Friday, December 5, 2008
Daddy, is Santa Real?
What follows is from my archive (a previous blog) from 2006...
---
I'm a proud father, though I'm frustrated too. What can you do about some things but to just shake your head and wonder.
I'm a member of the Ogden Athletic Club. One of the biggest selling points for the club (in my mind) is the nursery care they provide for young children. My experience with their childcare has so far been mostly positive, but I have to write about an incident that happened a week or two ago.
My daughter, 3 years old (almost 4), was in tears on the way home from the club. My wife had picked her up from the nursery and relayed to me what had happened that made my little princess so distraught.
A fellow boy had apparently mentioned something about Santa Claus, probably about all the toys Santa was going to bring him. You know, something typical and innocent to say around Christmas time. My daughter, with a pure heart and only good intentions, promptly informed the boy that in fact Santa wasn't real, that he's just make believe and that Santa would not be bringing him any presents.
What's a strong willed girl to do but to set the young man straight? It's my daughter's nature to try and help out when and where she can. She's very smart and understands things at a level most children her age don't. When someone says something she inherently knows is wrong, it's her duty in life to inform them the truth. What's a smart strong-willed 3 year old supposed to do?
So my wife walks in after the situation had apparently cooled down some, but there was still tension in the air. Apparently, many of the kids were offended by my daughter's words, they were yelling at her and she was left to defend her position basically alone. "Well, who brings us the presents then?" asked the boy.
"Our parents give us presents," was my daughter's reply.
One nursery assistant, having her own child in nursery that day, promptly grabbed her daughter and dragged her away from the situation. She was so afraid of her daughter hearing that Santa wasn't real, to hear the truth. Why not take that opportunity to teach the child? Teach your child that some people have certain beliefs, and that others have other beliefs, and that it's all ok for each to have their own.
I get the feeling that the nursery staff was a little peeved at my daughter's actions. My wife described the tension in the air, and I would believe it given that no teacher intervened in the verbal argument between my daughter and the rest of the class.
I can't expect her to know all the nuances and dances we perform to keep the cultural Santa mythology going. She's not a politician yet, she just tells it like it is; 3 year old's don't have a sense of political correctness. Just as true as it was in my daughter's mind that Santa wasn't real, it was true in the boy's mind that Santa was real. It's black or white for this age, there is no understanding of gray issues, political correctness, or historic fictional characters.
In my daughters mind, God is real and Santa is make believe, and I frankly like it that way. I can understand why the boy felt so offended and confused (my daughter contradicted the boy's parents). And I understand why my daugther was in tears over getting verbally ganged up on by her peers.
What I don't understand is why we continue to lift up Santa, yet put down God. Why do we lie to our children and let them so wholeheartedly believe in something that in a few short years they will realize is not true. Wouldn't it be better telling our children that Santa is just a fictional figure head, someone who is fun to talk or pretend about, something to tickle our fancy and imaginations like any good story book? As opposed to setting them up for disappointment and breaking trust in their parents?
I want my children to wholeheartedly trust me with everything. I will only ever tell my children the truth, because I want to model and teach them true faith, true trust and love. Setting our children up for disappointment by perpetuating a lie burns bridges and makes our children's hearts callus.
My biggest disappointment is with the nursery workers. Their inaction speaks volumes. Their inability to act and deal with the situation really demonstrates how sacred the lie of the Santa Christmas has become. The original St. Nicholas advocated people sell their goods and give to the poor. Shouldn't that be what Santa is all about? Shouldn't that be what we're teaching our children?
---
I'm a proud father, though I'm frustrated too. What can you do about some things but to just shake your head and wonder.
I'm a member of the Ogden Athletic Club. One of the biggest selling points for the club (in my mind) is the nursery care they provide for young children. My experience with their childcare has so far been mostly positive, but I have to write about an incident that happened a week or two ago.
My daughter, 3 years old (almost 4), was in tears on the way home from the club. My wife had picked her up from the nursery and relayed to me what had happened that made my little princess so distraught.
A fellow boy had apparently mentioned something about Santa Claus, probably about all the toys Santa was going to bring him. You know, something typical and innocent to say around Christmas time. My daughter, with a pure heart and only good intentions, promptly informed the boy that in fact Santa wasn't real, that he's just make believe and that Santa would not be bringing him any presents.
What's a strong willed girl to do but to set the young man straight? It's my daughter's nature to try and help out when and where she can. She's very smart and understands things at a level most children her age don't. When someone says something she inherently knows is wrong, it's her duty in life to inform them the truth. What's a smart strong-willed 3 year old supposed to do?
So my wife walks in after the situation had apparently cooled down some, but there was still tension in the air. Apparently, many of the kids were offended by my daughter's words, they were yelling at her and she was left to defend her position basically alone. "Well, who brings us the presents then?" asked the boy.
"Our parents give us presents," was my daughter's reply.
