futtta's blog

I always wondered why people would contact me for freelance work, until earlier today a colleague told me “but you’re a consultant, according to your LinkedIn profile”! Indeed, my “Professional headline” there read “Internet Technology Consultant”. So if not a consultant, what am I instead? Internet Technology Expert? Internet Technology  Specialist? Nah, too poshy …

Wait, what do I do at work? I try to discover (by experimenting and reading) how web technology can be used and I try to apply that knowledge to help colleagues steer their projects. That’s like … exploring and navigating, no? So as of today I’m Futtta the Web Technology Explorer and Navigator on LinkedIn!

So what would a small-time web-tech blogger all of a sudden need Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine expertise for? For his real job, that’s why!

On Thursday, May 12th someone pretty high up in the company hierarchy decided we had to have a web application ready on the 19th. The catch: it had to be able to handle a shitload of traffic in only 2 days time. After consulting with a couple of specialists and reviewing our options, we decided to go for it with our existing web-development partner. Because of available expertise and resources however, we decided to switch from J2EE to .Net and to deploy the application on Microsoft’s “platform as a service” offering, called Azure.

In 5 days time (what weekend was that?), using a shared Google Docs spreadsheet as project hub (for bug-list, todo’s, translation strings and in document IM) the application was developed, tested and hammered upon with a huge load-test and on Wednesday-evening the final version was deployed on Azure.

The most interesting technical tidbits (as designed by a smart and very motivated lead-developer):

• the architecture is based on Azure’s Compute “web role” and “worker role” instances, with the “web role” instances taking care of capturing user data and putting it on a queue and the “worker role” instances asynchronously picking up, processing and storing the data
• data relevant for the “web role” instances is available in distributed cache
• processed data is stored in Azure Storage’s blobs & tables (i.e. not in Azure SQL)
• static files are offloaded to Azure’s CDN

The application handled a huge amount of traffic the first two days. Due to circumstances the load was especially high on Thursday morning (with over 800 HTTP-requests/second), but performance and availability remained perfect. It was like walking on this fluffy cloud, really:

Het is al weer een tijdje geleden dat ik hier nog eens stoefte met het schoonste, liefste en slimste dochterken ooit, maar dat is bij deze dan ook weer rechtgezet:

En ja, het is toch al wreed schoon weer voor den tijd van het jaar geweest eh Meneer?

On January 28th I was stupid enough to forget my trusty HTC Hero on the train. I filled out the NMBS’ online lost luggage forms and mourned the loss of my faithful personal digital assistant for a couple of days. As my employer is supposed co-finance a new handset in July, I decided to look for a cheap temporary replacement for now. Main requirements: cheap, 3G+, tethering and optionally Android. The Acer beTouch e110 seemed to be a perfect match.

The e110 is a small and light touchscreen device, running Android 1.5 (Cupcake). It comes with 3G+ (HSDPA), Bluetooth, GPS and FM radio and it is one of the cheapest Android-based handset available. And when I say cheap, I mean cheap as in “you can’t even find a decent 2nd hand device for that price”-cheap.

So what’s not to like? Well, the CPU is pretty slow, there’s no WiFI and the touchscreen needs some tough love. Android 1.5 Cupcake isn’t exactly the latest and greatest Android around either. Although Acer did issue new ROM’s in 2010, those were all based on Android 1.5 and there are no plans for an Eclair or Froyo version. What’s more surprising (although some would consider this a plus) is that the e110 is not a Google-branded phone. This means, amongst other things, that there’s no Google Market and no Contacts synchronization. Add the lack of Exchange integration to the equation and you’ve got very empty contacts and calender, which is pretty frustrating if you want to use your phone for work purposes.

No, Acer’s beTouch e110 certainly is no Hero, but I’ve got my HSDPA, tethering and even Android for a very low price. So I’ll cope until my Hero comes home. And if that doesn’t happen, the unboxing of the Desire Z in July will be all the more exiting.

Little over a year ago I must have been smoking some weird shit when writing that Flash would become irrelevant in 2010. Because after all, this is 2011 and there’s still plenty of Flash for Adobe aficionados to make a living and the famous html5 video codec issue hasn’t been fully sorted out yet either. So I was wrong, was I? Well, … not really!

Apple still stubbornly refuses Flash on the iPhone and more importantly the iPad, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 joined the HTML5-crowd in full force and even Adobe is going HTML5 with support in Dreamweaver and in Illustrator and with a preview of Edge, “a tool for creating animation and transitions using the capabilities of HTML5″.

But is was only in December 2010 that I knew I was dead on with my prediction, when I overheard this conversation at work between a business colleague and a web development partner:

Business Colleague: I would like a personalized dashboard with some nice-looking charts in my web application.
Web Development Partner: No problem, we’ll do it in Flash!
Business Colleague: No, we want this to work on the iPad too!

The year technology-agnostic decision-making business people started telling suppliers not to use Flash, that was the year Flash became irrelevant and “the open web technology stack” (somewhat incorrectly marketed as HTML5) took over.

Elise maakt vuurwerk voor uw Gelukkig Nieuw Jaar:

Maak er iets moois van, van 2011!

Aangezien ook dit jaar blijkbaar enkel de brave kindjes speelgoed van Sinterklaas kregen, heb ik mezelf afgelopen weekend dan maar een cadeautje gekocht; een n135 netbook van Samsung. Een beetje tegen de tablet-stroom in, ik weet het, maar ik ben zo tekst-georiënteerd. Geef mij een toetsenbord en ge hoort mij niet meer. En dan is er de kwestie van de prijs natuurlijk. Een 5 maand oud netbookje voor nog geen 200 Euro (met dank aan koopjeszoeker.be), daar hebt ge niet veel tablet voor, toch?

Soit, zondagnamiddag thuisgekomen pakte ik blij verrast mijn cadeautje uit om dan 5 minuten schaapachtig naar Windows 7 Starter te kijken. 2 minuten hadden kunnen volstaan, maar Windows 7 op een netbook, echt snel is dat toch niet. Maar zo wist ik dat ik Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition met een gerust hart kon installeren, die Windows zou ik niet missen. Over die installatie valt weinig spannends te vertellen, behalve misschien dat ik een beetje heb getwijfeld over de partitionering van de harde schijf. Uiteindelijk heb ik sda1 en sda2 laten staan, dat lijken de recovery-partities van Samsung (met oa de Windows 7 installatie-bestanden). Voor de rest: smooth sailing!

En op die manier zit ik nu op de trein met m’n netbookje (6 uur autonomie, geen schrik van vertragingen); stukje bloggen, m’n presentatie over website-performantie bijwerken, een eerste versie van een nieuwe WordPress-plugin (DoNotTrack) tweaken … Straks nog een mailtje naar Sinterklaas, beloven dat ik braaf zal zijn en of ik in Juli dan een HTC Desire Z (met toetsenbord) krijg.