with specific questions/areas of interest.  This lets you have focus when you are confronted with the vast feast of knowledge that most conferences display.  Make sure you read the schedule and note interesting talks.
  • Don’t eat all the snacks provided.  There’s a temptation to take advantage of all the ‘free’ food, but gorging yourself will make you sleepy.
  • Realize that you can’t see all the interesting sessions.  See if the conference is posting video later.  Google I/O is (supposedly by June 6).
  • Talk to people.  This is one of the hardest things for me to do–there are a ton of strangers at a conference, I’m not sure if they’ll have valuable information, and it’s so much easier to sit back and wait for someone else to talk to you.  But everyone I talked to at I/O had an interesting story to tell, and most everyone was interested in what I had to say.
  • Get people’s business cards.  It’s flattering to be asked for a card, and you never know when you might run across an article or project that might be of interest to someone you’ve met.
  • The informal meetings (Birds of a Feather, Fireside Chats) are worth far more than the organized talks.  There is a fantastic amount of formal and informal articles, blogs and videos about technology that you can consume at your leisure, in your bathrobe at home.  Far less common is interactive descriptions of problems and solutions, including face to face time.  While mailing lists and newsgroups take care of some of these needs, social time at conferences is an even easier way to have these kind of thought provoking and wide ranging discussions.  Also, it’s easier to talk to people when that is the purpose of the event.
  • Sit at the back of the session, and on the sides of the row of chairs. This lets you exit easily if you need to.  (Of course, not everyone can do this.)
  • Verify how feedback will be given to the speakers before you spend any of your precious time filling out feedback forms.  Conference organizers, this is a call for you to step up and tell attendees how their feedback will be delivered–I heard at least one speaker say that in ten years of attending conferences, he had never seen any feedback forms.
  • Keynotes are interesting, high level, and great places to finish breakfast.
  • Use a notepad, not a laptop.  For I/O, I took a laptop one day and a notepad the next.  I have a hard time taking notes on a laptop and not being distracted by email, searching for concepts/tools/projects that the speaker mentioned, and upcoming work.  (I’m not sure I’m NADD compatible.)  With a notepad, you can capture everything you feel is important, and if it is really important, you can revist it later.
  • Review your notes.  Perhaps for a blog post, but definitely review them and break out action items–projects to investigate, articles that you should read, information to pass on to colleagues.  Act on those action items.
  • Bring a water bottle.

[tags]io2008[/tags]

Conferences Presentations | moore |

Google I/O

I’m off to San Francisco for Google I/O, a two day conference on focused on web application development, with a heavy focus on Google’s APIs and tools. I’m excited for sessions ranging from “Faster-Than-Possible Code: Deferred Binding with GWT” to “Underneath the Covers at Google: Current Systems and Future Directions”.

I probably won’t be live blogging the sessions, but I will try to write a wrap up post. If you’re attending, I hope to see you there.

GWT Web Applications | moore |

Useful Tools: Password Safe

One of my clients has a fairly complicated web application. In any application of this nature, there are a lot of usernames and passwords–for DNS management, databases, accounts for integrated services, etc. Where can you store all these?

Well, you could have a master excel spreadsheet that gets version controlled. You could also go the route that some of my sysadmin friends have–a text file that is PGP encrypted. You could manage all the passwords via extensive sticky note or social memory (I might recommend against the latter two methods).  Or you could use a specialized password management software. I haven’t done extensive research on in this area, but so far we’ve been using Password Safe, and I’ve been relatively happy with it.

Good features:

  • You can open up the password file as ‘read only’, preventing you from mistakenly adding or changing data in the file.
  • There’s an option to generate passwords. So, if you’re having a hard time coming up with a secure password, the software can string together a random set of characters.
  • You can copy the password from Password Save and paste it into your application without even seeing it.
  • Once you give it the master password, it will only stay open for a certain number of minutes.
  • You can group password entries within the tool for better organization.
  • You can associate a URL with a password entry, and use keyboard shortcut to open that URL when you are viewing the password entry. This is something I thought was kind of useless until I started using it.
  • Password Safe supports windows and linux, and there’s other projects out there supporting more platforms, like Password Gorilla

The only issue I can think of is that version controlling the password file can be tedious. Just like version controlling any other binary file, CVS (or any other source management system) can’t do merges. That means that when you change something, you need to make sure that anyone who will change something else in the file updates before they do. The alternative is to not have it version controlled, but I like everything in version control.