One nursery assistant, having her own child in nursery that day, promptly grabbed her daughter and dragged her away from the situation. She was so afraid of her daughter hearing that Santa wasn't real, to hear the truth. Why not take that opportunity to teach the child? Teach your child that some people have certain beliefs, and that others have other beliefs, and that it's all ok for each to have their own.
I get the feeling that the nursery staff was a little peeved at my daughter's actions. My wife described the tension in the air, and I would believe it given that no teacher intervened in the verbal argument between my daughter and the rest of the class.
I can't expect her to know all the nuances and dances we perform to keep the cultural Santa mythology going. She's not a politician yet, she just tells it like it is; 3 year old's don't have a sense of political correctness. Just as true as it was in my daughter's mind that Santa wasn't real, it was true in the boy's mind that Santa was real. It's black or white for this age, there is no understanding of gray issues, political correctness, or historic fictional characters.
In my daughters mind, God is real and Santa is make believe, and I frankly like it that way. I can understand why the boy felt so offended and confused (my daughter contradicted the boy's parents). And I understand why my daugther was in tears over getting verbally ganged up on by her peers.
What I don't understand is why we continue to lift up Santa, yet put down God. Why do we lie to our children and let them so wholeheartedly believe in something that in a few short years they will realize is not true. Wouldn't it be better telling our children that Santa is just a fictional figure head, someone who is fun to talk or pretend about, something to tickle our fancy and imaginations like any good story book? As opposed to setting them up for disappointment and breaking trust in their parents?
I want my children to wholeheartedly trust me with everything. I will only ever tell my children the truth, because I want to model and teach them true faith, true trust and love. Setting our children up for disappointment by perpetuating a lie burns bridges and makes our children's hearts callus.
My biggest disappointment is with the nursery workers. Their inaction speaks volumes. Their inability to act and deal with the situation really demonstrates how sacred the lie of the Santa Christmas has become. The original St. Nicholas advocated people sell their goods and give to the poor. Shouldn't that be what Santa is all about? Shouldn't that be what we're teaching our children?
MPF File Extractor
I always thought that the .mpf file extension was a proprietary file format used with Microsoft's Clip Organizer product or via their online clipart gallery. In fact, it's not very exciting or difficult to extract clip art (or I assume other media) from the package file, since it's only an xml file with the clipart files encoded as Base64 inside.
I have a legal copy of the Clip Organizer product. However, I don't necessarily install it (nor want to) on every computer. But, I do make extensive use of Microsoft's online clipart gallery which means I get a lot of ClipArt.mpf files lying around.
Searching, I found a PERL script to extract mpf files. But, I don't use Perl regularly, so getting the right perl modules installed wasn't exciting. I decided it would just be easier to write a parser / extractor in Java. If you're interested, here is the (free) java source code.
The class requires the Apache Commons Codec library to be in the classpath.
I have a legal copy of the Clip Organizer product. However, I don't necessarily install it (nor want to) on every computer. But, I do make extensive use of Microsoft's online clipart gallery which means I get a lot of ClipArt.mpf files lying around.
Searching, I found a PERL script to extract mpf files. But, I don't use Perl regularly, so getting the right perl modules installed wasn't exciting. I decided it would just be easier to write a parser / extractor in Java. If you're interested, here is the (free) java source code.
The class requires the Apache Commons Codec library to be in the classpath.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Layman's Guide to Credit Default Swaps
This is a good video and introduction to the problem of credit default swaps, which is one of the primary causes in our current financial meltdown.
http://vimeo.com/1915392
http://vimeo.com/1915392
Monday, October 13, 2008
Once a Month
Seems I'm on the once-a-month blog posting. Not bad really, but improvements could be made.
Well, lacking anything really insightful to post, here is a useful chart:
The Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart
Well, lacking anything really insightful to post, here is a useful chart:
The Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart
Monday, September 29, 2008
Quote of the Day
Another quote, this time from my very good friend and teacher, Ron H.
We were talking about the market and such. Especially after today's 7% drop in the DOW, I thought what he said was timely:
He always makes me smile.
We were talking about the market and such. Especially after today's 7% drop in the DOW, I thought what he said was timely:
Doesn't much matter what the stock market, etc. does; the rivers still run and the leaves still change colors. Somebody else is in charge of that, so it still works.
He always makes me smile.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Quote of the Day
I've been reading a bit about Patrick M. Byrne (CEO of Overstock), in particular his campaign against naked short selling. This quote (from March 8th) comes as a response to a Business Week reporter. It made me laugh:
And, if you don't know anything about naked short selling, or of Mr. Bryne's "campaign" against it, try www.businessjive.com (a site of Byrne's).
Since I think "EBITDA" is the stupidest thing I ever heard emanate from Wall Street (no small feat), I … don’t begin to know how to answer. I suppose I could go and recast all my numbers into EBITDA (or for that matter, "pro forma") but I think I’ll do something more valuable with my time, like alphabetize my CD’s by, "Name of drummer."
