The moons of Verthandi - A random blog by Dani Giribet

El mite de Brick Lane

Ja van tres vegades seguides que anem per la zona del mític Brick Lane i acabem sense sopar un curry.

El carrer és molt conegut per la gran quantitat de restaurants indis i la guia Timeout diu que per aquesta raó el carrer també rep el nom de “Banglatown“. La guia també avisa que “quantitat i qualitat no són el mateix” i que hi ha altres zones i restaurants molt millors.

És molt cert i alguns dels que he visitat han estat decepcionants, i fins i tot el Preem té dies variables, encara que l’experiència diu que dóna molts millors resultats si s’hi va a dinar i no a sopar.

Valen molt més la pena llocs com el meu nou preferit, el restaurant Gaylord, amb seus a diversos llocs del món, decoració “classicoide” i servei de qualitat. També interessa el Punjab, més senzillet però on també saben quedar bé, no us perdeu les especialitats de la cuina del nord de l’Índia així com els plats més clàssics. I finalment tenim una bona relació qualitat-preu -amb uns plats força picants-, el Sartaj. En aquest últim hi serveixen pa naan tamany “familiar”, només per si hi ha molta gana.

Però bé, si finalment no ens movem de Brick Lane, sempre ens queda el The Big Chill Bar que hi ha allí mateix, que és genial.

Experiencing server-side OSGi with Equinox

There is currently a lot of buzz about the OSGi java component technology, also server-side. I have been playing -and working- with this interesting technology recently, mainly the Equinox server-side bundles that allow deployment of an OSGi environment in a java servlet environment.

A fundamental problem that this technology solves is being able to load an OSGi environment on a servlet server. That is a relatively costly operation that needs to be done only once and be persistent on the server in between client requests. After that point, state is maintained and bundles can be deployed and managed as needed. Creating, loading and destroying the environment for each request would just be unacceptable. One interesting functionality is then being able to serve client requests, specially HTTP requests, uploads, provide REST interfaces, etc.

Eclipse provides a number of projects to load the environment, register servlets, handle http requests, etc. Of particular interest is the ‘org.eclipse.equinox.servletbridge’ project, which initally starts the framework, loads the appropriate framework bundles, etc.

Looking at the code, you can start by checking out the main class, which has a number of interesting responsabilities:

/**
 * The BridgeServlet provides a means to bridge the servlet and
OSGi runtimes. This class has 3 main responsibilities:
 * 1) Control the lifecycle of the associated FrameworkLauncher
in line with its own lifecycle
 * 2) Provide a servlet "hook" that allows all servlet requests
to be delegated to the registered servlet
 * 3) Provide means to manually control the framework lifecycle
 */

I personally like classes that have a small set of responsabilities, but one can argue that the three are so related that they are expressions of the same one. The first responsability described is actually managing the lifecycle of the OSGi framework FrameworkLauncher class.

Basically, the Servlet Container will load the bridge web application, create an instance of ServletBridge and call its init method (defined by the HttpServlet interface which it implements). In that method the OSGi environment will be created and loaded by the following code:

framework.init(getServletConfig());
framework.deploy();
framework.start();
frameworkStarted = true;

The attribute ‘framework’ is an instance of the ‘FrameworkLauncher’ class, which encapsulates the OSGi environment management logic. The ‘init’ method pulls information from the servlet configuration (such as the name of the ‘WEB-INF’ folder) and calls an overloaded empty init method that could be exploited by specialised subclasses (more on this later).

After that, the framework is “deployed”. The method in question declares the following contract:

/**
* deploy is used to move the OSGi framework libraries into a location
   suitable for execution.
* The default behavior is to copy the contents of the webapp's
   WEB-INF/eclipse directory to the webapp's temp directory.
*/

And that’s right, the code is quite straightforward and goes along the lines of:

File servletTemp = (File) context.getAttribute("javax.servlet.context.tempdir");
platformDirectory = new File(servletTemp, "eclipse");
if (!platformDirectory.exists()) {
	platformDirectory.mkdirs();
}
File plugins = new File(platformDirectory, "plugins");
copyResource(resourceBase + "plugins/", plugins);

Which copies the bundles you want to deploy onto the OSGi environment onto the Servlet Container temporary folder (the ‘work’ folder in the case of Apache Tomcat).

After that the framework is started, reading .ini configuration options, command line switches, bundle list, run levels and so forth. We have not been able to get bundles started automatically unless we specify the bundle filename, complete with ‘.jar’ extension and all. One interesting option is the ability to fire up a standard OSGi console that uses the STDIN/OUT of the Servlet Container process.

