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Preamble

Explanation of standard formats and protocols:

• JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight (Lightweight in both size and resources required to process data encoded in JSON vs. XML.) data-interchange format with language bindings for C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, TCL and many others.
• JSON-RPC is a simple remote procedure call protocol similar to XML-RPC although it uses the lightweight JSON format instead of XML.

What is it?

I love the simplicity of JSON-RPC when it comes to rapidly devloping cutting-edge web applications.

Preamble

Explanation of standard formats and protocols:

• JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight (Lightweight in both size and resources required to process data encoded in JSON vs. XML.) data-interchange format with language bindings for C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, TCL and many others.
• JSON-RPC is a simple remote procedure call protocol similar to XML-RPC although it uses the lightweight JSON format instead of XML.

What is it?

I love the simplicity of JSON-RPC when it comes to rapidly devloping cutting-edge web applications.

The Why: Preamble

Working in the information technology sector, one of the most common questions I get asked by parents is about monitoring internet access of their children. (Most actually ask about “controlling what their kids see online” but I generally argue for a observe-only approach as it helps open lines of communication with your child whereas silently blocking “bad” sites will only start a silent war which will only frustrate you once they do find a suitable workaround, such as a proxy.)

Recently I got tasked with load testing an internal system and producing statistics for the team to show how well it will scale once it is put into production.

After some intense research I decided to go with “The Grinder” which allows multiple tests to be run by multiple machines which can all funnel their collected statistics back up to a central “console”. Tests are written in Python which, in turn, gets fed through Jython and converted into native Java bytecode to be run by participating Grinder agent instances. Grinder works on a single, user-definable port, for both pushing scripts to listening agents as well as gathering statistics from tests.

Recently I attended the Atlanta Linux Fest where a keynote (deceptively entitled " Standing Out in the Crowd") was given, and I still don’t understand why they felt the need to make this a keynote when there was already a workshop scheduled on the same subject. I, and others at the conference, tweeted and tried to make known that we didn’t appreciate the importation of social justice concerns into an area that, by all rights and purposes, ought to be coldly logical.

Many might consider even the thought of running PHP inside of a Java Virtual Machine to be anathema. Others will wonder why bother (apart from the novelty). However running PHP in Java has one crucal benefit: it future-proofs your code.

Quercus is a nifty utility that will allow you to run PHP code in clouds such as Google App Engine (Other great articles on running PHP in Google’s App Engine can be found here and here. IBM has also highlighted this utility.). This means your Drupal and Wordpress sites can now be distributed across a highly avaliable and scalable cloud infrustructure.

First, some review

Hadoop is a very powerful MapReduce framework based on a white paper released by Google documenting how they have successfully tackled the issue of processing large amounts of data (on the scale of petabytes in many cases) using their proprietary distributed filesystem, GFS. Hadoop is the open source version of this distributed file system, heavily supported by companies like Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Adobe, Facebook, Hulu, IBM, RackSpace, etc. and has a growing number of related projects hosted by the Apache Foundation.

Recently my wife and I decided to try and wrangle our images into some sort of logical order for easy accessibility. After some thought we decided on a simple system of image-directory/year/month for our images and since our old images were spread out across several folders in no particular order I decided to write a script to copy everything into the right folders.

Here is the Python script I wrote to sort all of our images by creation date into properly ordered folders. (Directory walking code taken from here with slight modification to make patterns truly case insensitive.)

A friend of mine recently asked me about cloud computing, what it was, and the ramifications of it on where we will see technology in the coming years. In his question he demonstrated a common confusion among most people between the difference between cloud computing and diskless computing.

Both of these are interesting areas of computer science, they do sometimes overlap, and they are both going to change computing in general in significant ways as time rolls on, but they are not the same.

Recently I’ve been studying several technologies that appear to form the core of cloud computing. In short, these are the technologies behind such technological marvels as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, NetFlix, Pixar, etc. (This article is a continuation of a recent article I wrote on the different approaches to cloud computing taken by Google and Microsoft)

Since each of these technologies by themselves is worthy of a new book, and since even those familiar with the common implementation languages of these technologies (like Java and Python), I decided to put together all the resources I’ve found on these technologies in hopes that they will help someone else get started in this fascinating world of distributed or “cloud computing”.