And, if you don't know anything about naked short selling, or of Mr. Bryne's "campaign" against it, try www.businessjive.com (a site of Byrne's).
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Subprime Primer
Do you understand the subprime mortgage financial crisis which we're currently enjoying? I didn't until I read this:
(Note: potty word alert)
The Subprime Primer
(Note: potty word alert)
The Subprime Primer
Friday, June 13, 2008
Greylisting Whitelist for Gmail via SPF
[update: 10/14/2009]
I just noticed that Google provides this same technique on a Google Apps help page. Here is the link:
http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60764
--------
In the ever escalating arms race between spammers and hosting providers, the technique of greylisting was, at one a point, an extremely effective weapon against spam. These days, greylisting is not as effective, because spamming hosts now correctly handle the temporary error condition used by a greylisting server. But it still is a good tool and first line of defense when used correctly.
Of course, one of the biggest problems with greylisting comes from large email hosting providers, like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. These services use multiple servers to deliver their mail (they have to), and as such, when a message is returned as a temporary failure, it's not guaranteed that the same sending server will attempt to deliver the message a second time.
As such, the only thing to do is whitelist the servers used by these large hosting providers. Due to, I'm sure, Google's ever growing infrastructure, Gmail is particularly difficult to keep up on which servers belong to the Gmail cloud.
I just stumbled upon a pretty decent way, however, to easily learn all of Gmail's outgoing mail server IP addresses. This information is readily available in their SPF records for their service.
Here is a link which describes which type of SPF record should be added to a domain which has email routed through Google Apps: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33786
You can see that Google specifies an "include" directive which is aspmx.googlemail.com. So, now we can do a TXT query on this domain, which gives us:
The same query against googlemail.com and gmail.com returns the same information, too. So, following the redirect:
Obviously we can infer from this the following ip address ranges:
I don't know if Google has officially published all their mail servers to help us who use greylisting. However, the above technique seemed to be a pretty slick way to determine which IP address ranges should be considered for whitelisting Gmail.
Well anyway, it was one of those "oh duh" type moments for me. Hopefully this helps someone else too.
I just noticed that Google provides this same technique on a Google Apps help page. Here is the link:
http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60764
--------
In the ever escalating arms race between spammers and hosting providers, the technique of greylisting was, at one a point, an extremely effective weapon against spam. These days, greylisting is not as effective, because spamming hosts now correctly handle the temporary error condition used by a greylisting server. But it still is a good tool and first line of defense when used correctly.
Of course, one of the biggest problems with greylisting comes from large email hosting providers, like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. These services use multiple servers to deliver their mail (they have to), and as such, when a message is returned as a temporary failure, it's not guaranteed that the same sending server will attempt to deliver the message a second time.
As such, the only thing to do is whitelist the servers used by these large hosting providers. Due to, I'm sure, Google's ever growing infrastructure, Gmail is particularly difficult to keep up on which servers belong to the Gmail cloud.
I just stumbled upon a pretty decent way, however, to easily learn all of Gmail's outgoing mail server IP addresses. This information is readily available in their SPF records for their service.
Here is a link which describes which type of SPF record should be added to a domain which has email routed through Google Apps: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33786
You can see that Google specifies an "include" directive which is aspmx.googlemail.com. So, now we can do a TXT query on this domain, which gives us:
]$ host -t txt aspmx.googlemail.com
aspmx.googlemail.com descriptive text "v=spf1 redirect=_spf.google.com"
The same query against googlemail.com and gmail.com returns the same information, too. So, following the redirect:
]$ host -t txt _spf.google.com
_spf.google.com descriptive text "v=spf1 ip4:216.239.32.0/19 ip4:64.233.160.0/19 ip4:66.249.80.0/20 ip4:72.14.192.0/18 ip4:209.85.128.0/17 ip4:66.102.0.0/20 ip4:74.125.0.0/16 ?all"
Obviously we can infer from this the following ip address ranges:
216.239.32.0/19
64.233.160.0/19
66.249.80.0/20
72.14.192.0/18
209.85.128.0/17
66.102.0.0/20
74.125.0.0/16
I don't know if Google has officially published all their mail servers to help us who use greylisting. However, the above technique seemed to be a pretty slick way to determine which IP address ranges should be considered for whitelisting Gmail.
Well anyway, it was one of those "oh duh" type moments for me. Hopefully this helps someone else too.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
From the Horse's Mouth...
I figured my last blog about him would bring out the best. Sure enough. Here's what Dell Schanze, Libertarian candidate for governor of Utah, left as a comment to my blog post about him:
No rebuttal needed.
