Archive for the 'technical' Category

Browser wars (Take 5)

Fellow Nestanalysts,

No, the browsers haven’t all gotten together to create a funky tune in an unusual meter. Rather, it’s simply time for the latest instalment in a series of posts (1 2 3 4) which concern themselves with the popularity of various browsers, as used to access Nestoria.

Why

To be honest, there’s more than one reason we’re interested in keeping track of how users access Nestoria.

However, the single largest concern is user experience. Using Nestoria should be easy, intuitive and a consistent experience, no matter what your choice of browser. Keeping an eye on browser usage lets us test and tweak Nestoria so that we can achieve these goals.

Microsoft: losing ground

gen browser

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has managed to lose a further 3% share of the ‘visits pie’ since our last review (in June):

2% of that goes to Chrome;

1% to Firefox;

1% to Safari; together with

a 1% decrease in ‘others’ (Opera, Camino and the like).

Slow but steady

ff saf chrome

Whilst change may not happen overnight, the browser arena is definitely an interesting space, and it’s nice to see that things are far from stagnant.

Even my parents know of and use Firefox – that has to say something about this open-source browser’s impact on society, although adoption seems to be slowing when compared to that of less established browsers.

The uptake of Google’s Chrome is an indication that users can be lured by promises of speed and stability (having said that, I’m sure a whacking great banner on the world’s most popular homepage doesn’t hurt either).

Perhaps Safari’s success can be attributed to the rising market share of Macs, or perhaps impressive standards compliance.

Firefox 2: Going, going…

ff2 ff3

Firefox 2.x usage pales in comparison to that of it’s 3.x brethren, representing less that 1% of browsing on Nestoria.

3.x versions account for nearly 18%.

IE8 & 7 = substitutes, IE6 = no substitute

ie 6 7 8

The most obvious (and probably correct) conclusion that can be drawn from the above graph, is that IE7 users are the new IE8 users. They switch from new to newest, and this is reflected in the almost mirror-like red and blue plots. I suspect these are home users, free to upgrade to the latest and greatest at the instruction of Windows Update.

Many ‘corporate’ users have no such freedom, but instead are subject to the oversight of their IT departments. I would hazard a guess (not for the first time in this series), that the majority of our IE6 users are browsing from workplaces, where IE6 still reigns supreme. Will Windows 7 succeed where Windows Vista failed, and bring with its success the banishment of IE6? Tune in next time (or the time after) to find out.

iPhone >> Penguins

small os

As predicted, more users visited Nestoria using iPhones/Pods in this period than they did using Linux-powered computers (no, not including OS X). There was an especially sharp uptick in such usage around the festive season – I think there were a number of happy iGift recipients around that time. It should also be noted that these figures don’t include iPhone app usage.

Also interesting is that Symbian visits continue to increase, whilst Android really hasn’t made that much of a splash.

That’s all for this instalment. We’re always keen to hear your thoughts and opinions on topics we blog about, and those we don’t. Please get in touch, comment below or tweet at us.

YQL FTW!

Fellow Nestorbrants,

Recently we’ve been spending a bit of time working on the Nestoria API. This got us exploring the wonderful world of APIs in general (BTW a great way to stay on top of things is via the delightful blog programmableweb). One project we’ve had our eye on for some time, and wanted to highlight here, is Yahoo’s YQL effort. YQL is effectively an “API of APIs”. It allows anyone to pull in any number of datasources via a well-known SQL-like syntax. All sorts of datasets are available, and it’s not hard to add more. Best of all the Nestoria API is also accessible via YQL, for which we have Sam Pullara and Francisco Jesús Jordano Jiménez to thank. Nice work guys! Here’s an example query. But to see the true power you should spend some time playing with Yahoo’s online console (you need to be logged in, so no link).

If you’d like to learn more (which I highly recommend) Yahoo! developer advocate Chris Heilmann gave a great presentation showing the potential of YQL. It’s well worth checking out.

Overall YQL is a great innovation as it moves us yet another step closer to the internet of “small things, loosely joined”. It’s great to see Yahoo! driving these efforts.

On a related note, for our German-speaking friends, here’s our interview with Christian a few months back.