Using the very same servlet bridge, there are a number of URLs that can be hit do control the framework, start, stop, undeploy, etc.

After that, one can register servlets as extension points or listen for services named “org.osgi.service.http.HttpService” and adding servlets with code going along these lines:

public Object addingService(ServiceReference reference) {
	HttpService httpService = (HttpService) context.getService(reference);
	httpService.registerServlet(url, servlet, null, null);
}

All is well and good. However, in working with the bridge code we have found a glitch in the startup code. Whenever the bridge app is started anew, it does the framework deployment and startup as expected but if there are any bundles that have any changes they will not be read by the environment unless the redeploy url is hit. This is fine in development environments but not on production, where you want to keep things  as smooth as possible.

Behold the power of OSS, we took a look at the code and submitted a bug entry complete with a working patch that fixes the problem. It is not pretty but it works (it has some code duplication).

Server-side OSGi is proving to be the place to be, or at least it is quite promising. Give it a try.

L’Enginyeria Informàtica aturada???

M’he quedat sense paraules en llegir la notícia que el Govern Espanyol encara no ha publicat les fitxes de competències per les enginyeries informàtiques. Informàtica és doncs l’única enginyeria que no en té de cara al procés de regularització de Bolonya. A més, sembla ser que algunes de les competències més pròpies de l’enginyeria del software s’han afegit a les competències de les enginyeries de telecomunicacions.

Aturada el 19 de novembre: per una Informàtica digna

Es pot trobar més informació al blog AI2 i a la pàgina de la convocatòria de vaga de Huelga Informatica. També hi ha un post interessant “Bolonya per dummies“, on el tema està molt ben explicat i resumit tot i que no estic d’acord amb la valoració que en fa l’autor. Obligatòria lectura ponderada dels diversos comentaris.

Probablement el dia 19 seré a Barcelona i de bon gust em sumaré a la convocatòria i les accions que siguin pertinents.

A Fistful of Fandango

One amazing thing about London is the sheer amount of musical activity that takes place every other day. One only needs to glance at TimeOut, check out the usual pub where they do regular gigs or just randomly amble around at dusk and crash into any music venue.

Recently, A Fistful of Fandango was organised by the indie guys at Club Fandango, which regularly do indie gigs at several venues. Actually, I find the their website slightly overwhelming with so many artists and information. The gig in question was a part of a series, with the girl duet Robots in Disguise as the main band in that particular night.

Quite a few surprises there, the Black Affair singer plus supporting guys  were quite nice. Very spontaneous, did sound well rehearsed and serious. A pity it was so dark on the stage you could barely see them, one can only imagine they are actually looking for that image. They felt quite at ease if a bit too shy and the audience didn’t seem to understand. Perhaps seeing a little bit more of the performing artists would have helped. Anyway, sweet enough to be left wanting more of these dark sounds. Well, what else can be said of a guy who’s traveled more than 16,000 miles on top of a camel?

Slagsmalsklubben was nice as well, funny with good humored character. Check them out!

Robots in Disguise was somewhat of a disappointment. The female duet overflows with potential but they looked and did sound too ahead of themselves, nervous and thinking rather than playing. Seemingly worried about their customes rather than their performance. Actually, the supporting drummer seemed the only one who was enjoying himself and did put a a lot of effort into the gig. Learn from Black Affair girls! Though the lines to engage the public were quite good, rehearshed or not…

Les generacions de l’audiovisual es troben a Edinburg

S’ha celebrat recentment a Edinburg el MediaGuardian International Television Festival. Encara que el nom esmenti “television”, abarca també tot l’univers de l’audiovisual, també anomenat “media”.

Entre els “piulantes” d’aquesta i altres edicions podem trobar el Rupert Murdoch, el seu fill James Murdoch, de la News Corporation, l’Al Gore, diversos personatges de la BBC, Skype, UKTv, ITV, Al Jazeera, etc.

Com era d’esperar, el rotatiu intern de la BBC, l’Ariel, se n’ha fet ressò en portada. Es parla de moltes coses, com per exemple el control sobre els èxits de BBC Worldwide i el seu impacte en el mercat audiovisual, amb crítiques desde diversos sectors, el parlament, Endemol UK, etc. Sorprenent la contribució del director de TV de Channel 4, defensant la branca comercial de la corporació anglesa i afegint que la BBC “rep bastonades per no explotar prou la seva marca arreu del món i patacades si ho fa bé”.