Ok Adams Daft, who are you going to vote for?? EXACTLY!!! ME!!! No matter how much crap you want to talk about totally false media stories I am the only hope you have as I am the only American on the ballot. I have tons of support as I helped hundreds of thousands of people with the businesses I owned and people know I did what I said I would and went out of my way to take care of them if any issue arrose. I am by far the best candidate and the only one of the ballot worth voting for. Even those that don't like me will still vote for me even if for the mere reason of NOT voting for the other guys. Your ridiculous story is what makes the party look stupid and ununified. The homos in the tootoos rejecting me at the convention are what make the party look stupid. I built the 4th largest system builder in the western US and won the World System Builder Award by over 30%. You should pull your head out and start supporting candidates on the issues and not attacking them because of your personal issues. I am your only hope and it doesn't matter if you like that or not. I'm it. Now quit being an idiot and attacking the only person that WILL stick up for your rights. Dumb Ass!!
No rebuttal needed.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Competition is Good, even for Java
For about the last decade, a flame-war has existed in the Java camps:
The following is mostly my own guess as to how things have gone down with the Java platform. I'm guessing that most of what I've written here is seemingly accurate, though undoubtedly there are some mistakes in the timeline and/or motivations of the interested parties. I believe this is close enough to the truth to be acceptable for the point I'm attempting to make.
From a likely naive read of Java history, it seems obvious to me that the competition between companies like IBM and Sun over the Java platform has strengthened the platform as a whole, created new options, more mature APIs, and has eventually lead to the opening of the Java source code by Sun in 2007.
For example, when IBM started to look at Java's AWT (Abstract Window Toolkit) graphic framework, improvements needed to be made to provide better fidelity with the native operating system underneath. AWT was basically judged as unacceptable by IBM for use in the development of its Visual Age IDE. AWT was clunky and lacked many features, and as such, IBM chose to develop its own windowing toolkit which did not rely on AWT and provided for better native OS integration. IBM came out with SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) which, unlike AWT, had native renderings for the various graphic interface windowing components. SWT was fast and looked native.
Meanwhile, Sun pushed forward on the development of AWT by creating Swing, a light-weight layer sitting atop the AWT framework. With Swing, Java developers would have a very consistent API to developing moderately decent looking graphic user interfaces. Even with Swing though, IBM was not satisfied and was instead seeing great strides being made in its SWT platform, both in terms of functionality and performance. IBM stuck with SWT and Swing development slowed, mostly due to legitimate and fundamental criticisms over Swing (slow, kludgey, non-native rendering). IBM had picked the right horse to bet on, at least for the time being.
Today however, that perspective of the "right horse" is changing. A comparison is being made between the Eclipse and Netbeans IDEs (Integrated Development Environment) developed by IBM and Sun respectively. Netbeans, being based on Swing, has largely suffered from the original criticisms leveled against Swing, while Eclipse has been left rolling on highs as the king of Java development environments.
But recently, Netbeans (mostly because of the strong improvements to Swing) has made extrodinarily amazing gains in performance and functionality and is garnering attention from multiple technology critics, fairing well in comparison to Eclipse. Netbeans is now a viable competitor to Eclipse, possibly about even in developer mindshare. Eclipse vs. Netbeans is now the next Java holy war. Swing, once all but considered dead, is now extremely healthy and alive.
I have recently read a few forum postings and blog postings which say something to the effect that "Sun was right" to stick with Swing and that "IBM was wrong" to keep pushing on SWT. The comparison has primarily come from recent perceived performance problems in the latest versions of Eclipse, as well as the inability for Eclipse to run on all platforms as well as Netbeans. Swing has made significant improvements in the last two major Java versions; at this point, for most applications, it's as good as native applications.
In all this, what seems to be easily forgotten is that IBM was "right" to make the decisions that they did. At the time, AWT/Swing was just not viable. If Sun had been more cooperative with IBM, then perhaps SWT wouldn't exist. SWT has created good competition that Swing has been forced to mature quickly. And, fundamentally this is a good thing!
The competition between IBM and Sun has only pushed Java forward in a positive direction. Another example is the recent open source release of the Java framework. Previously, the Java source code was only available under a fairly restrictive license, but again due to pressure from other competitive sources (IBM, Redhat, Microsoft, Oracle), Sun has gotten all the parties to the table in order to open source Java in a GPL derivative license. The healthy Inter-platform Java competition has again benefited the Java ecosystem as a whole.
Ultimately, my hat goes off to the good folks at both IBM and Sun. I believe it's because of both their efforts (among many countless other organizations not even mentioned here) that Java is truly a fantastic environment to create a whole host of applications. I hope that the lesson learned is that free market values and the competitive spirit does indeed work to create better products. The gift of Java is a great example of this competitive and innovative spirit.
- Swing vs. SWT
- Netbeans vs. Eclipse
- Sun vs. IBM
The following is mostly my own guess as to how things have gone down with the Java platform. I'm guessing that most of what I've written here is seemingly accurate, though undoubtedly there are some mistakes in the timeline and/or motivations of the interested parties. I believe this is close enough to the truth to be acceptable for the point I'm attempting to make.
From a likely naive read of Java history, it seems obvious to me that the competition between companies like IBM and Sun over the Java platform has strengthened the platform as a whole, created new options, more mature APIs, and has eventually lead to the opening of the Java source code by Sun in 2007.
