Recruiting at USC

Since there was always a line 15 deep of potential candidates, we decided to only ask one question: “Outside of school and work what projects have you been part of for fun and your own curiosity?”. This seemed to be a powerful question, many students simply had nothing to say, and we promptly ended our interviews with them. Some got excited and talked about their personal projects and passions. In a startup, passion is a big part of what we get our energy from, so its a pretty fundamental requirement for us. The way I see it, if you spend your free time working on your craft, then it must be something you really love to do!

	Toolbar toolbar = new Toolbar();
        ToolbarButton button = new ToolbarButton("Click to New URL", new ButtonListenerAdapter()
        {
            public void onClick(Button button, EventObject e)
            {
            	Window.Location.replace("http://www.google.com");
            }
        });
        toolbar.addButton(button);

Now when the button is clicked, it will act like a normal <a href link.

The Configuration =

• Load Balancer: <192.168.0.2> // will be our haproxy server
• Web Server 1: <192.168.0.10> // web application server 1
• Web Server 2: <192.168.0.20> // web application server 2
• Admin Panel Port 8080: <192.168.0.2> // Statistics Panel on port 8080

                                       Web Server 1
Load Balancer <
                                       Web Server 2

Step 1: Get and Install haproxy

We’ll be using the 1.3.17 src files to install haproxy. You can get them from http://haproxy.1wt.eu/

wget http://haproxy.1wt.eu/download/1.3/src/haproxy-1.3.17.tar.gz 

cd haproxy-1.3.17 

make TARGET=linux26 

cp /path/to/haproxy-1.3.17/examples/haproxy.init /etc/init.d/haproxy 

chmod +x /etc/init.d/haproxy

Step 2: Create some users for security

We’re going to add a haproxy user and run it in a chroot jail. Be sure to read up on other security measures for your server.

useradd haproxy 

mkdir /var/chroot/haproxy 

chown haproxy:haproxy /var/chroot/haproxy 

chmod 700 /var/chroot/haproxy

Step 3: Configure /etc/haproxy.cfg

This will be a simple load balancing. The HAProxy server will listen to 1 IP and distribute to 2 servers.

global
maxconn	 10000 # Total Max Connections.
log	 127.0.0.1	local0
log	 127.0.0.1	local1 notice
daemon
nbproc	 1 # Number of processes
user	 haproxy
    	group	 haproxy
    	chroot	 /var/chroot/haproxy

defaults
log	 global
option tcplog
mode	 tcp
clitimeout	60000
srvtimeout	30000
contimeout	4000
retries	 3
redispatch
option	 httpclose 

listen	load_balanced	192.168.0.2:80,192.168.0.2:443
balance	 source
option	 ssl-hello-chk
option	 forwardfor

server webserver1 192.168.0.10 weight 1 maxconn 5000 check
server webserver2 192.168.0.20 weight 1 maxconn 5000 check

listen  admin_stats 192.168.0.2:8080
mode	 http
stats uri	/my_stats
stats realm 	Global\ statistics
stats auth 	username:password

Start up HAProxy by /etc/init.d/haproxy start.

Step 4: Configuring logging

Edit /etc/sysconfig/syslog

SYSLOGD_OPTIONS=”-m 0 -r”

Edit /etc/syslog.conf. Add the following:

local0.* /var/log/haproxy.log
local1.* /var/log/haproxy-1.log

Restart Syslog

service syslog restart

Uses the latest 2.0 SyntaxHighlighter by Alex Gorbatchev. It supports Bash/shell, C#, C++, CSS, Delphi, Diff, Groovy, JavaScript, Java, Perl, PHP, Plain Text, Python, Ruby, Scala, SQL, Visual Basic and XML!

• Read More and Download : http://www.lastengine.com/syntax-highlighter-code-colorizer-mediawiki/
• Media Wiki Extension Home Page: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SyntaxHighlighterAndCodeColorizer

Example:

public static void main(Strings [] args)
{
	int i = 0;
	String x = "hello";

	System.out.println(x);
}

You can Do things like this:

Easily highlight syntax!

• Get more information about SyntaxHiglighter.
• See More about the Syntax Higlighter Wordpress Plugin.

• a is null or not an object
• oa is null or not an object
• ‘J’ is null or not an object

The error is exactly what it says – you are probably adding or removing a null overlay.

The Fix for this is to do an if statement to check if your overlay is null before you try to add or remove it =

if ( myOverlay != null )
	map.removeOverlay(myOverlay);

1. Do an SVN hotcopy so you get all your stuff
2. tar up the entire directory
3. split and bzip the files using p7zip so they can fit on hosted drives ( 2 Gb files )
4. copy them to S3 or any online service

Commands:

/usr/bin/svnadmin hotcopy /path/to/svn/repository /path/to/destination

tar cvf /path/to/backup/svnbackup-`date +%Y-%m-%d`.tar /path/to/destination/*

/usr/local/bin/7z a -tbzip2 -v2g svnbackup-`date +%Y-%m-%d`.tar.bz2 /path/to/backup/svnbackup-`date +%Y-%m-%d`.tar

Copy them over using any scripts you have. I personally use jstream on a linux server to move stuff to Amazon S3

My Mac Pro

I have been the happy user of this Mac Pro for the last month.

