Archive for February, 2010
Mish(S?)Mash
Feb 19th
MishMashSMash is my ambitious new OSS opensocial container for housing individuals own personal, arbitrary and portable online datastores, where they can build personal or social data feeds amongst ‘friends’ with a finer grain of access control than is generally offered by seed funded social networks. Think Yahoo! Pipes, but for ‘local’ feeds you create yourself (like your record collection, favourite OMGLOLCatzHAHAOHDAD! or whatever), or with friends (a collection of my mates french jungle records circa 2003-2005 who live in Brisbane). Clear as mud?
The project has just been started and is available on github here (feel free to fork), with an ongoing developer blog here relating to opensocial standards, LOD/RDF(s) + semantic web, online privacy, interoperability, the irony of building a possibly monetising system to avoid vendor lockin and every one of my tedious technical discoveries. It’d be nice if this talked building AR/Layar services as well.
Tech is PHP/CodeIgniter for a quick backend prototype + some serious client side behaviour using Mootools + Gears (offline mode) + Cassandra cluster for elasticity with *minimal* server-side application logic. So much to chew! lucky these meats are truly delicious.
HipHop PHP, the day has arrived
Feb 4th
HipHop PHP has been a rumored Facebook project for a few months now, finally it’s arrived.
“HipHop transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then compiles it with g++ to build binary files. You keep coding in simpler PHP, then HipHop executes your source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features – such as eval() – in exchange for improved performance.” (more info, repo).
It looks neat (in a Google GWT kind of way), keen to see how it plays with opcode caches, xdebug, shared memory stuff etc. and whether it makes pcntl_fork() actually useful (no eval(); so chances are slim). Facebook has very different requirements to the rest of us and an already highly optimised code base, so HipHop may be filling a very specific niche. Hopefully developers won’t use it as a bandaid to actual performance profiling, or expect it to solve their I/O issues. fingers crossed :p
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