Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

September 4, 2018

Of hosting files in url minifiers [Passing < 4k operational orders]

Filed under: Compression,Hosting,Intelligence,Web Server — Patrick Durusau @ 4:56 pm

Of hosting files in url minifiers by Paul Masurel.

From the post:

Today I had an epiphany while staring at a very long url. I thought: “Url minifiers are really nice to store all of this data for free”. And then it stroke me… One can really store 4KB of arbitrary data with a url minifier system and share it for free.

Now there’s a clever thought!

Apologies for missing this when it first appeared. I can imagine several interesting uses for this insight.

Such as the passing of operational orders via a url minifier system.

Tasking the intelligence community to discover and inspect every shortened url, everyday.

I saw < 4k operational orders because the more advanced the technique, the greater the technical overhead. The base 4k is trivial.

For example, https://bit.ly/2wHB3zH, which gives a 404, but also the text:

http://www.nowhere.com/Today-is-the-day-we-smite-our-oppressors-at-the-usual-location

All I needed was a public url minifier.

Please share this post with anyone who has a need to pass < 4k operational orders or information.

Be sure to credit Paul Masurel with this discovery. Me, I find interesting use cases and applications of technology.

January 4, 2018

Who’s on everyone’s 2017 “hit list”?

Filed under: R,Web Server — Patrick Durusau @ 8:10 pm

Who’s on everyone’s 2017 “hit list”? by Suzan Baert.

From the post:

At the end of the year, everyone is making lists. And radio stations are no exceptions.
Many of our radio stations have a weekly “people’s choice” music chart. Throughout the week, people submit their top 3 recent songs, and every week those votes turn into a music chart. At the end of the year, they collapse all those weekly charts into a larger one covering the entire year.

I find this one quite interesting: it’s not dependent on what music people buy, it’s determined by what the audience of that station wants to hear. So what are the differences between these stations? And do they match up with what I would expect?

What was also quite intriguing: in Dutch we call it a hit lijst and if you translate that word for word you get: hit list. Which at least one radio station seems to do…

Personally, when I hear the word hit list, music is not really what comes to mind, but hey, let’s roll with it: which artists are on everyone’s ‘hit list’?

A delightful scraping of four (4) radio station “hit lists,” which uses rOpenSci robotstxt, rvest, xml2, dplyr, tidyr, ggplot2, phantomJS, and collates the results.

Music doesn’t come to mind for me when I hear “hit list.”

For me “hit list” means what Google wasn’t you to know about subject N.

You?

January 22, 2013

Crash Course on Web Performance

Filed under: Web Server — Patrick Durusau @ 2:40 pm

Faster Websites: Crash Course on Web Performance by Ilya Grigorik.

From the post:

Delivering a fast and optimized user experience in the browser requires careful thinking across many layers of the stack – TCP and up. In a rather ambitious undertaking, when I got the chance to run a three hour (marathon) workshop at Devoxx 2012, I tried to do exactly that: a crash course on web performance. Even with that much time, much was left unsaid, but I’m happy with how it went – it turned out to be one of the most popular workshops.

The best part is, the video is now available online for free! The Devoxx team did an amazing job of post-processing the recording, with inline slides, full agenda navigation, and more. Check it out below. Hope you like it, and let me know if you have any feedback, comments or questions.

You may have the best content on the Web, but if users tire of waiting for it, it may as well not exist.

Just a reminder that delivery is an important part of the value of content.

September 1, 2012

Web Performance Power Tool: HTTP Archive (HAR)

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Performance,Web Server — Patrick Durusau @ 2:52 pm

Web Performance Power Tool: HTTP Archive (HAR) by Ilya Grigorik.

From the post:

When it comes to analyzing page performance, the network waterfall tab of your favorite HTTP monitoring tool (e.g. Chrome Dev Tools, Firebug, Fiddler, etc) is arguably the single most useful power tool at our disposal. Now, wouldn’t it be nice if we could export the waterfall for better bug reports, performance monitoring, or later in-depth analysis?

Well, good news, that is precisely what the HTTP Archive (HAR) data format was created for. Even better, chances are, you favorite monitoring tool already knows how to speak in HAR, which opens up a lot of possibilities – let’s explore.

If you are tuning or developing a web interface, there is much here you will find helpful.

The gathering of information for later analysis, by other tools, was what interested me the most.

HTML [Lessons in Semantic Interoperability – Part 2]

Filed under: HTML,Interoperability,Semantics,Web Server — Patrick Durusau @ 10:11 am

While writing Elli (Erlang Web Server) [Lessons in Semantic Interoperability – Part 1], I got distracted by the realization that web servers produce semantically interoperable content every day. Lots of it. For hundreds of millions of users.

My question: What makes the semantics of HTML different?

The first characteristic that came to mind was simplicity. Unlike some markup languages, ;-), HTML did not have to await the creation of WYSIWYG editors to catch on. In part I suspect because after a few minutes with it, most users (not all), could begin to author HTML documents.

Think about the last time you learned something new. What is the one thing that brings closure to the learning experience?

Feedback, knowing if your attempt at an answer is right or wrong. If right, you will attempt the same solution under similar circumstances in the future. If wrong, you will try again (hopefully).

