Recent Technology

• 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

• Using JAX-RS (Jersey) to build a JPA/JAXB-backed JSON REST API

  I’ve been looking for a while though to find that perfect combination of frameworks and libraries that would give me the expressive power that I want for building web applications — now I think I’ve found it.

  December 25th, 2008

• Time Machine vs. ZFS + rsync

  Update: I actually got the fslogger thing at the end of this entry working so I can do incremental backups. Not really a product yet but it isn’t hard to do. Here is the super rough version of it.
  I can’t stand inefficiency. Time Machine is fundamentally a very inefficient mechanism for backing [...]

  October 30th, 2008

• Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP) and Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) launch today

  Since I moved into the platform group at the beginning of the year I had worked with the YAP and YQL teams to help them define their strategy and direction but without being part of the day-to-day operations. In August, the head of the Y!OS project asked me to step in to take them [...]

  October 28th, 2008

• 2008 Olympic Medal Counts by Population

  There are obviously a lot of ways to measure how well a country did at the Olympics. This post takes a view that we should look at how many people the country had to draw on in order to send the athletes to China to compete. There are a lot of problems with this [...]

  August 24th, 2008

• Yuil is dead! 4hoursearch is now online.

  As this was really just a demonstration of the power of Yahoo! BOSS, I have brought the site back as a demonstration site. Additionally, Yahoo! is making the source code to the new site available so anyone with a knack for Python, HTML and CSS can take a swipe at making a better search experience. [...]

  August 1st, 2008