For example, when IBM started to look at Java's AWT (Abstract Window Toolkit) graphic framework, improvements needed to be made to provide better fidelity with the native operating system underneath. AWT was basically judged as unacceptable by IBM for use in the development of its Visual Age IDE. AWT was clunky and lacked many features, and as such, IBM chose to develop its own windowing toolkit which did not rely on AWT and provided for better native OS integration. IBM came out with SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) which, unlike AWT, had native renderings for the various graphic interface windowing components. SWT was fast and looked native.
Meanwhile, Sun pushed forward on the development of AWT by creating Swing, a light-weight layer sitting atop the AWT framework. With Swing, Java developers would have a very consistent API to developing moderately decent looking graphic user interfaces. Even with Swing though, IBM was not satisfied and was instead seeing great strides being made in its SWT platform, both in terms of functionality and performance. IBM stuck with SWT and Swing development slowed, mostly due to legitimate and fundamental criticisms over Swing (slow, kludgey, non-native rendering). IBM had picked the right horse to bet on, at least for the time being.
Today however, that perspective of the "right horse" is changing. A comparison is being made between the Eclipse and Netbeans IDEs (Integrated Development Environment) developed by IBM and Sun respectively. Netbeans, being based on Swing, has largely suffered from the original criticisms leveled against Swing, while Eclipse has been left rolling on highs as the king of Java development environments.
But recently, Netbeans (mostly because of the strong improvements to Swing) has made extrodinarily amazing gains in performance and functionality and is garnering attention from multiple technology critics, fairing well in comparison to Eclipse. Netbeans is now a viable competitor to Eclipse, possibly about even in developer mindshare. Eclipse vs. Netbeans is now the next Java holy war. Swing, once all but considered dead, is now extremely healthy and alive.
I have recently read a few forum postings and blog postings which say something to the effect that "Sun was right" to stick with Swing and that "IBM was wrong" to keep pushing on SWT. The comparison has primarily come from recent perceived performance problems in the latest versions of Eclipse, as well as the inability for Eclipse to run on all platforms as well as Netbeans. Swing has made significant improvements in the last two major Java versions; at this point, for most applications, it's as good as native applications.
In all this, what seems to be easily forgotten is that IBM was "right" to make the decisions that they did. At the time, AWT/Swing was just not viable. If Sun had been more cooperative with IBM, then perhaps SWT wouldn't exist. SWT has created good competition that Swing has been forced to mature quickly. And, fundamentally this is a good thing!
The competition between IBM and Sun has only pushed Java forward in a positive direction. Another example is the recent open source release of the Java framework. Previously, the Java source code was only available under a fairly restrictive license, but again due to pressure from other competitive sources (IBM, Redhat, Microsoft, Oracle), Sun has gotten all the parties to the table in order to open source Java in a GPL derivative license. The healthy Inter-platform Java competition has again benefited the Java ecosystem as a whole.
Ultimately, my hat goes off to the good folks at both IBM and Sun. I believe it's because of both their efforts (among many countless other organizations not even mentioned here) that Java is truly a fantastic environment to create a whole host of applications. I hope that the lesson learned is that free market values and the competitive spirit does indeed work to create better products. The gift of Java is a great example of this competitive and innovative spirit.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Python Wins
It's official... Python is now the official web application language of the future. For many many years, we've had an intense battle for the hearts of the multitudes of web application developers. While the battle is still being fought, and likely many on the battlefield will disagree, the winner is now decisively clear.
Recently, Google announced the creation of an "App Engine," which is a highly scalable web application framework. The App Engine allows developers to plug into Google's infrastructure to provide highly scalable and reliable hosting for the application environment.
Amazon should probably be considered the first mover in this field of usable and scalable developer infrastructure resources, with such services as EC2, S3, etc. Google too has had a strong role in offering APIs and other remote interfaces into their environment.
But, now it's game over. The writing is on the wall. Web hosting providers should know their time has come to an end.
As an extremely small web host and web application programmer, I've enjoyed a steady flow of income hosting websites and small web applications for various businesses. I've hosted on my own dedicated (leased) servers mostly out of necessity. It is much easier to provide custom services on my own platform than trying to use someone else's nickel-and-dime hosting provider. I install the tools I need, get the database running, essentially everything I need is available to do what I need to do quickly.
Awhile ago (a few years?), Google announced their "Google Apps" service (of which the App Engine will be a part), which is a broad set of useful services for businesses, including email hosting (through GMail), documents, calendars, etc. Google Apps allows the use of custom domains, so for example, my adamtaft.com email is routed through Google Apps / GMail. (Works great by the way, which is another future blog posting).
Included in Google Apps is a quite lame web page hosting service, called Google Pages. I checked out the service when it first arrived, and basically came to the realization that it was just a toy for the tweens, not really ready or equipped for a full service website or web application. It reminded me of other free hosting providers, like geocities or the like.