M’ha cridat l’atenció una de les seccions especials dedicades al festival, que parla de l’impacte del vídeo sota demanda (VOD) en els media i com fa que la gent del “mundillo” es replantegi les coses (literalment “think differently”).

Simon Nelson de la BBC, comenta que esta molt interessat en continguts que puguin arribar a l’audiència sense haver de passar pel “dossier” de programa de TV convencional. Aquests continguts i els que generen els propis usuaris tenen èxit si s’en fa ressò i s’obliden si no tenen qualitat, sense passar per la “graella” televisiva.

Kangaroo, l’oferta de TV per IP en la que treballa l’Ashley Highfield, va participar activament en el debat. El treball conjunt de BBC Worldwide, ITV i Channel4 tindrà 10.000 hores de programació el dia del seu llançament, i estan buscant continguts “addicionals” als programes tradicionals per fer la seva oferta més atractiva. És curiós com tres “rivals” d’aquest nivell s’ajunten per anar tots a una en aquest mercat. Si la plataforma tira endavant serà més fàcil ser-hi que no pas estar fora. D’entrada sembla un bon complement pel servei gratuït de la BBC iPlayer.

Malgrat que Nelson va comentar que la TV seqüencial tant la generalista com la especialitzada tenen un paper molt important en presentar continguts nous a les audiències. La gent necessita accedir a les novetats per formar-se una opinió. Malgrat això, el de la BBC va afegir que el nou escenari del contingut audiovisual sota demanda representa una pèrdua d’influència pels commissioners, és a dir, les persones i productors que encarreguen programes als equips corresponents. Va subratllar que la majoria tenim una manera de pensar curiosa: “mira, aquí tenim una cosa nova, això vol dir que lo vell morirà”. Reflexió tòpica però interessant, l’aparició del vídeo sota demanda no significa l’acabament de la televisió seqüencial, però si la seva evolució.

Idea que no va agradar al consultor Nigel Walley, que comentava que l’”era multicanal s’acaba”, que no calen tants canals si tenim bons PVRs i bons serveis sota demanda. En part també es veu clar el seu raonament, perquè necessitem tants canals si podem gravar o descarregar el que més interessa?

Qui té la raó? Segurament tots i cap. Posats a fer futurologia, mirem al present. Una de les poques lliçons que han sortit de la revolució de la Web és “equivoca’t, però fes-ho aviat, sovint i barat“. Amb aquest mantra molta gent s’ha fet milionària, sobretot als USA. Com podem aplicar aquesta experiència al món de l’audiovisual? De moltes maneres, per exemple, en el cas de continguts destinats exclusivament a Internet, perquè no agafem un equip de dos o tres persones i ens posem a fer rodatges ràpids? Fem un guió en un dia, el rodatje en un altre i la postproducció en el tercer. Si no funciona agafem una altra idea. Si funciona tornem a fer un cicle de 3 dies, i hi tornem un altre cop. Què passa si ho fem en 2 dies en comptes de tres?

Tampoc caiguem en sonar com un manifest en favor del cinema més artístic, però les eines d’avui ens donen una agilitat de mitjans i preus que no tenen precedent, s’està aprofitant al màxim? Si el contingut resultant és aspre i espontani, doncs millor. I de fet, per molt ràpid que es faci, serà un contingut infinitament millor que el 95% del que hi ha a YouTube, no?

Happy simple birthday

Some people love birthdays, some dislike them, others simply ignore them. Regardless, they happen and will continue happening. We might as well enjoy them, yeah?

My birthday was quite recently and as is quite usual with people that were born during summer periods, I was away from home on holidays.

I happened to be spending a few days in Eivissa, one of my favourite places to hang out and relax. In my opinion,  and contrary to what many people thing, the island has many interesting sides that do not have much to do with its partying fame.

So, say it is your birthday and…

You enjoy a delicious curry that reminds you of eastern London in the Ancient People restaurant, away from the bustling town center. Sit at the bar while sipping a cold Cobra beer, then discuss with the owner the level of hotness of their spicy chicken Madras, “It’s like London, you know”. Amazing rice comes together with quite decent curry and large nan bread and the moments drag on until the mango lassi is there to help you end them in style.

You get some unexpected calls from loved ones far away. Those are always welcome.

You taste a great ‘paella mixta’ in one of my preferred eating venues ever, the great Ca Na Ribes, in a lovely street of the Santa Eulàlia town. While you wait for the main course, you have a nice healthy salad and you eat as much “all i oli” sauce on traditional balearic-style bread as you can. The restaurant is decorated in a way that recalls a sparse forest, with plenty of creeping plants and many overhanging greenery. The peaceful and uncompromising atmosphere are nice complements to excellent food.