If you have many passwords to manage, I’d recommend taking a look!

Useful Tools | moore |

IE7 doesn’t like div classes named ‘content’

I ran into a really bizarre issue today.  A client’s website had paragraph tags separating content, wrapped inside a number of divs.  One of the divs had the classname of ‘content’.  In IE7, and not in FF2 or IE6, the first line of the paragraph was indented.  Modifying, even deleting, styles of the parent divs or the paragraph did not seem to change anything.  Adding a break tag as the first child of the paragraph tag fixed the indentation, but led to too much space.

Finally, I tried deleting the entire classnames from the parent divs.  Deleting the class ‘content’ from one of the divs fixed the issue.  Then I tried with a classname of ‘contaent’, and the issue was still fixed.

Apparently IE7 doesn’t like divs with the name ‘content’?  I was able to use ‘content-wrapper’ just fine.  Beats me.  A cursory search of the internet didn’t turn up any suggestions, and I unfortunately don’t have the time to try to plumb the depths of this bug.
[tags]IE weirdness[/tags]

Web Applications | moore |

Boulder Facebook Developer Garage Notes

So, on Thursday I went to the Facebook developers garage, kindly arranged by Kevin Cawley. It was held at ‘the bunker’, secret home of TechStars (we didn’t even get the precise address until the afternoon of the event. I could tell you where it is, but then I’d have to kill you). It was an interesting evening; it started off, as per usual with tech events, with free pizza and pop and beer (folks! if you want a job where you can get free pizza regularly, consider software). Then, there were six presentations by local startups. A number of the companies were ones that I’d seen before at the New Tech Meetup, and that was what the garage felt like. Rather than a deep look at some of the technical or business problems that Facebook applications face, it was a quick overview of how the platform was being used by existing startups. Then there was a video conference call with Dave Morin, the platform development manager for Facebook.

As far as demographics, the garage had about 40-50 people there, of which 4-5 were women. One of the presenters asked how many people had apps running on Facebook; I’d say it was about 40%.

While I’ve succeeded in writing a “hello world” application for Facebook, I am by no means a Facebook developer. I attended the garage because the platform is exciting new technology. There are a number of interesting applications that have a chicken and egg problem: the application is cool if there are a lot of people using it, but people will only use it if is cool. For example, any recommendation engine, or classified listing service (incidentally, I started off the night talking to the Needzilla folks, who are hoping to build a next generation Craigslist). Facebook, by making finding and adding applications delightfully easy, helps developers jump the chicken and egg problem. Of course, it’s just as easy to uninstall the application, so it needs to be pretty compelling. And that is why I went to the garage (no, free pizza had nothing to do with it!). Also, note that this meeting was streamed on Ustream and will hopefully be available on one of the video sharing sites sometime soon. I’ve asked to be notified and will post the link when it is available.

The first speaker was Charlie Henderson of MapBuzz. They’re a site looking to make mapping easier for users to build and create content and community around. They partner with organizations such as the Colorado Mountain Club and NTEN to build maps and communities. They’re building a number of Facebook apps, mostly using iframes rather than FBML. They had some difficulties porting their existing application to work within Facebook, especially around bi-directional communication (if you add a marker or a note to a map within Facebook, that content will appear on the Mapbuzz site, and vice versa). They had some difficulties with FBJS. I couldn’t find their widget on Facebook as of this time.

Lijit is a widget you can drop in your blog that does search better, as it draws on more structured information, including trusted sources. They use the Facebook API as another source of information to search that is fairly structured. They insisted they complied with the Facebook TOS and are starting to look at OpenSocial as a data source as well.

Fuser showed a widget that displayed Myspace notifications on Facebook. Again, they used the iframe technology, and actually used a java applet! (I’m happy that someone is using a java applet for something more complex than a rent vs buy calculator). Since Myspace doesn’t have an API, they ended up having that applet do some screen scraping.

Useful Networks had the most technically impressive presentation, though not because of its Facebook integration. This company, part of Liberty Media, is looking to become a platform for cell phone applications with location services (a “location services aggregator”). Eventually, they want to help developers onboard applications to the carriers, but right now they’re just trying to build some compelling applications of their own. Useful Networks has built an application called sniff (live in the Nordic countries, almost live in the USA) which lets you find friends via their mobile phones and plots locations on a map in Facebook. They had a number of notification options (‘tell me when someone finds me’, etc) and an option to go invisible–the emphasis on letting people know about about their choices surrounding sensitive information like location was admirable. The presenter said that they had been whittling away features to just the minimum for a while. Most importantly, they had a business model–each ‘sniff’ was 50 cents (I’m sure some of that went to the carrier). 80% of the people using sniff did it via their mobile phone, while the other 20% did it from the web. They used GPS when possible, but often cell [tower] id was close enough. And the US beta was live on two carriers. Someone suggested integrating with Fire Eagle for another source of geo information.