I knew it would happen though... I knew eventually Google would offer a total and complete web application environment such that would be useful under the Google Apps umbrella and provide the missing server side programming traditional of web hosting provides. The App Engine offers 500 MB of storage for free, and apparently 5 million page views per month (how that translates into actual bandwidth, I don't know). The data storage resides on Google's cloud (GFS / BigTable), so you can expect the same scalability and reliability as Google search has itself.
What does all this mean? It means the end is near and that Google will now begin to take a lion's share of web hosting away from small web hosting services. And, because of the fact that the App Engine supports Python (at least for now, likely other languages on the way), it makes a strong case towards knowing and developing future projects in the various Python environments. In fact, Google ships a version of Django (a Python based web application environment) with their App Engine SDK. (note, all python libraries are not available, but most of those which are useful for web application development are)
I've known for a long time I want to be out of the business of actually maintaining the hosting servers; it's a pain for a small guy like myself. So, from my point of view, this is fantastic news. Now I can concentrate on providing actual value added services to my clients (i.e. actual billable hours) instead of constantly needing to work on the maintenance of the infrastructure itself.
Ruby on Rails, Java, .NET, PHP, Perl... These are all great web application environments. I know quite a bit about a few of them (I'm obviously a Java fan boy). But clearly, I have neglected Python for too long now. The wake up call is here. I'm just glad I hear the alarm going off.
Recently, Google announced the creation of an "App Engine," which is a highly scalable web application framework. The App Engine allows developers to plug into Google's infrastructure to provide highly scalable and reliable hosting for the application environment.
Amazon should probably be considered the first mover in this field of usable and scalable developer infrastructure resources, with such services as EC2, S3, etc. Google too has had a strong role in offering APIs and other remote interfaces into their environment.
But, now it's game over. The writing is on the wall. Web hosting providers should know their time has come to an end.
As an extremely small web host and web application programmer, I've enjoyed a steady flow of income hosting websites and small web applications for various businesses. I've hosted on my own dedicated (leased) servers mostly out of necessity. It is much easier to provide custom services on my own platform than trying to use someone else's nickel-and-dime hosting provider. I install the tools I need, get the database running, essentially everything I need is available to do what I need to do quickly.
Awhile ago (a few years?), Google announced their "Google Apps" service (of which the App Engine will be a part), which is a broad set of useful services for businesses, including email hosting (through GMail), documents, calendars, etc. Google Apps allows the use of custom domains, so for example, my adamtaft.com email is routed through Google Apps / GMail. (Works great by the way, which is another future blog posting).
Included in Google Apps is a quite lame web page hosting service, called Google Pages. I checked out the service when it first arrived, and basically came to the realization that it was just a toy for the tweens, not really ready or equipped for a full service website or web application. It reminded me of other free hosting providers, like geocities or the like.
I knew it would happen though... I knew eventually Google would offer a total and complete web application environment such that would be useful under the Google Apps umbrella and provide the missing server side programming traditional of web hosting provides. The App Engine offers 500 MB of storage for free, and apparently 5 million page views per month (how that translates into actual bandwidth, I don't know). The data storage resides on Google's cloud (GFS / BigTable), so you can expect the same scalability and reliability as Google search has itself.
What does all this mean? It means the end is near and that Google will now begin to take a lion's share of web hosting away from small web hosting services. And, because of the fact that the App Engine supports Python (at least for now, likely other languages on the way), it makes a strong case towards knowing and developing future projects in the various Python environments. In fact, Google ships a version of Django (a Python based web application environment) with their App Engine SDK. (note, all python libraries are not available, but most of those which are useful for web application development are)
I've known for a long time I want to be out of the business of actually maintaining the hosting servers; it's a pain for a small guy like myself. So, from my point of view, this is fantastic news. Now I can concentrate on providing actual value added services to my clients (i.e. actual billable hours) instead of constantly needing to work on the maintenance of the infrastructure itself.
Ruby on Rails, Java, .NET, PHP, Perl... These are all great web application environments. I know quite a bit about a few of them (I'm obviously a Java fan boy). But clearly, I have neglected Python for too long now. The wake up call is here. I'm just glad I hear the alarm going off.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Ogden Fire on Jefferson St.
Early Friday morning at about 5:00am, my wife and I were awakened to a hoard of sirens, both police cars and fire engines. It's not unusual for a police chase to occur in our neighborhood; in fact, we have come to expect the semi-regular sirens and various events as living in Ogden seems to come with certain "privileges." However, this was different; there was much more noticeable emergency response traffic. My wife and I were like "what is going on?"
I get up and look out the front window and notice a few police cars up at the corner. Next I look out the kitchen window on the side of the house, and note that the amount of ambient light is greater than normal for the dark hour. My neighbor's house was lit up differently than it normally would be. "That's weird," I thought to myself. I thought maybe they had installed a new outdoor light.