You unwrap some presents that you kept unopened in your luggage. The temptation to open them before their time is not easy to overcome but you prevail. You really get two gifts, one on the day you are given the present and one on the day you open it, at the same price!

You thrive in the calm company of old friends, of the kind that is never completely lost and every encounter is lavender fresh. Discussion stretches for hours, like the equally welcome silences, which are followed by politics, sports, technology, entertainment, gossip, food, girls, friends, music, servers, jokes, restaurants, travel, places, work, languages, anecdotes, computers, synonyms, poetry, lyrics, comedy, hobbies, adventure, the past, the present and the future. After that perhaps some quiet and finish it off with a jog, hopping around the convenient urban obstacles of Vila town.

You relax with the excellent service in the Nanking, a chinese food refuge where cold Catalan beer is mixed with simple oriental dishes. While eating spring rolls you idly watch the night time workers order stuff to go and wait patiently, thinking of the long shift ahead. The staff welcome clientele with a smile and local elder men eat alone while leafing the paper and re-reading the sports sections. The hubhub of the streets just below is well forgotten now.

You doze in the amazing Ses Salines beach, just past the salty flats, stopping near Sa Trinxa to bathe in the fiery sun and balm yourself in the cool chill out music that oozes out of the seaside bar. Local waitresses speak to you in fluid Catalan and seem to merge against the creamy sand, they belong there. Cold heinekens sweat condensation in the heat and reflect the black-clad staff girls’ thin frames while they hop from client to client, occasionally barking rapid-fire chatter amongst themselves. Time drags on and on.

You remember days past, recalling times more than ten years gone. Can’t believe college is finished and many projects are now complete. So many things have been said and done. Can’t believe who isn’t here with us anymore and pleasantly surprised at who is still with us. In the short hours my birthday is well over, the sun is up and I just take a photo. Why not? Simple tastes are better.

Who says birthdays are boring? ^_^

Crisi, quina crisi?

Resulta curiós venir a la península i sentir parlar de la “crisi”. La visió aquí és molt més catastrofista que a UK. Sembla que l’impacte de la política del “totxo” té molta més incidència i la caiguda és de més amunt.

Mentrestant, la directoria de finances de la BBC comenta en el diari Ariel que s’han reduït les despeses del grup en uns 347M de lliures, només 8 milions per sota de l’objectiu previst. Fins ara s’ha aconseguit una rebaixa en el que es gasta el grup de fins a un 10%. L’objectiu pels pròxims anys és rebaixar el cost un 3% anual.

A la vegada, a la branca comercial de BBC Worldwide augmenten els beneficis fins a 117.7 milions de lliures. Segons es comenta a l’Ariel, l’experiència a Worlwide ens diu que durant una desacceleració econòmica la gent és queda més a casa i consumeix més contingut audiovisual i interactiu. Si ara els ingressos totals s’acosten als mil milions, doncs tot això que hi haurà.

Bé, no tot són bones notícies per la British Broadcasting Corporation, la inflació anual a UK s’espera que sigui d’un 5%, mentres que la licence fee només augmentarà un 3% aquest any i un 2% els vinents. Això vol dir que la corporació veurà efectivament reduït de forma significativa el seu poder de gastar diners en els pròxims anys.

Aquí és on hi entren els moviments de fitxes (entre d’altres) que hem comentat, reducció de la despesa en 3 punts més un creixement real i previst en els ingressos que fa la BBC via la seva branca comercial. Això s’uneix a altres moviments estratègics com la reducció i restructuració de la plantilla, unficació de redaccions, auditories realitzades pel BBC Trust, acomiadaments selectius d’executius en casos justificats, etc.

Avui en dia ja és un tòpic parlar dels grans canvis en el sector audiovisual, la crisi dels models actuals és una realitat i una ombra que plana sobre el sector, tant en la seva vessant privada com en la pública. La BBC no n’està exempta ni molt menys, però la meva sensació és que ja s’està preparant amb antel·lació per quan l’espasa de Damocles caigui sobre els nostres caps. L’anticipació sembla una millor estratègia que esperar a veure-les venir i a veure que fan els altres. Estem avisats!

An Evil Guest

I am quite pleased to read in Lupine Nuncio that Gene Wolfe is releasing a new book this September.

The book is called ‘An Evil Guest‘ and it is supposed to be a pulp, adventurous, Lovecraft-meets-Replicants thriller. Definitely looking forward to 304 more pages of Gene Wolfe goodness. Great news!

Eurovisió 2008, l’anticultura?