Without any hesitation, this thing has been churning through some serious lines of codes and application servers running in debug mode.

A quick snapshot always helps to see whats going on at any moment. There are some statistics we can run through historical data also. If you have any cool ideas, run them by me. Here is one that I really liked = Earthquake Heat Map for USGS.

Some common uses for this:

1. For fun, yell at all your friends all at once!
2. For work, send all your clients a message: “Hi this is Al Bundy, we have new extra wide stilettos on sale!”
3. Last minute plan changes. Party switched to a new place? Send a Friendcast out.
4. At your work, make sure everyone hears you.

Were thinking of lots of new features for this app, so keep it updated!

Prerequisites

1) NuSoap Libraries: http://sourceforge.net/projects/nusoap/

Sample Code

<?php
    // add nusoap library
    require_once('lib/nusoap.php');

    // create a soap client
    $client = new nusoap_client('http://localhost/sugar/soap.php?wsdl','wsdl','','','','');

    // Login
    $user_auth = array(
                'user_auth' => array(
                    'user_name' => 'ipshift-user',
                    'password' => md5('ipshift-password'),
                    'version' => '0.1'),
                 'application_name' => 'ipshift-crm'
        );

    $result = $client->call('login',$user_auth);

    // output the session id
    echo '<h2>Session Id:</h2>';
    print($result['id']);

    // Now Prepare a Contact
    $set_entry_params = array(
              'session' => $result['id'],
              'module_name' => 'Contacts',
              'name_value_list'=>array(
                            array('name'=>'first_name','value'=>'FirstName'),
                            array('name'=>'last_name','value'=>'LastName'),
                            array('name'=>'email1','value'=>'vmehta@ipshift.com'),
                            array('name'=>'lead_source','value'=>'Web Site'),
                            array('name'=>'phone_work', 'value'=>'1231231234'),
                            array('name'=>'account_name','value'=>'IP Shift')
                            )
                        );

    // Now Add the Contact
    $result2 = $client->call('set_entry',$set_entry_params); 

    // Show the result
    echo '<h2>Add Dump:</h2>';
    print_r($result2);
?>

I own an iPhone and I am pretty happy with it, but something is starting to change about how I perceive Apple; It reminds me of Microsoft a few years back. I was happy with Dos, Windows 95 and Windows XP too. There was a time when Microsoft was great, they had the best gaming, the best productivity software, a relatively easy development platform and simple workplace integration with their products! But things started changing when Microsoft used their success to push their own interests, instead of focusing on the consumers interest. If you have been reading the news lately, it seems that Apple is doing exactly the same things.

I probably would never have bought Podcaster, but it irks me that I can’t because Apple told me not to. It seems like the jail break market is going to keep growing until Apple decides to give people some freedom.

Here are things that I think are critical to staying “good” in the consumer’s eyes:

1) Stop the anti-competitive behavior. If someone writes better software than you, let them. Learn from it. And stop blocking them from the app store.

2) Don’t put your consumers into unfair licenses that they must obey. Bricking their phone for not following your EULA is not right. You don’t have to provide them with tech support once they do it. But forcing them to conform!

On a side note, I’m happy Android won’t require approval for their app store! Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile don’t have restrictions either.

I’ve been working on the API documentation for many of the services but here are a few that can be usefull: Click-To-Call API, Dialer API, Phone call API, Telephone API, Call center API and Voice broadcast API.

How Voice 2.0 has affected the industry

The telecom market has already seen massive changes in how it works. If you were watching things happen over the last 5 years, you would have seen that almost all phone systems work on the same Cat-5 cable that your data comes over. Wiring offices just became easier for everyone. What was the impact of this? Well, now we have to share bandwidth on the wire, and our network switches need to move more packets. At data centers, large VoIP systems can route traffic and handle media without expensive hardware to terminate T1 lines.

As networks get faster, it’s easier to start implementing Voice 2.0 services. Just look at the old days of choppy Yahoo and MSN Messenger calls, to today’s (somewhat better) Skype and Google Talk services! As things get faster, we’ll be adding video to the mix too!

How to use Voice 2.0

As a consumer, it’s easy. Just download Google Talk or Skype, use your cell phone, do what you always do – it’s already being implemented for you in the back end.

As a developer, it’s a bit harder. That’s what we’re going to start showing on this site! Take a look at this Voice Broadcast API. This is a quick way to start sending out voice messages. I’ll start posting some code soon so you can start using it in your applications. There are some more advanced topics, like mobilizing a distributed workforce, and the problems are becoming easier to solve! I’ve worked on a team that allowed 400 volunteers from all over the U.S. to call thousands of voters, just using their web browsers!

So, coming back to Voice 2.0, we’re ready to start the process. VoIP is probably in a better place than video right now. Here are some quick links while you are in the mood:

Voice XML
Voice Broadcast API
Distributed Telephony Architecture