Edd Dumbill's Weblog: 'web' articles

Gandi's VM hosting beta now closed to new users

2008-06-12T13:20:08Z

I've been experimenting with Gandi's virtual hosting service recently. In fact, this blog is now hosted on it.

Gandi have created by far the easiest hosting service I've used. The web interface allows you to buy credit, create pre-installed virtual machines and log in, all in under 15 minutes. Add the ease of Ubuntu to the mix (just one of the preinstalled images you can choose from), and commissioning times for new services are low indeed.

The hosting service is based on Xen, and allows you to dynamically change the resources your VMs can access (CPU/memory/disk), on a scheduled basis if required. It has an API which provides enough functionality for you to white-label hosting as part of your own web app.

Excerpt from Gandi's explanation of the amount of resource you can allocate to a virtual machine

Gandi's service isn't yet as flexible as Amazon's EC2, but it comes at the problem from the other end — its initial offering "just works" as an alternative hosting solution, with the added flexibility their Xen infrastructure brings to the mix. Even with all its tool support, Amazon EC2 feels like stepping into an alternate universe. I'm pretty excited about the directions in which Gandi's service will develop.

And yes, now I've told you all this, unfortunately you can't yet play with the beta service if you've not got an account already. The initial success means Gandi are closing new signups for a little time to concentrate on improving their infrastructure.

The good news is that Gandi say this is the final step before the full release of the system. I can't wait! It's so good to see innovative, high-quality internet solutions coming from Europe.

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Badges, blogging and bragging

2008-05-23T14:32:11Z

Back from my travels, it's time for a few updates. I've mostly blogged about these elsewhere, so I'll just give some pointers here.

The launch of magnetic-stripe cards at Where 2.0 went well.

We had some initial teething issues with Linux talking to the card printers, which was resolved by backing down to Linux kernel 2.6.22 from 2.6.24. I'm not entirely sure what's up with 2.6.24, but it exhibited strange behavior talking to the card printers over ethernet — as if there were MTU misconfigurations. It's a big nuisance, as 2.6.24 is the default kernel shipped with Ubuntu Hardy, an otherwise excellent release.

I've been paying some attention to OpenID 2.0 recently, as it's time for me to upgrade my OpenID accepting websites to use the new release of the specification — if for no other reason than Yahoo! OpenIDs are 2.0-only.

This investigation led me to notice XRIs again, which are the confusing underbelly of the OpenID specs. The W3C Technical Architecture Group recently advised against using XRIs. I wrote about this over on my XML.com blog.

I've not used for that blog for a long time, but will try to do so more. I've realized that I've still got a lot to say about the web, XML and open standards, and the XML.com blog seems like a good place to say it.

Finally, to brag for a short moment. Another XTech has been and gone, and this year's was a great experience for everybody involved. This quote from attendee Paul Smith summed things up nicely, as it tells me I succeeded in my main goal for the conference:

What I really liked about this conference was the mix of attendees and presenters, both from academia, and the commercial world both and small. It made it feel much more valid, and it really felt like everyone was there for the right reasons - not trying to sell anything, but out of a genuinely altruistic wish to make the web better.

My sincere thanks to everybody involved in XTech this year.

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Zonbu: an intersection of open source, Web 2.0 and energy efficiency

2007-08-04T13:33:26Z

Salon.com recently reviewed Zonbu, a highly compact general-purpose computer with no moving parts.

Zonbu's key features are its incredibly low power consumption, network-connected storage and that it works right out of the box without any installation. Under the covers, it's a Gentoo Linux installation with mainstream open source apps such as OpenOffice and Firefox.

Zonbu and its skins — high-powered dressing for a low-power device

Price-wise, you can get the Zonbu for as little as $99 if you commit to two years' subscription to the network storage. Understanding the open source ethos, Zonbu also offer the box without any tether for $250. As with the Mac mini, supplying the keyboard, mouse and monitor is up to you.

