**** OK, this works–but it’s not feasible. I found xserver-xgl to be VERY slow and had screen rendering issues. ****

Take this for what it’s worth–and that does not seem to be much.

When I originally installed Ubuntu Hardy on my HP Pavillion zt3000 laptop Compiz worked perfectly. Much to my dismay, after I re-installed, Compiz Fusion would not re-enable, even though I had the restricted drivers installed and enabled. (Selecting System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects -> Extra returned a “Desktop effects could not be enabled” error.)

I tried running “compiz” from the command line and one line of the output caught my eye:

checking for xgl not present

That gave me enough search terms to search on Google and hit paydirt on UbuntuForums.

The solution was simple: Go to System -> Administration -> Synaptics Package Manager and install “xserver-xgl.”

After I logged back out and back in, I enabled Compiz ( System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects -> Extra) and everything worked.

If you a techie kind of person and if you have ever had ambitions to build a large-scale website, you have thought to yourself “how can I make this scale really big?”

Well, the guys at YouTube have been through the drill. Here is a great video by Cuong Do, one of the founders of YouTube and the guy in charge of making YouTube scale, about how they managed to scale YouTube.

Yeah, there are some architectural decisions you can make up-front that will make scaling a website easier, but, after watching this video about the scalability challenges YouTube faced, I realized that:

1. Scalability is all about managing bottlenecks. You watch for them forming, you deal with them before they become a problem.
2. Improving performance in parts of the system that are not bottlenecks does very little good.
3. The problems you get are almost never the problems you plan for.
4. Plan, but don’t over plan. See what happens and adapt.

I have become a huge fan of the Google Tech Talk videos and tech videos in general on Google Video and YouTube. I have started to download them and load them on to my iPhone (how to do that is a future blog post itself) and I find myself watching them whenever I am in the subway, in a taxi or have a few minutes to kill. They are a great way to get a healthy dose of new knowledge fast and if you have them on the iPhone, you can get that dose in those random periods of downtime that would otherwise be wasted time.

I have been on a website performance and scalability kick lately. I thought I would share some articles I have enjoyed on the topic.

IBM Developer Works has a nice little two part series on Tuning Lamp Systems (pt 2).

Then again, IBM Developer Works often has some awesome articles. Scan it regularly if you can!

Enjoy!

Let’s face it: some people should just NOT be allowed near computers.

Photo by °Florian

InfoWorld, a magazine that is seldom considered a bastion of humor, has a series of hilarious articles with real-life stories about seriously stupid things that IT people and Hackers did with computers.

They are a great way to kill some time and leave you feeling smugly confident that you are, at least, not that stupid.

Stupid user tricks: Eleven IT horror stories

More stupider user tricks: IT horror stories redux

Stupid hacker tricks

Stupid hacker tricks, part two: The folly of youth

From the The Nation:

Soon, a factory will lead the push for development of open-source code software for Thai industries, locally.

The Association of Thai Software Industry (ATSI), the Industrial Promotion Department, the Software Industry Promotion Agency (Sipa), Microsoft (Thailand), Rangsit University and 20 local software companies have joined hands to set up the country’s first software factory.

ATSI president Somkiat Ungaree said the software factory is expected to open in the next two months. It will be housed at Rangsit University. The factory will receive Bt3 million in funding from the Industrial Promotion Department and Bt2 million from Sipa.

The factory’s first project will be developing a prototype of small-size manufacturing resource planning (MRP) software used in small and medium manufacturing plants.

Excellent! Home-grown, open source software so small Thai manufacturing plants won’t have to shell out big-bucks and be locked into proprietary software. GREAT IDEA!

But wait…

He said 100 programmers from the 20 local software companies, would be trained in Microsoft’s .Net platform at the factory. They will then develop open-source code software two days a week at the factory.

Huh? They are developing it in .NET! OK–so application will be open source and the application will be free… you are just locked into an expensive, closed-source, insecure PLATFORM.

I don’t know who dreams this stuff up…

There’s the thing you do all the time. Solutions that you have internalized and you often can look at a problem and you think “oh, that’s a _____ problem and if you do _____ it’s easy to solve.” That’s a design pattern: a generalized problem that has a set of generalized solutions.

Design patterns don’t mean cookie cutter solutions! Design patterns are just generalized solutions to common problems. They are usually a good starting point when tackling complex problems: deconstruct the complex problems to component pieces, look at common solutions, then build something unique and amazing by combining them in new ways and adding your own unique flourishes as appropriate.

When I saw the Yahoo Design Patterns page a light went off. Kind of like a flash bulb. I had been working on a conceptual site design for a client and, looking over the catalog of design patterns, I suddenly saw how I could combine a few pieces to make a pretty darn slick feature for the website.

I am going to make the YDP site a regular stop when I am pondering complex site architecture or UI issues. It’s great to have a simple catalog of basic design patterns to pour over.

It’s easy to get caught up in the complexities of a problem and forget to take a step back and think about it from a simpler, more granular level.

It’s much easier to deconstruct complex problems when you have a bare-bones catalog of simple design patterns staring you in the face. The little nuggets trigger all sorts of “aha” flashbulbs that get the creative juices flowing again.

Awesome.

Well, Encylopedia Britannica has gone wiki.

Not a bad move, but will they be able to be able to build a strong contributor base? One one hand there is some cachet to having your contribution approved by EB, on the other hand, it’s perceived as closed, old-school, stuffy and exclusive–which might put potential contributors off.