I follow the light source to see a ridiculously huge blaze, flames reaching a good 3-4 stories in the air, and immediately knew someone's house was on fire. I didn't have my contacts in, so I couldn't make out exactly whose house, but it was close, less than 50 yards. I assumed a close neighbor's house, off the back of our property, that was currently unoccupied.
I hollered at my wife to come and look, then scrambled to put my contacts in, and shoes and coat on. I grabbed the video camera and headed outside. The house in question was not the abandoned one that is closer to our property on the back. It was, instead, one house further up the street.
Tragically, this home was occupied by an elder lady, age 74. We hadn't seen her for awhile, so Jess and I both hoped that the house was empty and that the woman might be living with a relative or in a nursing care facility. With the size of the blaze, there was no chance that anyone could have survived if they hadn't gotten out immediately.
Indeed, after the fire was put out, the fire fighters found the body of the elderly woman living in the house. From the looks of it, apparently she was very close to getting to the front door. She was in a wheel chair, however, and so I assume this likely slowed her exit. The amount of smoke, or so I can imagine, would have been been extremely difficult to deal with if constrained to a wheel chair.
The home is a complete loss. The family of the woman obviously very shocked. Overall, it was a very tragic and unfortunate event that you could only pray to never have happen to you or your loved ones.
So, that's the story. But I have another reason for writing today...
I mentioned that I grabbed my video camera and started filming the blaze from our back yard. I did this originally just of interest to me; I've been trying to video record various novel events just as some sort of family diary. Only after the day had broke and all the news crews arrived that I thought the video might bring value to the news community as whole.
For class, I've been reading the book The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. The short summary of the book is in basically how the walls of global economic barriers are being broken by technologies like the internet. How the world is being "flattened" by various forces allowing a level of human equality, particularly in the competitive global marketplace, to exist that the world has never known.
A good example of the flat world is with regards to the media and the sources of our news. The blogosphere has become an extremely important aspect to our news, enabling any Joe Schmoe to be a self-contained media company and trustworthy news source.
I strongly believe that news in the future will, in fact, have a stronger active community tone to it. Originally, I'm sure the Associated Press was more accepting of independent news journalists. I know independents can still get published, but it's much harder today, and really there has been a lock down in the news distribution channels such that the community feel of local news has more or less gone away. The local news organizations, newspapers and TV, still portray a "local" feel, and I believe they honestly try to represent and serve the community. But, I also believe these local news organizations have seen the writing on the wall and know their time is coming to an end. The new flat world reporters, local bloggers, podcasters and video bloggers, are ultimately going to drive the news of the future.
The only hope I can see is for the traditional news organizations to partner with local bloggers, basically lending their name and distribution networks to the small independent voices. With the potential of so many voices, it becomes as important a role to sort the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. In the future, this will be the role that media companies are relegated to. They are already adept at making these kinds of content decisions, but in the future, the sources of news will originate from the independent blogosphere and not dominantly from their own resource pool.
I thought it would be interesting to see which news stations would use my video in their reports, particularly under my explicit requirement that they give attribution for the video's source. I spoke with the reporters from Fox 13, KSL 5, and KUTV 2, all of them were interested in possibly using the video in their spots. I got their email addresses and sent a link to the video which I had already uploaded to my hosting server. I gave the exact requirement that they must include a small attribution "Courtesy Adam Taft" on or under the video if they decided to use it.
The video was honestly not worth any money. It's not like I could have marketed it in any way. It was just a typical local camcorder recording, shaky and jittery, bad lighting, poorly framed, etc. But, even if it was perfect and I could have sold it, I wouldn't because of my somewhat utopian belief that we should all be responsible for contributing to the local news and that we should never give up the independent voice or leave all our news content in the hands of a select few corporations.
Out of the three news organizations that I sent the video to, only one of them used it in their report. Fox 13 news (our local Fox news affiliate) used a good portion of the video, probably a good 4-5 seconds of it. You can view the report, made by reporter Kirk Yuhnke, here:
http://www.myfoxutah.com/myfox/pages/ContentDetail?contentId=6156896
I was very happy with the outcome of my experiment. It's hard to say why the other two news stations decided not to use the video. Perhaps, since it was shot from the back of the house, it's hard to authenticate that the burning house in the video is the same as the one in the story. Or perhaps, there was concern over the footage being perceived as too violent given the tragedy of the situation. Of course the quality was poor too.
I tend to think, however, that the notion of the flat world might have something to do with it. Fox News in general seems to be more on the "edge" and possibly more accepting of the changing world, while the other two organizations definitely feel more conservative and traditional. Maybe they just don't "get" it.
I wonder if the requirement to give attribution for the video put them off. I hope it did...
I hope it gives them a wake up call that their world is going to quickly change, and that local independent voices are rising up. Either they join us, or we leave them behind.
I get up and look out the front window and notice a few police cars up at the corner. Next I look out the kitchen window on the side of the house, and note that the amount of ambient light is greater than normal for the dark hour. My neighbor's house was lit up differently than it normally would be. "That's weird," I thought to myself. I thought maybe they had installed a new outdoor light.
