Today's news and links
Yahoo Boosts Social Travel : the latest battlefield in the online wars saga seems to be focuses on the travel sites/services. Expedia leads the pack, but the underdogs are gaining ground by the day. I am looking forward to the day we launch our own travel service for pathfinder.gr. By the looks of it, it won't be long..
arstechnica is reviewing Parallels Desktop 1.0 for Mac OS X : they like it, just like most of the ones that have had the chance it try it out, me included. I am going to purchase it soon ( their introductory price offer ends at 15h of July ) and use it for Visual Studio .NET, SecureCRT and for running PIM, until I get down and build a PIM client for Mac OS X -- which is probably going to be my first real Mac OS X App, just like PIM was my first real Win32 app. .
Pages 3 to sport improved word processing features : more reasons to rejoice! Not only Charts is going to be included in the forthcoming Apple iWork 07 upgrade, they are adding some great new features on Pages 3 as well, such as:
A number of convenient features catered to writers and typists will also be wrapped into Pages 3, including a thesaurus and integration with Spotlight, Wikipedia, and Google. Apple is also said to be looking to build a robust grammar checking engine for Pages that could find its way into other Apple and Cocoa applications.and
Apple is also beefing up Pages' collaboration capabilities, sources say, enabling any object in a document to be commented on and tracking changes from multiple users. A more robust Mail Merge functionality should also at last support mail merging to email.
David Watanabe believes Apple will ditch the metal windows look altogher in favor of the iApp scheme, for the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. This is probably a good thing.
Nintendo DS rocks!
Monday, 10 July 2006 8:14 pm
Blogs : Blogger.com importer fixed
Two nasty bugs managed to escape our screening process and made it to the Pathfinder Blogs blogger.com importing facility. Namely, one had to do with HTTP responses encoded as 'chunk-encoding' and the other had to do with the comments of the posts ( not properly converted from UTF-7, not properly retrieving date..). Sorry folks.
Wednesday, 21 June 2006 11:29 pm
Reflector
Today I started working on a 'content acceleration platform' [sic], which will really help us ( if things go as planned ) with our ever increasing bandwidth saturation problems we are facing here at Phaistos Networks.
The main idea is that we are going to deploy as many content acceleration points on various hosting providers around the world, use a UltraDNS or a similar service so that whenever a user requests an object (HTTP request) from, say, images.pathfinder.gr, it will resolve to the CAP ( content acceleration point ) which is closer to the user's location. The Reflector node running on that CAP will serve the object directly (if cached either in-mem or on-disk) or will issue a redirection to the originator (say, orig.img.pathfinder.gr ) for that path and fetch it in the mean time, so that future requests for that object will be satisfied from the cache.
It's a more or less trivial application to build. Throw a few threads here, get them to handle some hundred concurrent connections through I/O multiplexing, manage some containers here, some events there.. However, according to my calculations, each CAP will be able to support over 2,000,000 objects in-mem and at least 10,000,000 on-disk. I doubt we will ever need that much of a capacity, but it's nice to be able to grow effortlessly.
I wish we could just afford to get more bandwidth and save our time for developing new services or fixing old ones, but it is too damn expensive here in Greece. Oh, btw, using Squid for this kind of operation is a no-no. Whoever wrote Squid didn't care at all about optimizations, ease of use or scalability, it seems..
Wednesday, 21 June 2006 9:22 pm