Preloaded with an office suite, email, IM, web browser, multimedia player, games and Skype, Zonbu is aimed at being a general computing appliance. You can't install anything else on it, but then again, that way you can't break it easily either. It sounds the sort of thing I'd be happy leaving with non-technical family and friends.

Storage with Amazon S3

Low-power solid state devices are nothing new of course, there are a variety available, and things such as the NSLU2 have been in production for some years. The novel thing about the Zonbu however is in how it manages its storage.

The Zonbu has 4GB of compact flash storage on board, which it uses as a cache for Amazon's S3 storage network. All your files get encrypted and sent to S3, and are retrieved when you need them. One really neat consequence of this is that you can get at your data via the web any time you want.

Secondly, it gives me some sense of security for my data. I don't know if Zonbu will give me the 'keys' to my data on S3, but it wouldn't be hard for them to provide an easy way to migrate out. Either way, S3 is a place I'd trust with my data.

Why Zonbu is important

Windows, and to some extent, Mac OS X, are becoming the needy children of computing, always tugging on your arm and asking you something. In contrast, Zonbu looks like a great step towards "appliance computing". Its features are more like those you'd expect from your phone or cable TV provider:

it's a black-box appliance that users don't need to care about, with little or no vulnerability to malware
the real value of the product is in the network
the system is upgraded as part of the subscription

Zonbu has the potential to change domestic computing. The low price point lowers the barrier to computer ownership. Low maintenance needs lower the technical barrier to entry and use. And Zonbu's a green and economical technology, yet as useful as the full power version.

As a company, I feel Zonbu to be a well-intentioned player because of their strong support for open source, and the ease with which you can get at your data despite its appliance nature. I hope they continue to develop in this open data direction.

Zonbu itself probably won't attain ubiquity, but it will change the marketplace and open up a new category of network-connected appliances for the home.

Launching Expectnation

2007-06-01T17:13:00Z

I'm very pleased to announce the launch of Expectnation, a web application for managing conferences.

What does it do?

Expectnation is intended to replace the ad-hoc collection of emails, spreadsheets, documents and hacks that hold together the organization of most conferences. The aim is to improve the quality and reliability of communication between the organizers, speakers and attendees.

But it doesn't stop there. What I'm really excited about is the chance to enhance the conference experience through the web. Expectnation is capable of managing the complete web site for a conference, which provides many opportunities for bringing the best of the social software world to augment events.

Our tagline is "build your conference into a community", which underpins a key aim: to help organizers make events more relevant and useful to attendees, and to live on beyond the event itself. We do this in two ways: saving time, so you can spend it on improving your conference, and providing online tools to support community building.

Right now Expectnation is able to manage the proposal, review, scheduling and publication of presentations, along with the conference web site and smart emailing to speakers, reviewers and chairs. Over the next two months we'll be introducing our registration module, with optional online payments, and working on extending the social software features available for attendees.

Take a look

I'm really excited about letting users get started with Expectnation, and seeing the uses it gets put to. We believe Expectnation will be just as handy for organizing events inside an organization as for traditional conferences.

So, if you organize, speak at, or attend conferences of any sort, please check out Expectnation and recommend it to a conference organizer near you!

Related links

Expectnation tour complete with screenshots
Previous posts I've written about Expectnation
XTech 2007 was completely managed inside Expectnation

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Up close and personal at XTech

2007-05-11T17:59:05Z

It's been a long time since I last wrote, mostly because we've been pulling out all the stops for XTech.

Next week is set to be stimulating and challenging. I'm amazed at the collection of thinkers and innovators we've drawn together, and am looking forward to getting a boost of energy and inspiration from the conference.

Browser summit

On Tuesday next week, Molly Holzschlag and I are sponsoring a Web Browser, Standards and Interop Summit. This is an opportunity for browser vendors, standards advocates, W3C and related standards supporters to talk in a vendor (and standards-body) neutral atmosphere about tackling the problem of browser interoperability.