No em vaig poder resistir veure gairebé sencer el festival d’Eurovisió 2008. Després de ignorar-ho els últims 2 anys o així hi havia prou suquet aquest any com per no perdre’s-ho. Les raons eren moltes i molt variades:

El dia que es va fer la final anglesa a la BBC casualment estavem amb un company -el Chris-, al pub de la BBC. Haviem tingut ‘pollastres’ a la feina i haviem anat a treballar en dissabte. Vam resoldre els “problemes” laborals, vam anar a un dels meus restaurants indis preferits de tot London, l’Ajanta Tandoori i havent plegat vam anar a remullar-ho al mític BBC Club.

Aquell dia es feia la final de la selecció de l’artista que representaria a UK a l’Studio One del Television Centre i el pub es va anar omplint d’artistes. Bon ambient! Entre tots vam veure com l’Andy Abraham era l’artista seleccionat, que passava de escombriaire a defensar l’”honor” de UK a Eurovisió. Entre tot una gran nit a l’anglesa, “pints” i “chips” inclosos.

Una altra raó va ser el Rodolfo Chikilicuatre, òbviament. Els corredors d’apostes anglesos li donaven un 25-1 o sigui que per cada lliura esterlina que hi poses, si el Chikilicuatre guanya te n’emportes 25! No em vaig poder estar d’ensenyar als d’aquí un dels punts més forts de la nostra cultura… Em va resultar impossible transmetre les vibracions de l’humor català, però bé, l’intenció és lo que compta, no?

I finalment, perles com la proposta del francès Sebastien Tellier, grandíssim i eclèctic directe, encara més gran clip i una mica de música de veritat per variar. També destacable l’oferta turca, a mans de Mor ve Ötesi.

Aquestes tardes a l’anglesa, els descobriments musicals entre tota la brossa i la companyia de bons amics és la gràcia de tot plegat, no? Encara que el comentarista de la BBC de tota la vida, el Terry Wogan, digui que vol plegar…

Innovation comes from many places, but it should be measured everywhere

Innovation is one of the buzzwords of the Media Industry. “We need to do more innovation”, “Innovation is one of our key assets”, “We need to bolster innovation” and so on are some of the catchphrases that are heard in our modern New Media cubicles and Web 2.0 meeting rooms.

The issue is obviously the focus of zillions of books, experts and analysts and is constantly being discussed by “experts” around the globe.

Recently some insightful fruit has dropped from the Web tree, in the form of the ‘11 innovation lessons from Blizzard‘ lessons consolidation article published on the Inside Innovation blog.

Quite interesting and to the point indeed, without any unecessary cruft or embellishment. There are a number of very relevant pieces of advice, too long to cover on a blog entry.

However, I would like to stress one in particular, namely “Statistics Bolster Experience”. That is highlighted in the article but it should deserve one on its own. In my years of working in the media business whenever any kind of metric of success -no matter how relative-, has been put in place it has been a invaluable tool to actually achieve that particular project objectives. Actually, these stats help the project managers know when to stop working on it, which I would say it is equally as important if not more.

It also shows when objective and trivial to acquire metrics are plainly ignored. Recently I paid a visit to a friend’s office and we discussed Web design, CSS implementation and the importance of page weight. As a random exercise, we fired up the debug menu in Safari and examined the different loading sequences and rendering times of a number of sites.

We visited a site which shall go unnamed, but the main page did amount to more than 2.1MB! And that without any embedded video loading. Such a thing should never have made it live to clog the pipes of the net. In developing a professional Web page or portal, it would be very helpful to keep track of page weight as new features and content are added to pages. Just stick it into an Excel spreadsheet or Google spreadsheet or whatever.

Use simple metrics and breakdowns, for instance the different types listed by Safari should be okay: Total Size, Documents, Stylesheets, Images, Scripts and Other. Add average total loading time with cache turned off by firing the browser 4 times or so. Automate the process for extra karma points if you like.

Build a graph over time and note where major features were added, removed, optimisations made, etc. Once it starts to develop, the relevant questions will start to pop up in design meetings. “Does this feature really belong in the home page? Perhaps it would be better on a dedicated section…? Actually, we should set up a ballpark total weight target… Not that it should be an absolute figure but more of a set of ranges. Actually, can we measure some sites we like, to get an idea of reasonable figures…”. Behold! Reasonable discussion backed with real world data! Beware of unsubstantiated “opinions”!

Blizzard are showing their wisdom here by having stats part of their development cycle. Measure, graph, visualize, print or draw it on a board and watch the positive feedback cycle unravel… You will never look back.