Recent Technology

• Coders At Work Interview

  Peter Seibel wrote a great book called Coders at Work which contains interviews of various programmers throughout computer science history. Yury Lifshits has put up a site called Interview 2010 that lets you both define interviews and respond to them. Peter graciously agreed to put up a subset of his questions for the [...]

  March 11th, 2010

• What I would like to see in the new Apple device (iSlate, iPod Tablet, iTouch, iPad, iTablet, iPhone Max)

  Update Misses: no cameras, no GPS, no stylus, no SD
  If there is going to be an Apple Tablet there are a few features that I would like to see.  These aren’t really predictions but more my limited view of how you might use such a device:
  Hardware

  Front and rear video camera for killer video conferencing and [...]

  January 4th, 2010

• Drastically reducing GC pause times for YQL

  Update 2: JRockit Real Time 3.1.2 using -XgcPrio:deterministic performed even better than this configuration in testing though it is not yet an approved VM at Yahoo! we will continue to test with it.
  Update: One issue we still have is that after many hours of deployment with this configuration the heap fragments and we start to [...]

  November 3rd, 2009

• Building OpenJDK 1.7.0 for Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

  I’m basing this blog entry on this reference page.  There are only a few different things that you need to do so I will spell those out cleanly relative to what was previously needed:

  Grab the dependencies except for JIBX, it is no longer needed for the build.
  Checkout the code as described.
  export JAVA_HOME=$SOYLATTE_HOME
  The build script is [...]

  November 1st, 2009

• Update your FireEagle location automatically from any browser

  With all the talk of geolocation in the browser, I decided this afternoon to go ahead and make it really easy for anyone to automatically update their location in FireEagle by going to a single url from any browser. Depending on the capabilities of your browser it will use various technologies to determine your [...]

  July 17th, 2009

• Creating a JSON web service API for Find My iPhone

  One of the really cool features of MobileMe and the new iPhone 3.0 OS is the ability for it to reach out and locate your iPhone at any time if you have that feature enabled. Right now Apple only makes this available on their MobileMe website however and does not offer a programmatic way [...]

  July 3rd, 2009

• 4hoursearch – faster, simpler, more powerful using YQL

  As you know the original 4hoursearch was built using Yahoo! BOSS, YUI and Python running on Google App Engine. Although Google App Engine is a very productive environment I was unhappy with it for a few reasons. It doesn’t feel snappy enough, presumably because of the security enforcement aspects of the system, your [...]

  April 17th, 2009

• YQL opens up 3rd-party web service table definitions to developers

  The Yahoo! Query Language aspires to be the last web service API that the normal developer will ever have to learn. By default we implement 50+ tables that grab data both from Yahoo! web services, some 3rd party web services and then the web at large using our dynamic tables that allow you specify [...]

  February 5th, 2009

• Using JAX-RS with Protocol Buffers for high-performance REST APIs

  One of the great things about the JAX-RS specification is that it is very extensible and adding new providers for different mime-types is very easy. One of the interesting binary protocols out there is Google Protocol Buffers. They are designed for high-performance systems and drastically reduce the amount of over-the-wire data and also [...]

  December 27th, 2008

• Build your own mail analyzer for Mac Mail.app

  You’ve probably read about things like Xoopit and Xobni for analyzing both online mail and your outlook mail. As it turns out, Apple has done something great in this regard that I think has been mostly overlooked. Mail.app stores all of the meta-data for you email in a file called ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index. [...]

  December 26th, 2008