As the full announcement mentions, we're also throwing open the doors to interested bloggers and journalists to get involved in and cover the discussion.

The summit came about after Molly and I got talking about our desire to provide a forum for effective exchange between the people shaping the future of HTML. This is something that spawned the vision of the Browser Track and XTech in the first place three years ago.

I don't know how much we'll solve at the first summit, but it puts down a marker and a challenge for participation. I am not the only one concerned at the increasing fragmentation of the HTML landscape, the breakdown in communication, and the ultimate ill-effects for web developers and users.

Personal scheduler and evaluations

As my conference software Expectnation nears its public launch, we'll be using some of its fun features at XTech. Normally, the bulk of the work is done behind the scenes, so it's nice to have a feature to show off to attendees and the wider public.

The personal scheduling feature lets you compose your own timetable for the conference, just by clicking on the stars throughout the schedule. As a bonus, you can subscribe to your personal schedule as iCal, allowing you to take it with you on your phone or PDA.

In addition, we'll be allowing attendees to submit evaluations of sessions online. If you're using the personal scheduler, it gets even neater as you can quickly find links to submit your evaluations, and review ones you've already submitted.

Behind the scenes, I can see which sessions are the most popular and get advance warning if we're likely to need to move rooms to avoid overcrowding.

I'm pretty excited about this. Features like this aren't exactly new, but now we've made them a standard feature for every conference. We're looking forward to adding more social software facilities to enhance the conference experience.

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JavaScript frameworks, new heroes of the web

2006-12-14T12:59:08Z

Makers of Dojo, Prototype, jQuery and Mochikit, I salute you.

It is immensely gratifying that there are those with the courage and sense to make JavaScript in the browser workable for the rest of us. Like many busy developers, I've steered myself away from hacking JavaScript for many years. Cross-browser incompatibilities, the troubles of debugging and the relatively small reward for effort have kept me focusing on the server side (not to mention the temptation JavaScript poses to those prone to stray from the REST religion).

This is now starting to change. The immense efforts of JavaScript developers are providing frameworks that allow developers to work on the client side with something approaching the elegance and concision that we can now wield on the server side.

One of the wonderful things about the web is that it has become the forum for its own improvement. JavaScript has ensured that this is now true of the browser too. New techniques can be proved in script before they ever need baking into a markup language.

Even the most ardent of declarative programming hacks will appreciate the way toolkits such as jQuery allow painting of behaviour onto pages rather than littering semantic markup with snippets of script.

The problem that faces us now is: which JavaScript framework to choose?

As is my habit in programming languages, I've found myself move from framework to framework depending on the actual tools available. Starting off in Prototype as it came with Rails, paying a happy visit to jQuery because of Thickbox, considering Dojo because of its rich text editor, and now being wowed by Plotkit and thus checking out Mochikit.

So, here's an idea for aspiring XTech presenters: we'd love to hear more about these toolkits. Experiences, future plans for the kits themselves, and how developers should choose between them.

XTech 2007 call for participation. Closes this weekend, so hurry!

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Afraid of the POX?

2006-12-11T16:34:12Z

The other day I had was tinkering with that cute little poster child of Web 2.0, Flickr. Looking for a lightweight way to incorporate some photos into a web site, I headed to their feeds page to find some XML to use.

Before you read on, don't forget that the XTech 2007 call for participation ends this week.

The result was interesting. Flickr have a variety of outputs in RSS dialects, but you just can't get at the raw data using XML. The bookmarking service del.icio.us is another case in point. My friend Matt Biddulph recently had to resort to screenscraping in order to write his tag stemmer, until some kind soul pointed out there's a JSON feed.

Both of these services support XML output, but only with the semantics crammed awkwardly into RSS or Atom. Neither have plain XML for public consumption (some is available behind a registration protected API), but do support serialization via other formats. We don't really have "XML on the Web". We have RSS on the web, plus a bunch of mostly JSON and YAML for those who didn't care for pointy brackets.

