Rudimentary Art of Programming & Development

And this is the YouTube video of it:

This is another not so new social networking site, but its idea is somehow refreshing and original.

• There are a lot of fashion blogs/magazines…
• There are a lot of gossip blogs…
• There are a lot of social network sites…

But there’s not a whole lot of those three combined in 1 site. It definitely has high advertisement values.

Popsugar is built using Drupal, one of the oldest open source CMS. It has tons of modules. A social networking app can easily be built on top of Drupal.

Detailed conversation about Popsugar’s technical specs & Drupal tips is recorded here.

Granted that Drupal source code is somewhat funky, along with its hook architecture, but it is well known to be flexible and capable to withstand medium-sized traffic.

References:

• The Popsugar Site
• Drupal page about Popsugar
• Drupal page about TeamSugar – The social network component of Popsugar
• More Drupal powered sites

Reference: 

This is the link to Webware Top 100

is pretty much neutered. It doesn’t have a lot of extensions that I need such as: curl, mysql (this is the big one), pdo, etc, etc…

Update: It seems like I did not went through a clean-wiped-out install when installing Leopard. Many of my old development tool directories stayed the same, but some are different. PHP happens to be one of the few that’s different.

That sucks… O well, all I have to do is rebuild PHP 5.2.4/5.2.5 from source (+ all the extensions that I want) right?

WRONG!!! Big Fat Wrong!

I cannot even do:

./configure -–with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql

After that I got this console message:

configure: error: -–with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql: invalid option; use –help to show usage

Huh? Why? WTF?

There are plenty of people complaining about the exact same problem, but no one seemed to have the answers.

Can anyone help me? Can anyone points me to the working PHP 5.2.4/5.2.5 source?

Please…

Friendster might be a yester-year trend (I certainly don’t think so since IT is the major social network site that I use), but its up and down story is the kind of tale that fascinates me.

In case some readers didn’t know, they rejected $30 million dollars buyout from Google in 2003.

Their super fast growth was probably 1 of the biggest problem, they couldn’t scale as fast as they grow.

It’s best for readers to simply read the articles. It’s very interesting read.

References:

• NYTimes full coverage on Friendster
• Wall Street Journal Video – The Fall of Friendster
• Wikipedia – Friendster

Note that the following are archives of what people said. I never work for Google. This summary is meant for fanboism towards Python.

Hope readers enjoy it.

How Python is being used inside Google itself[1]:

• “At Google, python is one of the 3 “official languages” alongside with C++ and Java.”
• “The Google build system is written in python.”
• “Google has an internal packaging format like RPM. These packages are created using python.”
• “Binary Data Pusher. This is the area where Alex Martelli is working, on optimizing pushing bits between thousands of servers.”
• “Production servers. All monitoring, restarting and data collection functionality is done with python”
• “Reporting. Logs are analyzed and reports are generated using Python.”
• Note from reference no.1: It is obvious that SWIG is being used to talk between C++ and Python, Cool… Way cool.

How Python is being used inside YouTube[2][3]:

• “Python is fast enough for our site and allows us to produce maintainable features in record times, with a minimum of developers.”
• “Requests are routed for handling by a Python application server.”
• “The Python web code is usually NOT the bottleneck, it spends most of its time blocked on RPCs.”
• “Python allows rapid flexible development and deployment. This is critical given the competition they face.”
• “Use psyco, a dynamic python->C compiler that uses a JIT compiler approach to optimize inner loops.” The other way is to use SWIG, wrapping C++ functions so that they are callable by Python.
• “Fully formed Python objects are cached.”  I guess that means The python object is serialized and stored somewhere close to the server’s CPU.  My wild guess is in the memory using Memcached.

References:

1. http://panela.blog-city.com/python_at_google_greg_stein__sdforum.htm
2. http://www.python.org/about/quotes/
3. http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture

Freecol is a turn-based strategy game inspired by the widely popular Colonization game of the 90s.

It is of course open source and definitely earned the nostalgic value of the commercial predecessor.

It is written in Java, if you are a programmer, make sure to download the source code and read it. The source code is very clean and organized. The source code could definitely be an awesome learning experience for those new in software development world.

As of today the stable version is 0.7.2.

There are a lot of hidden information on YouTube.

One of them is UCBerkeley channel. It is nice for an elite public university to share their knowledge to people outside the university itself.

Below are videos related to the internet from UCBerkeley channel.

Search, Google, and Life: Sergey Brin

Intellectual Property & Search: Jason Schultz

Quality & Search: Dr. Geoffrey Nunberg

Search Advertising: Dr. Hal Varian

Yahoo! Search: Dr. Jan Pederson

WebSpam: Dr. Marc Najork

I’d like to share these articles I found as nostalgic reads.

The list will grow as I found more interesting “relics”.

• Wired, January 2003 – Google v.s. Evil: “In the autumn of 1998, he and Larry Page unleashed Google with a clear mission: Help computer users find exactly what they want on the Internet.“
• New York Times, December 1995 – Digital Equipment Offers Web Browsers its super spider: This is back in the day when Alta Vista was still a prototype.
• CNet News, October 2001 – Seeking relics amid webvan’s ruins: This is right around the demise of Webvan, the $1 billion venture
• Google Logo around 1998
• Wired, December 1995 – The Java Saga

Hope readers enjoy them.

History of Computer Videos:

1. [Google Video] Modern Marvel – History of Computer

2. [YouTube] Computer History – A British View

3. [Google Video] History of Amiga

4. [Google Video] Modern Marvel – Codes

5. [Google Video] BeOS Demo Video

6. [Google Video] Computer Chronicles – 1985 UNIX

7. [Google Video] Computer Chronicles – Commodore 64

8 [Google Video] Computer Chronicles – PowerPC

9. [YouTube] Small UNIX History

10. [Google Video] The PalmPilot History