ProjectX Blog

Summer of Code rolls on with a monster line up speakers.

This week Sidhe, coming soon Weta Digital and Trade Me.

Title: Has New Zealand Got Game?
hosted by Tyrone McAuley of Sidhe

When: 27th November 2007
Time: 12:00pm
Place: MY632 Kelburn Campus -Murphy Building
Map: ZoomIn

Topic: Has New Zealand got game? by Tyrone McAuley.

The videogame industry has grown and evolved immensely over the last decade. It is no longer a world of small developers building niche games played by geeks and nerds. It’s a big, global business with an appeal firmly entrenched in pop culture. It is beginning to rival the film industry as an entertainment medium and it continues to grow and evolve at a cracking pace. So where does New Zealand fit into this behemoth? Share an intimate view of the New Zealand industry through the growth and development of Sidhe Interactive and the challenges it faces in the gaming world. Find out how to get into the industry, what it means and what it takes to be a good game developer.

RSVP on the forum

(I once worked for a company _this_ big – Nat Torkington)

Nathan Torkington, the reknown foo master, open source advocate, internet strategist, fisherman and banjo player will be delivering a seminar called “Design for the future” for the Summer of Code seminar series. Nathan will be talking about future software trends and what does it mean for open source software writers.

The talk is open to public. Please RSVP on the Summer of Code forum.

Title: Design for the future by Nathan Torkington
When: 20th November 2007
Time: 12:00pm
Place: MY632 Kelburn Campus -Murphy Building
Map: ZoomIn

Due to tightening of government funding, we have a couple of talented students who are looking for work over the Summer.

If you have any full-time / part-time work for programmers over the summer send me an email and I’ll send through their contact details.

If you’re interested email me!

There’s an article in today’s info-tech that the current skills shortage is going to effect the economy.

Gen-i general manager Chris Quin has warned that the shortage of ICT staff in New Zealand has reached the point where it may prevent companies from taking advantage of new technologies and could dent economic growth.

“You can’t solve it just by recruiting harder. This is an industry problem, and it is not a problem that can be solved in New Zealand alone or by one player.”
….
Part of the solution may be making careers in the industry more attractive to “Generation Y” and recruiting from overseas, he says.

<SOAPBOX>

Well, hello! Sorry if I seem a little cyncial to the article. We’ve had a skills shortage for the past 2-3 years. We live in a global market. If you have the right skills there are massive opportunities internationally. Kiwi’s have a fantastic reputation overseas, so its only a matter of time before more raiding occurs. As more people work overseas, they’ll draw a lot of their friends oversea. Its only going to get worse! Unfortunately one of main draw cards is the pay!

We created the Summer of Code as a way to attract the latest students into tech careers. We’re accelerating the learning of the students to help create a more experienced graduate workforce in years to come. There is plenty of amazing tech happening within NZ. Our problem is we’re not so good at letting everyone know! We’ve want to open the eyes to all of our students that there are other opportunites to working in a cubile farm or heading off overseas to find more intersting work.

Like a lot of other companies that I have heard talk about the recruitment shortages, they’re not actually doing a lot about it. Everything they do is is short term. Summer of Code is a long term commitment to accelerate talent and showcase where the real innovation and creativity of the country lies – our start-up and emerging companies. We want to showcase our heroes like Sam Morgan and Rod Drury as example of where NZ is heading.

So my big question to Gen-i is what are they doing about the skills shortage? Recruiting from Britain or investing or our future ? What are you doing for our tomorrow ?

</SOAPBOX>

Here’s a simple test to see if you use more of your right brain than your left brain….

It’s a little freaky when it changes direction!

Time magazine has announced their inventions of the year with iPhone taking top award.

Here are two amazing products….

1) Wireless charging

2) Alarm clock pillow

We’re entering an exciting era of technology…. What will we see next year????

The first Summer of Code 2.0 seminar has been announced. Stephen Cheng from Innaworks is giving a talk on “Mobile Chaos – a survey of the mobile market, technologies and opportunities”. It should be an interesting talk given all the happenings in the last 12 months, iPhone and now Android.

The talk is open to the public, places are limited (Summer of Code students, companies and VIP’s have priority)
Title: Mobile Chaos – a survey of the mobile market, technologies and opportunities

When: 13th November 2007
Time: 12:00pm – 1pm
Place: Rutherford House Lecture Theatre 3
Map: ZoomIn
RSVP on the Summer of Code 2.0 forum (Sign-up is required)

In common with a lot of AJAX-based sites, ZoomIn makes a lot of use of autocompletion, specifically to make it easier and more reliable to enter addresses. But thanks to this article from Gizmodo, we can see some of the hilarious questions that come up when autocomplete kicks in too early: Ask.com helpfully starts completing a phrase such as “is it legal to” with some bizarre and sometimes hilarious queries from other users.

But my favourite is an example that shows the touching faith that some people have in the Internet. Apparently it will answer questions that have stumped philosophers since the dawn of humanity:

We’re in the process of rebuilding our server infrastructure. We’re shifting from debian sarge with postgres 7.4 to Ubuntu 7 and postgres 8. We currently investigate the stability and scalability of various rails stacks. Also we’re looking at different solutions of handling high volume static content delivery ie. delivery of our map tiles. (This could apply to any static content like thumbnails) During our research into reverse proxy alternatives, Paul Gold put me onto varnish.

Varnish is written from the ground up to be a high performance caching reverse proxy. The author built it due to his frustration at squid and he provides a detailed analysis of why squid sucks. In his own words…

Varnish is written from the ground up to be a high performance caching reverse proxy. Squid is a forward proxy that can be configured as a reverse proxy. Besides – Squid is rather old and designed like computer programs where supposed to be designed in 1980.

– Poul-Henning Kamp, Varnish architect and coder.

I’ve done a little bit of testing against lighttpd 1.4, apache 2.2, vs varnish with some surprising results.

My test involved using apache bench (ab) in a brute force test of fetching a 1k, 5k, 10k and 20k image file. I tested against 50,100, 200 concurrent users. (eg. ab -n 20000 -c 100 http://test/5kimage.jpg ) I tested against a default installation of apache 2.2 and lighttpd 1.4.12.

Here are the results:

* = Denotes network throughput was approaching  10.93Mb / sec . The size of the network connection was effectively putting a cap on the throughput.

A couple things to note from the testing. First,  Apache forks a lot of processes, while lighttpd and varnish fork threads.Also, the CPU seemed to be under less load using lighttpd and varnish compared to apache.

From the results, Varnish excels at caching small files, and as fast as the other servers at higher file sizes. I want to do a bit more testing against varnish. For my next set of testing, I’ll test the webservers against 100 random images and post the results.

Here’s something for Monday morning…

37 signals have written a post about what Gordan Ramsay can teach software developers. Its a great post, with some good analogies. That made me think….

Forget Y-Combinator, forget Full Code Press, what about Hell’s Code ?!? Get developers to spend a number weeks going through a number coding challenges and eliminations until they win full funding for a start-up for a year ? Clients would wait around until the developers complete their prototypes, beta apps and full applications and give them a rating….

I thought it would be fun to imagine what Gordon Ramsay would say and do if he ran Hell’s Code ???

What would he yell at ???

• Developers who forgot to install a patch or module – (Forgot to add an ingredient)
• The application didn’t run (The dish is cold !)
• Didn’t test their code (Forgot to test the meat)
• Didn’t use CSS (Forgot to season the dish)

I can imagine Gordon Ramsay, if he found something wrong, he’d delete the code and tell them to start again. And if the developers made too many mistakes, he shutdown the coding and send all the clients home!

What else would Gordon Ramsay do ????