Stan James, founder of Lijit, then demoed a Facebook app. I’ve been pretty religious about not installing Facebook applications, but this is one that seemed cool enough to do so. It’s called SongTales and it lets you share songs with friends and attach a small story to each one. As Stan said, we all like songs that are pretty objectively awful because of the experiences they can evoke. As far as technical difficulties, he mentioned that it was harder to get music to play than to just embed a Youtube video (a probable violation of Youtube’s TOS).

David Henderson spoke about Socialeyes. Actually, first he spoke about Social Media, a company he worked for in Palo Alto that aimed to create adsense for social networks (watch out, Google!), and has a knowledge of Facebook applications after creating a number of them. One of those was Appsaholic, that lets a developer track usage of their app. He showed some pretty graphs of application uptake on Facebook, and made some comments about how the rapid uptake created viral customer interaction that was a dream for marketers. His new venture is an attempt to build a Nielsen ratings for social networks, measuring engagement and social influence of users as well as application distribution.

After the presenters Dave Morin skyped in. Pretty amazing display of cheap teleconferencing (though people did have to ask their questions to someone in Boulder, who typed them to Dave). He said some nice things about Boulder, and then talked a small bit about how the Facebook platform was going to improve. Actually, I think he just said that it will improve, and that Facebook loves developers (sorry, no yelling). Dave shared an anecdote about a girl who build a Facebook application which had 300K users and sold it in three weeks. Then people asked questions.

One person asked about how to make applications stickier (so you don’t have 50K users add your app, then 50K users delete it the next week). No good answer there (that I caught).

Another asked about the SEO announcement, which Dave didn’t know about because he ad been in a roundtable with developers all day (and I couldn’t find reference to on the internet–sorry).

Someone else asked about changes to the Facebook TOS, in particular letting users grant greater data storage rights to applications (apparently apps right now can only store 24 hours of data). Dave answered that what Facebook currently allowed was in line with the market standards, and that as those changed, Facebook would.

Somebody asked if authenticating mobile Facebook apps was coming, but I didn’t catch/understand the answer.

Someone else asked about the ‘daily user interactions’, and what that meant. After some hemming and hawing about the proprietary nature of that calculation (to prevent gaming the numbers), Dave answered that the number is not interactions per user per day, but the number of unique users who interact with your application over the last day. He also talked about what went into the ‘interaction’ calculation.

Someone asked about monetization solutions. Dave mentioned that the Facebook team was working on an e commerce API which he hoped would spawn an entire new set of applications. It will be released in the next couple of quarters. (This doesn’t really help the people building apps now, though).

Another person asked about the pluses and minuses of FBML versus the iframe. Dave said that FBML was “super native and super fast”, whereas the iframe solution lets you run the application on your own servers, and is more standard.

Yet another person asked about whether they should release an app in beta, or get it a bit more polished. Dave said that his experience was that the best option was always to get new features into the hands of users as soon as possible, and that Facebook was still releasing new code once a week.

Someone asked about Facebook creating a ‘preferred applications’ repository and Dave said that there were no plans to do that.

Somebody asked if Facebook was interested in increasing integration between FBJS and flash, but Dave didn’t quite get the question correctly, and answered that of course Facebook was happy to have applications developed in flash.

Dave then signed off. It was nice to be able to talk to someone so in touch with the Facebook platform, but I felt that he danced around some questions. And having someone have to type the questions meant that it was hard to refine your question or have him clarify what you were asking. FYI, I may not have understood all the questions and answers that happened in Dave’s talk because I’m so new to Facebook and the jargon of the platform.

After that, things were wrapping up. Kevin plugged allfacebook. People stood up and announced whether they were looking for work, or if they were looking for Facebook developers. By my count, 5 folks said they were looking for developers; no developers said they were looking for work (hey look, kids! Facebook app dev is the new Ruby on Rails!), including the developer of the skipass application and mezmo.com.

