ant0ine's blog

Finally fixed my empty Github account

I just released to Github a few things that I started coding months, if not years ago. This is about Tokyo Tyrant, RDF and Graph databases. I hope having it en Github will motivate me to hack on it again. The triplestore (TLG) is probably not usable yet, but if you're using Tokyo Tyrant with Perl, you can find useful my TokyoTyrantx::* modules. 

Devel::NYTProf is THE perl profiler

Google has to realize that Devel::NYTProf is THE perl profiler. The best, I think, is just to quote Ranguard:

"So, I'd like to talk about Perl profiling, or even profiling Perl. Devel::NYTProf doesn't make the claim that it is THE Perl profiler, but it really does seem to be the best profiler for Perl that is currently available."

OK, I'm a fan. What a voice !

Maybe I'm the last to discover Florence and the Machine (It looks like they have been at the top of the UK charts a few months ago) but in case you don't know, go listen now ! The whole album is just great.

My big news to start 2010, I'm moving to San Francisco

After five years working at the Paris office, I'm moving to San Francisco. I'll still work at Six Apart, still on TypePad, but not remotely anymore. I had the chance to fly to San Francisco a number of times before. All stays cumulated, I think I already spent six months in the city, I'm not landing to an unknown territory, but still, I think it'll be a great adventure. I can't wait to be on the plane because "closing" my Parisian life is a lot of paperwork and is not very exciting. In the real world, you can't zip all your life and upload it on the other side of the planet in a few seconds, too bad. Anyway, I'm very excited by this new experience, and I'm looking forward to see my san franciscan friends and coworkers again ! 

I'm not sure about the move date yet, Visa process in progress, stay tuned.

Quick notes on LeWeb 09

• A great opening with the conversation between Loic and Jack Dorsey. Very interesting to see how perseverant he was with his idea of what became Twitter, first experimentation in 2000 with blackberry and emails. He could not convince his friends to use it, but he continued to believe in the concept.

• His new startup Square is also very promising, (see details here) I like the idea of using the jack port, the data is converted in an analog signal and then decoded by the software on the phone. Simple and universal as every mobile has a jack port. This will go live for everyone in march 2010.

• Twitter firehose for everyone. That was probably the best part of the conf for me, Ryan Sarver making this announcement on stage. At Twitter, they were among the first to think that open APIs is at least as important as the website, and they make their competitors, FaceBook and MySpace, follow them. A few minutes later, Mike Jones of MySpace announced support for Pubsubhubbub. Open APIs are like fuel for developers creativity. We can thank Twitter for that. ( BTW, as Pubsubhubbub saves network and computing resources, and thus energy, it can be also a good topic for another small conference there, just kidding ;-) )

• LeWeb is about meeting people, and that starts at the first second, right out of the metro, helping one guy with a map looking for directions: rk: "I'm Jason, CEO of RunKeeper", me: "Well, I'm one of your users". And that was the same during all the conf, no more cards, no more URLs, you just exchange your Twitter usernames.

• Wifi worked, and we know this is a challenge to provide wifi to 2300 people, other providers failed during the previous editions. Thanks BT !

• Organization was perfect, you know that it's perfect when there is nothing to say about it, everything went smoothly. Congrats Geraldine !

Best LeWeb ever !

 

Playing With Tokyo Cabinet

I'm still playing with RDF, and while I'm at it, I'm now experimenting with Tokyo Cabinet and Tokyo Tyrant.

I rewrote my experimental triplestore using the Mikio Hirabayashi's software. Right now, I've got the Subjects, the Predicats, and the Literals stored in a Tokyo Cabinet Hash, the Triplets in a Tokyo Cabinet Table, and my abstract Node object (which is basically a set of Triplet) in Memcached.

I tried Tokyo Cabinet mostly because of the benchmarks, and indeed, I confirm, it's fast !

But also because I don't need all the features of a traditional RDBMS, and it really feels good to get rid of this complexity.

Nice Sunday afternoon hacking.

Update your feeds !

I just moved my blog from MT to TypePad. The feeds have moved too, you should subscribe again if you want to follow me:

• This blog feed

• The photoblog feed

The design is very simple for now, I'll play with the custom CSS feature in the next few days.

Playing with RDF

Rainy week-end in Paris, the sun waits until Sunday afternoon to show up, anyway I had good time hacking with perl, memcache and mysql.

I started to play with RDF, it came up like this.

The web apps in general are slowly moving from the traditional relational DB model, to something more flexible, schema less, and to something more scalable, distributed and heavy cached.

There are a lot of different components already existing, memcached, couchDB, Hadoop, ...

This is exciting, lot of innovations.

Back to RDF, I think that one way to go can be to store the objects in a triplestore. Kind of Semantic Web Object Mapping I you want. Every object has already a URI inside the app, plus, you get the notion of graph for free.

I started hacking something about this on my free time, at least as a good way to learn more about these technologies. If I manage to have it working, I'll probably share it on CPAN or github.

I loved LeWeb08

It's a quiet Sunday afternoon, four days after the conference, and I find myself thinking about what Chris Anderson said comparing the internet and the human brain, about the Open Stack and its ability to compete with closed environments, about the opposition between the Marc Simoncini's "rules" and the regular web2.0 business, ....

Every year these two days are the opportunity for me to take some distance with the everyday life, get inspired by great people and think about the future.

Congratulations Loïc and Geraldine !

Député visionnaire

PARIS (AFP) -- Les propriétaires d'ordinateurs récents seront soumis à la redevance TV (116 euros par an) parce qu'ils peuvent aussi recevoir la télévision, selon un amendement qui doit encore être adopté définitivement lors de l'examen du projet de loi audiovisuel à l'Assemblée nationale.

Freiner le développement d'internet pour financer le dinosaure France Television. Il n'y a que moi que ça choque ?