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Tag: technology

  • It's SQLite-Mania Time!

    Between the freshly announced Google Gears and the upcoming Firefox 3, I’m really happy to see the SQLite project picking up some massive and forefront industry momentum. And well deserved at that, since I’ve always thought it was an excellent venture in many respects, though often overlooked by the general development community.

    Firefox will use it for their upcoming Places feature, which aims to be the evolution of bookmarks and history.

    Google Gears, on the other hand, uses it for offline web app data storage. I have to say I’m getting a geeky kick out of seeing SQL queries passed directly via client-side Javascript (although as an offline app, I guess the client is the server too). And not even as a WTF post: bonus!

    Kudos to the SQLite dev team, and good call to the two latest industry icons who chose it.

    That install base sure is going to grow fast! Makes me giggle when I remember thinking that every PC would be running at least 6 different embedded copies of the tiny DB within a few years when I first played around with it, all without 99% of the end users even realizing this. I’d say we’re right on track. 🙂

    Who’s taking bets on Adobe doing the same with Apollo?

  • McGill Website Wins Silver CASE Award

    I guess we must be doing something right:

    The Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) awarded McGill University the silver medal in the Complete Institutional Web Sites category. There were 41 entries in this category, with two silver medals and one bronze medal awarded. CASE is a non-profit association encompassing 3,300 colleges, universities and elementary and secondary schools in 54 countries.

    Via McGill Announcements.

    I don’t actually know any more than this, because the details haven’t been published on the CASE web site yet. I really want to know who we tied with, knowing CASE has members such as MIT, CalTech, Harvard, etc.

    2007-06-16: The CASE web site has now been updated: Web Sites – 2007 Winners

  • Coming Soon: Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Edition

    From the source email (@ubuntu-devel-announce):

    We will start more detailed planning at the Ubuntu Developer Summit next
    week in Seville and the first release of this edition will be in October
    with Ubuntu 7.10. If you are interested in the project, please get involved.
    We will be working through our normal development processes on Launchpad,
    the developer mailing lists and IRC.

    Via Digg.

  • PHP 5.2.2 and 4.4.7 Released

    “PHP 5.2.2 and 4.4.7 have been released with a plethora of security updates. Many of the security notifications come from the Month of PHP Bugs effort, and range from double freed memory to bugs in functions that allow attackers to enable register_globals, to memory corruption with unserialize(), to input validation flaws that allow e-mail header injections, with an unhealthy sprinkling of other bugs and flaws fixed. All administrators that run any version of PHP are encouraged to update immediately.”

    Our sysadmin installed 5.2.2 on our test instances earlier today, and we’ll be testing (and closely watching for external reports) over the next few days before rolling it into production.

    Via Slashdot.

  • The Javascript Programming Language

    Yahoo! JavaScript Architect Douglas Crockford provides a comprehensive introduction to the JavaScript Programming Language in this four-part video. This is the first section of the four-part video. See below the embedded video for more links.

    Other programming videos by Douglas Crockford on Yahoo! Video:
    The JavaScript Programming Language (4 parts).
    Theory of the DOM (3 parts).
    Advanced JavaScript (3 parts).

    Via Digg.

  • parseMe 20070429 Update

    Here’s another update to parseMe (back story), my little GPL’ed PHP-based RSS/Atom feed reader for mobile phones and other web-capable devices.

    • Moved to object oriented, pretty much for the “fun” of it.
    • Now passing a custom user-agent in the http query to avoid problems with sources that require it (Digg, among others).

    You can find the appropriate links below:

    Keeps me from hating my phone until I can afford to get myself a nicer mobile solution.

  • Fedora Core 7 Test 4 Notes

    I installed FC 7 Test 4 on one of my home machines, which was previously running FC6, and it pretty much all went fine. Like with all new releases, there was a definite speed improvement in most operations.

    I personally like the new live CD installer. If nothing else, simply for the fact that you get a chance to see how the OS will behave on your new machine before you install it. It’s still ironic to me to see the major distros going to that format, because I remember how most Linux users were poking fun at the first developers to use a live cd install process (that I know of), back in 1999: the now defunct LinuxPPC distribution.

