10.05.13

Make ShareThis “Chicklets” Look All the Same

Posted in Blogroll, News, Tech at 3:36 am by Liv

I’ve written before on my blog about ShareThis — I do love their WordPress plugin and their analytics provide some interesting insights into my blog traffic. There is however a niggly little thing which has been bugging me for a while — and it’s all to do with the way their “chicklets” look. (If you’re not familiar with the ShareThis lingo, chicklets are those bubbles with numbers in them which show you how many times a certain piece of content has been shared per channel — e.g. Twitter, Facebook etc.)

If you are like me, always in a rush to produce the content rather than customize it (in other words, don’t want to spend too much time setting up your blog and want to dedicate most of the time to actually writing “stuff”), then you probably took the same steps to install the ShareThis plugin, accepted the defaults and then enable it. Trouble is if you do that, the chicklets by default don’t have a uniform/standard look, and you probably spotted different colors and styles being used — which gives the content a bit of a messy and disorganized look.

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01.05.13

Couchbase Graph/Stats Problem?

Posted in Blogroll, News, Tech at 6:44 am by Liv

This is just something that we found recently in Cognitive Match and I thought it might help others who use Couchbase as a NoSQL store, and rely on some of their (otherwise awesome!) graphs, as it seems these can be occasionally misleading — though this is probably an edge case.

A bit of background: we use Couchbase for some of our data stores in our serving solution in Cognitive Match; the particular data that gets stored in Couchbase gets updated frequently and even more frequently it gets read, however, due to the application architecture, an “eventual consistency” approach to updating this data is fine from our app point of view, and we don’t run complex queries to retrieve the data — just simple “get” operations. And since speed in important when reading the data (and we are ok with favouring reads versus writes/updates), Couchbase works great for us.

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28.02.13

S3 Utility on SourceForge.net

Posted in Blogroll, Tech at 1:48 am by Liv

Only a day after I’ve published the S3 utility for buckets with versioning enabled, I took the time finally to put this on SourceForge — woohoo! Still early stages, as I still need to figure out really how to properly release versions into their file system, but as it stands right now at least there is a basic project page, a wiki and issue tracker — not to mention a Subversion repository with the source code.

So let’s start with the basics:

First of all, the project main page is here: https://SourceForge.net/projects/awsversionmgmt/ . This includes links to the download area: https://SourceForge.net/projects/awsversionmgmt/files/ as well the standard SourceForge issue tracking system: https://SourceForge.net/projects/awsversionmgmt/tickets/. I am still working on planning the releases for this, but for now I’ve just added a few issues I have found for the first official version of this (which would be 1.0.0 — naturally!) — if you’ve already tried this tool (unlikely, it’s only been one day since I put up the original post ), feel free to suggest some enhancements using the SourceForge tracking tool.

Also I have created a wiki here: https://SourceForge.net/projects/awsversionmgmt/wiki/. The idea behind it is to make this a dev-oriented wiki — i.e. propose upcoming features and architectures etc. And last but not least, I’ve also managed to deploy the maven-generated site on the project website: http://awsversionmgmt.SourceForge.net.

With that in mind, I think I’ve successfully manage to transfer the project to SourceForge so I’ll maintain it there — though quite likely you will see the occasional blog post here when a new milestone is reached. drop me a line if you want to get involved.

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25.02.13

First Steps with Jolokia

Posted in Blogroll, News, Tech at 2:36 am by Liv

In a (rather old) previous post I have talked about using Sun (ahem Oracle!) JMX/HTML bridge to manage and monitor your applications. As it happens, that agent has been discontinued and due to various licensing issues (I’m guessing) one can’t even download it normally from a maven repo, and has to rely on all sorts of hacks to include the required jar in the application. Also, one of the downsides of that — while a small price to pay though! — is that you have to write some code to start the agent when your app starts.

In exchange of the (rather small) piece of code that you write to start the agent, you get in exchange a fully-fledged HTML-based app which allows you to inspect and change your managed beans. The trouble with that though — while a very handy tool otherwise! — is that it provides all the data in HTML and all the requests made to the agent are HTTP GET only. This means that if you need to query one attribute of one of your beans, you will have to employ some curl-ing (eeeeassy!) and some HTML parsing (ouch!). Do-able, even more so as the agent uses very simple HTML and the structure of the pages is always the same — but a bit cumbersome at times. Also, unfortunately complex data structures cannot be set or displayed easily using that tool.

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06.02.13

melovesvideos Goes Live!

Posted in Blogroll, Fun Time, News, Tech at 9:35 pm by Liv

About 2 weeks or so ago, Amazon launched their Elastic Transcoder and at the time this has captured my attention right away — to the point where I had to go and add it to my AWS account and try it for myself. Regardless of anything else, that is an amazing tool and Amazon did a good job of creating such a simple API for such a complex task.

If you ever attempted to transfer a movie from your say mobile device to your video handset, you will find yourself quite often in movie format conversion hell — while things are getting a bit more standardized nowadays, it is still occasionally the case that some manufacturers force you to use their software / firmware / drivers to get a movie from some obscure format onto your computer and be able to play it properly. (God forbid you made the mistake of tilting the camera so you get a panoramic view — as you will find yourself watching the movie on your computer screen with your head tilted in the opposite direction, trying to make sense of it!) Or vice versa, you have a powerful handheld device that can play anything you throw at it — and your “Transformers” BluRay you just bought comes preloaded with a HD MPEG version of the movie which you can download onto your phone; however, the damn thing “weighs” about 2Gb which seems a bit too much bearing in mind you’re watching it on a 480 x 320 screen! And there’s nothing out there to help you downsize the original for a more suitable format (and size) for your handheld…

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