When HTML appeared, so did primitive (in today’s terms) web browsers.

Any user learning HTML could get immediate feedback on their HTML authoring efforts.

Not:

  • After installing additional validation software
  • After debugging complex syntax or configurations
  • After millions of other users do the same thing
  • After new software appears to take advantage of it

Immediate feedback means just that immediate feedback.

The second characteristic is immediate feedback.

You can argue that such feedback was an environmental factor and not a characteristic of HTML proper.

Possibly, possibly but if such a distinction is possible and meaningful, how does it help with the design/implementation of the next successful semantic interoperability language?

I would argue by whatever means, any successful semantic interoperability language is going to include immediate feedback, however you classify it.

Elli (Erlang Web Server) [Lessons in Semantic Interoperability – Part 1]

Filed under: Erlang,Interoperability,Semantics,Web Server — Patrick Durusau @ 8:04 am

Elli

From the post:

My name is Knut, and I want to show you something really cool that I built to solve some problems we are facing here at Wooga.

Having several very successful social games means we have a large number of users. In a single game, they can generate around ten thousand HTTP requests per second to our backend systems. Building and operating the software required to service these games is a big challenge that sometimes requires creative solutions.

As developers at Wooga, we are responsible for the user experience. We want to make our games not only fun and enjoyable but accessible at all times. To do this we need to understand and control the software and hardware we rely on. When we see an area where we can improve the user experience, we go for it. Sometimes this means taking on ambitious projects. An example of this is Elli, a webserver which has become one of the key building blocks of our successful backends.

Having used many of the big Erlang webservers in production with great success, we still found ourselves thinking of how we could improve. We want a simple and robust core with no errors or edge cases causing problems. We need to measure the performance to help us optimize our network and user code. Most importantly, we need high performance and low CPU usage so our servers can spend their resources running our games.

I started this post about Elli to point out the advantages of having a custom web server application. If your needs aren’t meet by one of the standard ones.

Something clicked and I realized that web servers, robust and fast as well as lame and slow, churn out semantically interoperable content every day.

For hundreds of millions of users.

Rather than starting from the perspective of the “semantic interoperability” we want, why not examine the “semantic interoperability” we have already, for clues on what may or may not work to increase it?

When I say “semantic interoperability” on the web, I am speaking of the interpretation of HTML markup, the <a>, <p>, <ol>, <ul>, <div>, <h1-6>, elements that make up most pages.

What characteristics do those markup elements share that might be useful in creating more semantic interoperability?

The first characteristic is simplicity.

You don’t need a lot of semantic overhead machinery or understanding to use any of them.

A plain text editor and knowledge that some text has a general presentation is enough.

Takes a few minutes for a user to learn enough HTML to produce meaningful (to them and others) results.

At least in the case of HTML, that simplicity has lead to a form of semantic interoperability.

HTML was defined with interoperable semantics but unadopted interoperable semantics are like no interoperable semantics at all.

If HTML has simplicity of semantics, what else does it have that lead to widespread adoption?

August 9, 2012

…Creating Reliable Billion Page View Web Services

Filed under: Performance,Systems Administration,Web Analytics,Web Server — Patrick Durusau @ 3:40 pm

High Scalability reports in 3 Tips and Tools for Creating Reliable Billion Page View Web Services an article by Amir Salihefendic that suggests:

  • Realtime monitor everything
  • Be proactive
  • Be notified when crashes happen

Are three tips to follow on the hunt to a reliable billion page view web service.

I’m a few short of that number but it was still an interesting post. 😉

And you can’t ever tell, might snag a client that is more likely to reach those numbers.

January 22, 2012

NGINX: The Faster Web Server Alternative

Filed under: Software,Web Server — Patrick Durusau @ 7:31 pm

NGINX: The Faster Web Server Alternative by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

From the post:

Picking a Web server used to be easy. If you ran a Windows shop, you used Internet Information Server (IIS); if you didn’t, you used Apache. No fuss. No muss. Now, though, you have more Web server choices, and far more decisions to make. One of the leading alternatives, the open-source NGINX, is now the number two Web server in the world, according to Netcraft, the Web server analytics company.

NGINX (pronounced “engine X”) is an open-source HTTP Web server that also includes mail services with an Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Post Office Protocol (POP) server. NGINX is ready to be used as a reverse proxy, too. In this mode NGINX is used to load balance among back-end servers, or to provide caching for a slower back-end server.

Companies like the online TV video on demand company Hulu use NGINX for its stability and simple configuration. Other users, such as Facebook and WordPress.com, use it because the web server’s asynchronous architecture gives it a small memory footprint and low resource consumption, making it ideal for handling multiple, actively changing Web pages.

That’s a tall order. According to NGINX’s principal architect Igor Sysoev, here’s how NGINX can support hundreds of millions of Facebook users.

I have to admit, NGINX being web server #2 caught my attention. Not to mention that it powers Hulu, Facebook and WordPress.com.

It has been years since I have even looked at an Apache web server (use to run them) but I do remember their stability and performance. And Apache would be my reflex recommendation for delivering web pages from a topic map application. Why re-write what already works?

Now NGINX comes along with impressive performance numbers and potentially new ways to organize on the server side.

Read the article, grab a copy of NGINX and let me know what you think.

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