ScaleCamp – Lots of scale, not so much camp

As previously noted, a few members of the Lokku engineering team attended the UKs first ScaleCamp last Friday and we have photographic evidence to prove it:

Nestoria Team at UK ScaleCamp

We were also proud sponsors of the booze served immediately before and during the round of lightening talks at the end of the day.  Some of the effects may be apparent in the photo.

There was a lot of good content shared at the meeting.  Sessions of particular note included a spirited discussion about available data graphing systems for application monitoring, a very convincing discussion of the benefits of a coat of Varnish, and last.fm discussing how to scale up by 5x in the very short term.

Big thanks to The Guardian for hosting in their very nice offices near King’s Cross.  We look forward to attending (and sponsoring) bigger and better such events in the future.

Update: Ed’s slides from his talk about Lessons learned in doing lots with few people are up on Slideshare. Enjoy!

Nestoria First Sponsor of UK ScaleCamp

The good people at The Guardian are hosting UK Scale Camp on the 4th of December.  As far as I know, this is London’s first event focused exclusively on scaling applications for the web.  This is an unconference, so the schedule is not set in stone, but the content will likely be similar to Velocity, with a European focus of course.  Scaling high-performance web applications is something that is near and dear to our hearts at Nestoria.  And so is drinking.  For those reasons, we are doubly proud to be the event’s first sponsor and to have our money going towards crucial Friday beverages for attendees.

Not yet clear if anyone from Nestoria will be speaking at the event, but given our 3+ years of scaling up Nestoria from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of users, I think we should have at least some relevant source material to draw from.  Always nice to share a few war stories, but also very much looking forward to hear how other European web companies are integrating the long list of new scaling-related technologies out there – especially those from the FOSS community.

OSCON – New Venue, Great Content

Those that follow these things will know by now that OSCON 2009 took place in San Jose, California rather than its traditional home of Portland, Oregon.  Since this was my first year in attendance, I can not compare the two locations, but I can say that SJ was a welcome and consistently sunny break from the unreliable British Summer.  Lokku was good enough to let me go for the entire conference (2 days of half day tutorials followed by 2.5 days of one hour sessions and exhibitions), and I’ve come back quite a bit wiser on the happenings in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community.

I took the opportunity of the tutorials to get my head around some new (to me) programming languages.  SmallTalk is the original OO lingo with a legacy going back to the 1980s.  It has never been in favor for commercial development despite having had features back then that many “modern” OO languages (e.g. Java) lack today.  I was impressed by the Squeak development environment and its close interaction with the SmallTalk VM.  Working with SmallTalk requires a big change in mindset, but I see how it is worth it for a certain family of applications.  I get the impression that lots of current SmallTalk work is based on Seaside – a web frameframework that is the basis of the very cool DabbleDB online data navigator.

Erlang is another language with a long history that is back in the news of late.  Originally developed by academics with an eye towards use in the telcoms industry, its easy parallelism and compact syntax seem to have attracted a new audience.  Erlang and the Open Telecom Platform (OTP), make it easy to build applications comprised of many threads free communicating among eachother.  It is another tool that changes your approach to coding.  Erlang lacks some basic constructs that you find in almosst any “commercial” language.  For example, the best way to do a while() loop is through tail recursion.

Databases are another hot topic in the FOSS world right now.  MySQL got bought by Sun and Sun got bought by Oracle.  Many businesses (like Lokku) rely on MySQL and there is a certain amount of uncertainty out there about its future.  For whatever reasons, a number of MySQL forks have appeared.  I attended a session on one of these forks called ‘Drizzle’.  It is an effort to create a micro-kernel DB ready for scalable deployment in “The Cloud” (more on that later).  Best guess is that they will have stable code with a deployed userbase about this time next year.  Other groups are taking a different tack and eschewing SQL althogether in favour of databases focused on more particular uses.  For example, CouchDB is a documented-oriented database from the Apache Software Foundation and Neo4J is a database optimized for searching graphs.  Lots of movement and innovation in this area.

The various keynote talks were a mixed back of predictions and advocacy for various ideas and causes.  Getting FOSS into government and government money to FOSS-based companies was a topic of much discussion.  Along those lines, Sunlight Labs and others made their case for opening up government data.  Seems that the new US administration is moving in a direction that pleases the e-telligensia.  Our future also seems destined to bring us smaller devices offering ubiquitious services and more women working in IT in general and FOSS in particular.