Was this worth my time? Yes, definitely. Good friendly vibe and people, and it opened up my eyes to the wide variety of apps being built for Facebook. The presentations also drove home how you could build a really professional application on top of the API.

would I go again? Probably not. I would prefer a more BJUG style presentation, where one can really dive into some of the technical issues (scaling, bi-directional communication, iframe vs FBML vs Flash) that were only briefly touched upon.

[tags]facebook[/tags]

Programming Web Applications | moore |

GWT Mini Pattern: Make Your Links Friendly To All Users

Sometimes GWT widgets are used to provide functionality, like a form submission, that is easily replicable in traditional HTML. Other times, it’s not so easy to create a user interface that degrades well. Luckily, the self contained nature of widgets means that crucial functionality is typically still available to users with javascript disabled. However, you can take steps to make your site more friendly to users with javascript disabled (for whatever reason).

For the first case, where there is a viable HTML analog, the solution is to have your widget home span look something like this:

<span id="requestinfocuspan"><span class="clickable-link" id="requestinfocuspanplaceholder"><a xhref="/ContactUs.do?ContactUsType=More-info-about-a-listing" mce_href="/ContactUs.do?ContactUsType=More-info-about-a-listing" >Request More Info</a></span></span>

Now, if the user has javascript disabled, and they click on the href, they are sent to the appropriate HTML form. However, if the user has javascript enabled, the widget looks for a span to enable and if it sees the “requestinfocuspan” span, calls code like this:

public static Label buildClickableLink(String span, ClickListener listener) {
Element placeHolderLink = DOM.getElementById(span+"placeholder");
String contentsOfPlaceHolder = "Content unavailable";
Element placeHolderSpan = DOM.getElementById(span);
if (placeHolderSpan != null && placeHolderLink != null) {
contentsOfPlaceHolder = DOM.getInnerText(placeHolderLink);
DOM.removeChild(placeHolderSpan, placeHolderLink);
}
Label clickme = new Label(contentsOfPlaceHolder);
clickme.setStyleName(Constants.CLICKABLE_LINK_STYLE_NAME);
clickme.addStyleName(Constants.INLINE_STYLE_NAME);

clickme.addClickListener(listener);
return clickme;
}
This code takes the contents of “requestinfocuspan”, grabs the text of the span inside it, and replaces the whole of the contents with a label. That label has the same text and a click listener attached, so there’s no bouncing of text. If a designer wants to change the text of this link, they can do so by modifying the JSP without touching (or redeploying) GWT components.The second case mentioned above, where there is no easy way to build an HTML interface for GWT functionality, can be handled by placing a link to a page explaining to the user that javascript is required, and possibly how to turn it on. An easy way to show that link for non javascript users is to use the noscript tag

<script type="text/javascript">document.write("<a xhref='/psaf&city=Boulder'>Advanced Search Form</a>");</script>
<noscript><a xhref='/HomePage.do?state=javascriptNeeded'>Advanced Search Form</a></noscript>

This is a viable option here because there is no need to run the ‘buildClickableLink’ method. We don’t really need a click listener, because we have a plain href to a page that the GWT component will run on.

The other option is to use the existing link method discussed above and use the buildClickableLink method:

<span id="searchspan"><span class="clickable-link" id="searchspanplaceholder"><a
xhref="/HomePage.do?state=javascriptNeeded" mce_href="/HomePage.do?state=javascriptNeeded" >Advanced Search</a></span></span>

While accessibility to non javascript users is not built into GWT (although it might be on the way), you can take steps to make your widgets more friendly to these users. This is especially true if you’re merely ‘ajaxifying’ existing functionality. In addition, users with javascript enabled get a better user experience if you use some of the above methods because the text on the page doesn’t ‘jump around’ when GWT code is executed after the page is loaded.

PS Sorry for the ‘xhref’s in my links above–I’m not quite sure how to turn off the escaping that WordPress or TinyMCE does.  Please replace ‘xhref’ with ‘href’ wherever you see it.

GWT GWT Mini Patterns | moore |

On writing a book

I saw this great post on the nuts and bolts of writing a book on the BJUG mailing list. Well worth a read.

I have sympathy in particular with his ‘writing schedule’ comment. I started to put together a book with some friends, and it was hard to keep things moving. We ended up not moving forward with the book and placing the content on a blog (which has proven hard to update as well). The book was about software contracting.

[tags]authorship,inertia[/tags]

Books Programming | moore |