I do like the “open for contributions but expert moderated” model. I think it’s the best model for online travel content site and it’s the kind of model I see for travelguide.com’s future.

Barcamp Chiang Mai is underway. We have 104 people who are attending.

Group Shot. That’s a lot of Barcampers!

Preetam Rai just gave a very interesting presentation on Interesting Web 2.0 Companies in Asia. Draper Fischer Jurvetson just set up an office in Vietnam. Preetam suggested that if companies in Thailand wanted to create a great international site, they focus on their countries innate strengths and pointed to tourism as an excellent existing industry to build great websites around. He also suggested that a sight that was tightly focused ONLY on travel in Thailand that offered good content and community input was badly needed and would probably be quite successful.

2:00 pm I led a discussion on “What’s the Best CMS: Joomla, Drupal, WordPress or Typo3?” Which basically came to the conclusion that there is no one “best” CMS, just many good tools that are better suited for different audiences.

3:00pm Getting ready to do a presentation “Twitter Rules, sudo Sugree.” @Sugree will be co-presenting with me and @molecularck via Twitter!

4:00 Coffee break, distributed T-shirts. The crowd starts to dwindle.

4:30pm My final presentation was “Online Tourism in Thailand: Issues and Opportunities” with Dr. Ken Cosh, the head pf the Payap IT Faculty.

6:00 Supposed to finish, but realize we scheduled one too many session. Great! Enjoying a great discussion on social networks in Thailand.

6:30pm Off to Dayli for an after party!

Photos on Flickr tagged with BarcampChiangMai.

What’s not to love about this font?

AW Siam is a free font for Mac and PC that give you English characters with REAL Thai flair.

It even uses a few actual Thai characters. (For example, “a” is “lor ling”, “T” is “sara o” and “n” is “tor ta-haan.”)

The funny thing is, when I showed it to some of my Thai friends that read English, they had a hard time reading it–the “Thainess” of the characters threw them!

I have had a flurry of thoughts since posted my blog “My New Distributed Brain.”

The result of that epiphany is this: that Twitter has the potential to be a better search engine than Google.

“But,” you say, “Twitter is a microblog? How can it beat Google at search?”

Are you on Twitter?

Try this out: the next time you have a question, post it to Twitter instead of doing a search on Google.

Did you get an answer? Was it The Right Answer?

This doesn’t work everytime–at least not yet. But it works often enough that I use this approach to answer a lot of questions on a daily basis.

It works well enough that I notice a lot of other people that I follow are using it to ask questions–and get answers. (Twitter founder Biz Stone, Jason Calacanis and Chris Pirillo come to mind.)

It works often enough that Google and the other search engines would be well advised to take notice.

Querying Twitter does not always work right now but Twitter is growing fast.

With it’s open and flexible APIs, people are finding more and more ways to use the Twitter platform in new and innovative manners.

Twitter is a great platform to tap the collective intelligence and channel it into enhancing–even transcending the search engine as we know it. It’s not AI, it’s all “I” (real human Intelligence).

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft–watch out!

Why Twitter?

Why Twitter?

Could another messaging / microblogging platform beat Twitter at this game?

Possibly–but Twitter has several advantages at this point:

• Large user base. Twitter has 1 million users and it’s growing 800% annually.
• It seems to have a user base that skews towards openness and community. Good, good.
• Following is open by default; following does not require consensus by both parties; one person can choose to follow another in an non-symmetrical relationship; this makes it easy for people to build a list of people they want to hear from, easy for people to build a following.
• The “Track” feature allows you to track words of interest to you: this is critical.
• SMS integration. Can send and receive tweets via SMS. Perfect for mobile search.

Would people really have time to answer all these questions? Don’t worry, as Clay Shirkey points out: We Have the Time! (Part 2)

Scenario: A Major Search Engine Acquires Twitter

Once this meme catches on, I see a very high potential for this scenario to unravel:

• One of the major search engines moves rapidly to acquire Twitter.
• The search engine uses the Twitter API to post some queries as tweets.
• People start to answer the search engine tweets; they do it for many reasons: ego, community, interest in the topic, self promotion–the reasons are many.
• The search engine uses Ajax to put twitter responses on the results page in real time, augmenting their algorithmic search results. (Thanks for pointing this out, Arthur!)
• The search engine becomes the #1 search engine AND the biggest social network on the planet, dwarfing the Google of today.

There is a whole lot more the Search Engine could do to optimize the process; this is an idea in it’s infancy. Options to increase performance include: caching results of previous similar tweets, using the tweets as another source of signals for standard search results, build and integrate a reputation system so that tweeters are ranked by their accrued trust and accurate ratings (this would help to prevent spam from cropping up in tweet results). And more. A lot more.

I have done a search (on Google) and I have not found a similar system proposed. Hmmm.

I did however, get an answer on a similar system when I tweeted about this idea. (See! See what I mean!)

@tewson pointed out that ChaCha is a search engine that can take queries from users via the web, voice and SMS and a real person compiles an SMS response, but this is no where near as powerful as querying the masses.

Sergei, Larry, if you guys are reading this, follow me on Twitter: @jfxberns. We should talk.

2008.06.18 Update:

@celerachan pointed out this blog on SheGeeks by Alana Taylor that, basically, reaches the same conclusion: She Geeks In Tech - Stop Using Search Engines, Start Twittering