The trip to San Jose was definitely worth it for more than just the sunshine and fish tacos.  I could certainly see myselfor others from the Lokku team) returning to OSCON in the years ahead.

Sponsoring 2009 Perl QA Hackathon

We are proud to sponsor the 2009 Perl QA Hackathon.  The event is being run by the Birmingham Perl Mongers from March 28th to March 30th.  Although we are not sending anyone to the event, we are happy to be supporting the efforts of the Perl community.  The Nestoria development team is very big into automated testing and makes extensive use of the excellent Perl QA toolchain that has been built up over the years.  Small teams need to rely as much as possible on automation.  A big thanks to everyone that will be pushing things forward at the Hackathon.  We could not have built Nestoria without your efforts.

Dynamic Company Seeks Nerdcore Interns

As usual, Nestoria looking to take in a few orphans and give them a warm place to code.  We have space for several interns to join our engineering teams for a period of several months.  For those between university terms, this is an opportunity to put aside all that fancy book learning for a spell and pick up some new tricks from the professionals.  Got the summer off?  Why not come and join us for three months?  It’s a paid position and you will learn a lot of things that aren’t in any textbook.  For those already out in the working world, this is a chance to pick up a few new skills and see what the start-up life is like while you are between gigs.

We are ready to take in interns at any time.  To be worthwhile, though, you must be able to commit for a minimum of three months.  Longer internships are possible.

Interested?  More information on our jobs pages.

For those of you not so familiar with Nerdcore, here is a little video that explains it all…

Techie Matchmaking

Last night, MTM and myself went in for a bit of matchmaking.  A local software guru organized an event for start-ups looking for developers and developers looking for start-ups. It was a bit like speed dating for the nerdcore set.  Nestoria are currently in the market for talented contractors to help us build some new and experimental applications on top of our API.  We need people that are technically capable (can build and host online applications) and have excellent design and UI development skills (CSS, JS, HTML).  The ideal person or team would be based in London and have a serious fetish for neo-cartography.  We are of course open to working with those that are more geographically remote and/or less personally intense about maps.  The event helped us to generate a number of good leads but if you know anybody that fits the bill and is looking for work please drop us a line.

Twincity Perl Workshop 2008, Nestoria represent!

Readers of this blog will by now be surely aware that the Nestoria engineering team has a proven attendance record through several technical conferences, including YAPC Europe 2008 in Copenhagen, YAPC Europe 2007 in Vienna as well as the two London Perl Workshop events in 2006 and 2007.

This time we’re heading back to the roots and two team members, Mike and I (Spiros) will be attending the Twincity Perl Workshop, happening in Vienna and Bratislava from the 7th of November to the 8th. Mike will be giving a talk about Perl profiling, reviewing the best tools for the job along with tips and tricks learned. I will be talking about A/B testing, how one can implement it and the basics behind its operations, including many pictu Continue reading ‘Twincity Perl Workshop 2008, Nestoria represent!’

Nestoria goes Chrome

Fellow Nestorpeople!

As what marketing folk like to call ‘Lead Users’ all of you will no doubt know that our friends over at Google launched a new web browser, known as Chrome, a few days ago.

As lovers of all things new we of course dove in and took the new browser for a spin.

Nestoria in Chrome

First of all the pros: Chrome is very fast at page rendering (especially pages like Nestoria results pages with lots of javascript), Chrome is very simple (we love simple) Chrome is opensource, and Chrome has some interesting new features. On the con side of the ledger, Chrome isn’t yet available on linux or Mac and folks are finding all sorts of issues with the T&C’s (the whispers of discomfort about Google’s potential for constant monitoring of user behaviour aren’t getting any quieter). All of this is covered in great detail and with heated debate on the various leading tech blogs.

What we found most interesting about Chrome are the features that allow you as a user to make searching Nestoria even easier. There’s a function called “Omnibox” that allows you to assign keywords to searchengines and search directly from the address bar. So, for example I want to find a property near Holborn in London. I assigned the keyword “n” to nestoria, and then away I go.

Nestoria as default search option

Nestoria in Chrome

All in all, Chrome, still has a few issues, but also has some nice new features and will hopefully push the pace of innovation even more, thus benefiting all of us.

On a final note, of course the next of our regular Browser Share posts will break out Chrome users specifically so you can see how the new entrant is doing.