Did we as supporters of XML get it wrong somehow? I think we did. The success of the XML project and the W3C as a unifying forum was seductive, and we felt more bound to the edicts of the W3C than we thought. Our justified love of open standards inadvertently promoted a straitjacketed approach to using XML. XML was felt to need a schema language.

What we missed was that settling on schemas for data serialization represented much more of an up-front commitment than most developers could really make. The rise of agile programming techniques further emphasizes the hazards of prematurely freezing a design.

Schemas never really came with great evolution or migration strategies.
And of course it didn't help that both DTDs and W3C XML Schema are pretty darn obscure. Somehow we never got the word out, despite the "standalone" XML declaration, that it's OK to spread schema-less XML around.

We had of course the Simple XML movement, but it came to little. Other voices pointed the way forward. Walter Perry notably promoted an agenda that required little a priori agreement between communicators, but it gained little ground in common thought. Ironically it took James Clark to push the agenda of developer convenience, with the RELAX NG compact syntax giving us all permission not to think in angle brackets.

Meanwhile, busy developers with work to do on the web have created non-XML syntaxes such as JSON and YAML. Though I deliberately closeted myself in XML for a long time, I have come to appreciate the utility of these syntaxes.

One of the more intriguing developments is that the Semantic Web crowd, while still very much W3C oriented, have really proved themselves more flexible in their attitude than the XML world at large. RDF/XML is hardly the only acceptable way to approach the throne of Tim, and the man himself threw out XML syntax pretty early on with the development of the N3 scribble format. More recently, the work on GRDDL to scrape semantics from HTML has shown the semweb folks' amenability to outside initiatives such as microformats.

Maybe it's not such a bad world, as making an XML mapping of YAML, JSON and friends isn't really very hard. I'd just like to get the message out to web application developers that Plain Old XML is fine by me. I live in hope yet that the rise of REST will hit this home.

So while markup has most definitely won on the web, it's a shame XML hasn't yet achieved as much as it could. It's not too late for an injection of pragmatism and a little less constraint.

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The best of XTech 2006

2006-10-04T16:25:40Z

As I'm finalising the call for participation for XTech 2007 (15-18 May 2007, Paris, France), I've taken a look back at the some of the best received presentations from the 2006 conference. I thought them well worth sharing again here.

To be sure of hearing about the call for participation and other XTech 2007 news, sign up for the newsletter or keep an eye on this blog.

Native to a Web of Data: Designing a part of the Aggregate Web
Tom Coates (Yahoo!)

What are the architectural elements of the emerging web of data; how do you build services to thrive in this environment? What needs to change and what needs to return to fundamental principles? How do we bring it all together to make something awesome?

Read Suw Charman's report of this talk

An open (data) can of worms
Paul Hammond (Yahoo!, ex-BBC)

Open data is not a panacea, and presents as many questions as answers. Technology can only solve some of these issues, this presentation outlines some of the other, more fundamental, problems.

Read Suw Charman's report of this talk

Etna, a WYSIWYG XML RELAX NG and Gecko-based editor
Daniel Glazman (Disruptive Innovations)

A presentation of the new WYSIWYG XML editor based on Gecko, and its underlying implementation of RELAX NG.

Read the full paper

How American are startups?
Paul Graham (Y Combinator)

Startups are largely an American phenomenon. Why? What is it about America that makes startups work there? Could Silicon Valley be replicated in another country?

Written up as two essays:

The power of declarative thinking
Steven Pemberton (W3C/CWI)

This talk discussed the requirements for Web Applications, and the underpinnings necessary to make Web Applications follow in the same spirit that engendered the Web in the first place.

Read Pemberton's slides

RDF/A: The Easy Way to Publish Your Metadata
Mark Birbeck (x-port.net Ltd.)

