Google

That was pretty exciting. A free, big, enlightening event about the “Google Stuff”… Ok, ok. Who spoke with me here knows that it was NOT so enlightening: most of the knowledge they brought from USA is and was already available on the web. But that’s probably not the point. The point is, I believe, to share. Share the culture, the vision and… the APIs. The Venue: Wembley Stadium!!! I went there for mainly two topics: Android and AppEngine. About Android, the presenter, Mike Jennings, was very funny (and you will see him as the second presenter in the video below) and a “great character”. But his knowledge of the Platform was pretty basic. I believe he sort of Project Manager or something like that. Plus, in the second part they invited to do a “technical talk about the SDK” a guy, Carl-Gustaf Harroch. He is developing an application that involves a bit of LBS (Location Based Services) and some Google Maps. Ok nice, but he straggled quite soon with our questions about… almost everything of the SDK. And, yes, I was quite bastard with my own questions. Come one: how can you do a talk like that without even knowing “enough” what is the meaning of the Tags within the AndroidManifest.xml? He was even quite young and not very confident, and he was unable to introduce the basic concepts before talking about more complex and in deep stuff. At the end, quite disappointing session, I must say. Probably, I knew more about it :-P . The USB freebie ;) About AppEngine, I went to a “CodeLab”: a session where you are supposed to code. And I did, focusing more on my own Python code. They were available for help and questions, either about the application they proposed to build, or about your own. “In chair”, Mano Marks: confident. Probably too confident. But, at the end, he was helpful, even if an answer or two where quite “upsetting” (I mean: if I ask a question about something you don’t know, and I tell you that you are wrong, don’t be arrogant and confident; wait and see my proof!!!). Now, let’s see the Keynote: ...

I don’t have an answer to this, it’s too early (we don’t even have a screenshot of it). But I strongly suggest to take a look a the Google Chrome Comic Book: a very new, fresh, funny and precise (!!!) way to introduce an incoming software. They discuss a lot of different topics: * Problems they wanted to solve * Performance * Process Isolation * Javascript VM and Performance * Sandboxing * Phishing and Malware * UI principles Very interesting. And, again, very innovative. Ah, the Rendering Engine they chosen is… WebKit (what a surprise!!! ;-) ) and… it’s fully open source. An early leaked screenshot follows. ...

In the last period I’m spending some time working with Google AppEngine: if you don’t know what is it, be ashamed! :P I would like to highlight a couple of interesting resources that can make the life of who works with this framework/hosting platform/cloud computing system easier: * [Google AppEngine Cookbook](http://appengine-cookbook.appspot.com/) with a lot of good recipe (there are few now, written by the Googlers, but I'm sure it's gona blow up soon) The App Gallery, with a lot of interesting applications already in production phase ...

Google finally announced the winners of the First Round of the Android Developer Challenges. There are 10 x $275,000 prizes and 10 x $100,000 prizes. $3,750,000 in prizes!!!. Not bad I must say. There are some pretty cool apps, with a very clean and nice UI: demonstration of the power and flexibility of the Android Graphical Widgets Framework. Take a look at them in the official gallery. Congratulations to the Winners!!!

About the news itself, I invite you to spend 2 minutes to read directly from the words of Eric Chu on the official blog. Said that, what is not defined yet (just the screenshot you see here) is Security. Better, what exactly they have in mind? Just put on the Market WHATEVER the developer will come with and leave to the final user the burden of reading, understanding and accepting/rejecting the application. Based on just some words written on a little screen? Words that sounds like C3PO? ...

No, I’m not Dead. I’m just “very Busy” guys ;) A lot of things are happening at the same time: as soon as I have more time I’ll speak about it. I’ll just make a list of things I would like to speak about… if I would have time to do so: My new Job in France Telecom R&D UK - Orange Labs and my work inside the Source of Webkit (and a bit of Opera) ...

Title: Keynote for Google I/O 2008: Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud. Abstract: Featuring Vic Gundotra, Allen Hurff (MySpace), Steve Horowitz, Kevin Gibbs, Mark Lucovsky, Bruce Johnson, David Glazer, Nat Brown (iLike). I’m at minute 23 and it looks very very interesting and relevant (for every developer in any field). So, sit tight, grab a coke/beer/cigarette/juice/whatever-you-like and… listen carefully.

This time the main topic was about “Developer Productivity”. It was one of the most funny I have ever attended: a couple of speaker were just “crazy” (but in a good way)! ;) If interested in knowing more, here is a transcript of the event: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dm58hwb_5f93zjrcd.

For some reasons I started to play with Apache Hadoop (Core): Hadoop is a software platform that lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data. Here’s what makes Hadoop especially useful: Scalable: Hadoop can reliably store and process petabytes. Economical: It distributes the data and processing across clusters of commonly available computers. These clusters can number into the thousands of nodes. Efficient: By distributing the data, Hadoop can process it in parallel on the nodes where the data is located. This makes it extremely rapid. Reliable: Hadoop automatically maintains multiple copies of data and automatically redeploys computing tasks based on failures. Hadoop implements MapReduce, using theHadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). MapReduce divides applications into many small blocks of work. HDFS creates multiple replicas of data blocks for reliability, placing them on compute nodes around the cluster. MapReduce can then process the data where it is located. Hadoop has been demonstrated on clusters with 2000 nodes. The current design target is 10,000 node clusters. I followed the Quickstart guide and I can confirm that it works on [en:Mac OS X] too, but I managed only to make it run in “standalone” mode: usefull for first-stage development and debugging. ...

I was looking for info about [en:MapReduce] and I thought that would have been a good idea to take a look at the Tech Talks published by Google. Here we go. Title: 2007 Seattle Conference on Scalability: MapReduce Used on Large Geographic Data Sets Location: Google Tech Talks June 23, 2007 Speaker: Barry Brumitt, Google Inc. Abstract: MapReduce is a programming model and library designed to simplify distributed processing of huge datasets on large clusters of computers. This is achieved by providing a general mechanism which largely relieves the programmer from having to handle challenging distributed computing problems such as data distribution, process coordination, fault tolerance, and scaling. While working on Google maps, I’ve used MapReduce extensively to process and transform datasets which describe the earth’s geography. In this talk, I’ll introduce MapReduce, demonstrating its broad applicability through example problems ranging from basic data transformation to complex graph processing, all the in the context of geographic data. ...