I follow the light source to see a ridiculously huge blaze, flames reaching a good 3-4 stories in the air, and immediately knew someone's house was on fire. I didn't have my contacts in, so I couldn't make out exactly whose house, but it was close, less than 50 yards. I assumed a close neighbor's house, off the back of our property, that was currently unoccupied.
I hollered at my wife to come and look, then scrambled to put my contacts in, and shoes and coat on. I grabbed the video camera and headed outside. The house in question was not the abandoned one that is closer to our property on the back. It was, instead, one house further up the street.
Tragically, this home was occupied by an elder lady, age 74. We hadn't seen her for awhile, so Jess and I both hoped that the house was empty and that the woman might be living with a relative or in a nursing care facility. With the size of the blaze, there was no chance that anyone could have survived if they hadn't gotten out immediately.
Indeed, after the fire was put out, the fire fighters found the body of the elderly woman living in the house. From the looks of it, apparently she was very close to getting to the front door. She was in a wheel chair, however, and so I assume this likely slowed her exit. The amount of smoke, or so I can imagine, would have been been extremely difficult to deal with if constrained to a wheel chair.
The home is a complete loss. The family of the woman obviously very shocked. Overall, it was a very tragic and unfortunate event that you could only pray to never have happen to you or your loved ones.
So, that's the story. But I have another reason for writing today...
I mentioned that I grabbed my video camera and started filming the blaze from our back yard. I did this originally just of interest to me; I've been trying to video record various novel events just as some sort of family diary. Only after the day had broke and all the news crews arrived that I thought the video might bring value to the news community as whole.
For class, I've been reading the book The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. The short summary of the book is in basically how the walls of global economic barriers are being broken by technologies like the internet. How the world is being "flattened" by various forces allowing a level of human equality, particularly in the competitive global marketplace, to exist that the world has never known.
A good example of the flat world is with regards to the media and the sources of our news. The blogosphere has become an extremely important aspect to our news, enabling any Joe Schmoe to be a self-contained media company and trustworthy news source.
I strongly believe that news in the future will, in fact, have a stronger active community tone to it. Originally, I'm sure the Associated Press was more accepting of independent news journalists. I know independents can still get published, but it's much harder today, and really there has been a lock down in the news distribution channels such that the community feel of local news has more or less gone away. The local news organizations, newspapers and TV, still portray a "local" feel, and I believe they honestly try to represent and serve the community. But, I also believe these local news organizations have seen the writing on the wall and know their time is coming to an end. The new flat world reporters, local bloggers, podcasters and video bloggers, are ultimately going to drive the news of the future.
The only hope I can see is for the traditional news organizations to partner with local bloggers, basically lending their name and distribution networks to the small independent voices. With the potential of so many voices, it becomes as important a role to sort the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. In the future, this will be the role that media companies are relegated to. They are already adept at making these kinds of content decisions, but in the future, the sources of news will originate from the independent blogosphere and not dominantly from their own resource pool.
I thought it would be interesting to see which news stations would use my video in their reports, particularly under my explicit requirement that they give attribution for the video's source. I spoke with the reporters from Fox 13, KSL 5, and KUTV 2, all of them were interested in possibly using the video in their spots. I got their email addresses and sent a link to the video which I had already uploaded to my hosting server. I gave the exact requirement that they must include a small attribution "Courtesy Adam Taft" on or under the video if they decided to use it.
The video was honestly not worth any money. It's not like I could have marketed it in any way. It was just a typical local camcorder recording, shaky and jittery, bad lighting, poorly framed, etc. But, even if it was perfect and I could have sold it, I wouldn't because of my somewhat utopian belief that we should all be responsible for contributing to the local news and that we should never give up the independent voice or leave all our news content in the hands of a select few corporations.
Out of the three news organizations that I sent the video to, only one of them used it in their report. Fox 13 news (our local Fox news affiliate) used a good portion of the video, probably a good 4-5 seconds of it. You can view the report, made by reporter Kirk Yuhnke, here:
http://www.myfoxutah.com/myfox/pages/ContentDetail?contentId=6156896
I was very happy with the outcome of my experiment. It's hard to say why the other two news stations decided not to use the video. Perhaps, since it was shot from the back of the house, it's hard to authenticate that the burning house in the video is the same as the one in the story. Or perhaps, there was concern over the footage being perceived as too violent given the tragedy of the situation. Of course the quality was poor too.
I tend to think, however, that the notion of the flat world might have something to do with it. Fox News in general seems to be more on the "edge" and possibly more accepting of the changing world, while the other two organizations definitely feel more conservative and traditional. Maybe they just don't "get" it.
I wonder if the requirement to give attribution for the video put them off. I hope it did...
I hope it gives them a wake up call that their world is going to quickly change, and that local independent voices are rising up. Either they join us, or we leave them behind.
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