RDF/A is a new, and simpler, way of adding metadata to documents, in such a way that the document contains its own metadata--making it easy to turn a home page into a FoaF file or RSS feed.

Read full paper

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Places I'll be: Carson Summit, XTech, RailsConf

2006-02-06T20:51:03Z

The conference season starts again. Here are a few pointers to places where I'll be over the next few months.

Carson Summit on the Future of Web Apps

I'm really impressed with the group of folks that Ryan Carson's got together for this event. The emphasis on "lessons learned" is important to me, so I look forward to hearing more.

There's also a great connection in the topic with an article I wrote in October 1999, XML Inter-Application Protocols, in which I rave about applications moving to the web, the need for open standards, and the important role of XML in that through RSS and web services. All the stuff we're still just figuring out how to use! 7 February 2006, London.

XTech 2006

Being the conference chair I'm biased on this one, but it's safe to say that it's going to be an amazing event. Keynotes from Paul Graham, Amazon's Jeff Barr and Yahoo's Jeffrey McManus. Paper reviewing has just ended so next week we hope to publish a provisional conference schedule. 16-19 May 2006, Amsterdam.

RailsConf

Very excited to be going to the first ever Rails conference. I submitted a proposal, about which I've not yet heard. Being one of 80 such proposals, it looks like the competition's tough, but I'll be there whether speaking or not.

Though I'm arriving on June 21, I'm not booked in for the Rails Guidebook day, so I'm open to suggestions as to activities for June 22. 22-25 June 2006, Chicago.

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Google web authoring stats: less spin please

2006-01-26T20:08:15Z

I've been looking with interest at the Google Web Authoring Statistics report, having just completed an overview for IBM developerWorks of the two contenders pushing forward on HTML, WHATWG and XHTML. A snapshot of HTML tags in use tells us a lot about the current usages of HTML and the take-up of future pathways such as XHTML.

That said, I'm quite disappointed with the ways these results have been presented.

Firstly, the report as published has no author attribution. From the writing and other sources, I am given to understand it's Ian Hickson, the prime proponent behind WHATWG, but nowhere is this made plain. A date of publication would also be useful on the document.

Secondly, the graphs are given as SVG, which is laudable, but leaves those using IE or pre-1.5 Firefox browsers out in the cold. There's nothing in the data that means they couldn't be presented as PNG images. This is simply making a statement about browsers.

Thirdly, the report mixes political viewpoints about the HTML standard in with observations about the data. The report references WHATWG's HTML5 in various places without setting it in the context of the various ways forward. Hickson's views over XHTML 1.0 and the text/html media type were presented without recognition of it at least being a contentious issue, rather than a matter of fact. If authorship were attributed, this bias could be contextualised somewhat, but as it is it can only be construed as Google's endorsement of a particular viewpoint.

Don't get me wrong, I think this survey is highly valuable and congratulate Google's staff on the work done. I enjoyed reading the commentary very much, within the context I was able to place it in.

However, I think Google needs to raise their game here, by attributing authorship and separating the editorialising from the presentation of the results. The exclusion of non-SVG capable browsers from the results is also inexcusable, and rather against the general spirit of scholarship and the web.

Fascinating and enlightening as the current report is, without some basic information such as authorship it's hard to take it seriously as an addition to the body of research on the web.

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Edd Dumbill's Weblog: 'web' articles

Gandi's VM hosting beta now closed to new users

Badges, blogging and bragging

Zonbu: an intersection of open source, Web 2.0 and energy efficiency

Storage with Amazon S3

Why Zonbu is important

Further reading

Launching Expectnation

What does it do?

Take a look

Up close and personal at XTech

Browser summit

Personal scheduler and evaluations

JavaScript frameworks, new heroes of the web

Afraid of the POX?

The best of XTech 2006

Places I'll be: Carson Summit, XTech, RailsConf

Google web authoring stats: less spin please