    For those interested, you can access a lot of FC7 screenshots and videos at the main wiki: Fedora 7 Tour.

    Besides the obvious changes, one that puzzled me for a while since I’m not a hardcore follower up-to-date with all the details, is that all my IDE hard drives were now showing up as /dev/sd* (historically SCSI) instead of /dev/hd*. One quote I could find on the wiki about this was: “In this release, all hard disk partitions follow a /dev/sd* naming convention due to a new libata driver interface in the kernel. The Anaconda installer eases the transition for release upgrades.”

    Another puzzler was the fact that despite choosing to setup my box with a manually assigned IP address in the install process, it was still acquiring one with DHCP at boot time. You can see this in the attached screenshot below (click for a larger view): note the discrepancy between the network config panel and the address reported by the ping command in the terminal. This continued, even after rebooting the machine or just the network (“service network restart” as root), until I issued a “ifup eth0” command as root, which made it all fine from there on.


    Trying to run FC7 Test 4 on my MacBook worked fine natively from the Live CD (no install), which did not under Test 3, but I haven’t been able to boot it while virtualized in Parallels Desktop for Mac. I haven’t tried in VMWare Fusion yet.

    The last note is quite a personal one: I much preferred the default theme (icons) in Test 3 (3D) than the ones delivered in Test 4 (2D)… The new ones make me feel like I’m back in the pre-BlueCurve years. 😉

    That’s it for me, for now. This box being mostly a file/web/db server, running on older hardware (P4 1.65Ghz), I can’t really play with compiz, which would be one of the major improvements over FC6, besides running new versions of everything.

    Update: here are a few notes form a friend who recently installed it on his shiny new Mac laptop: FC7T4 on MacBook (Core 2 Duo).

  • Fedora Core 7 Test 4 Released

    FC7 test 4 (6.93) has just been announced, right on schedule, and is now available as a torrent and on (most of) the mirrors.


    Get it while it’s hot and especially before it makes it to the Slashdot, Digg, and many other high profile front pages.

  • Web 2.0 Expo and Conference

    The O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo is just finishing up, and my co-worker and I had a blast with most of it. Working in the academic sphere, it really feels great to get first hand confirmation that we are perfectly on track with the rest of the industry with our vision of what is to come. Now, if only we were given the means to do it all as fast as we can dream it, which is always a challenge in a large public institution. But we’re working on that. 🙂

    One of the highlights of the conference for me, was to find out (confirm) how close the Digg architecture is to the one that we’ve been developing for our university for many years now: LAMP (though we use PostgreSQL), memcache, Linux, clustering, etc. They actually seem to be facing some challenges that we’ve already tamed in the last year and a half. They’re hiring, by the way.

    On the other hand, it was my first time in San Francisco (about time…), and I won’t lie: it’s even better than I imagined it would be! Truly a fantastic city, populated with wonderful people. First time, but definitely not the last one, especially given that I just don’t have the time to stay a few extra days to visit Berkeley, Oakland, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Cupertino, Mountain View, etc. Next time!

    On this, I’m going to go and enjoy the city before I have to leave tomorrow morning.

  • Google@Mcgill

    Yes! We’ve done it. McGill is now using a Google Search Appliance as its main search engine backend, which is the main reason I have been so busy in the last while.

    Despite early hardware issues and a few bugs I faced in the caching engine and XML APIs (most of which have been or are being addressed by the Google Enterprise team), I have to admit that it’s been one of the most motivating and enjoyable projects I have handled at McGill.

    You can try it out for yourself on our main search page.

    We also enabled other areas, such as our advanced course search, and classified search.

    This is of course only the tip of the iceberg, since the architecture is quasi-infinitely extensible through the feeds and OneBox concepts (both of which we already use). And as usual, I already have a head full of ideas on how to further leverage the enormous amount of digital content on campus.

    Fun times ahead!