As the number of servers needed to run slideshare increases, we are spending more and more of our time simply deploying our software. Each new box has to have a lot of software installed, configured, and tested before it can be hooked up. Scripting common tasks makes things go faster, but doesn’t resolve the fundamental problem, which is that there’s never any way to prove that Server A has the exact same configuration as Server B. This makes troubleshooting tricky, obviously.
One path we’re starting to consider is virtualization. I haven’t heard of this as a common use for virtualization. Typically, people seem to use software like Xen or VMWare to run multiple virtual servers on one physical server, so they can get more use out of existing hardware. We don’t have that problem: all our boxes are in the red! But we would like to be able to roll out new servers reliably, at the push of a button, the way you can make a new instance of an image on Amazon EC2 just by typing a command into your command line.
The way I look at it, the configuration of a machine is valuable intellectual property, and it needs to be captured so that it can be reproduced whenever we need it. Of course there’s a performance penalty: something like 5/10% of CPU will be consumed by the virtualization software, meaning that overall we’ll need more boxes than we would otherwise. But we’ll be able to set up or rebuild boxes faster, and right now that seems more important to me.
Thoughts? Is this a good idea or not? Has anyone used virtualization in this way? Any recommendations on which software to try first? As always, reply in the comments field below.
Also: a special bonus slideshow on virtualization for your reading pleasure!
Author: jonathanboutelle
SlideShare “World’s Best Presentation” contest!
Today we launched our first contest on SlideShare. Contests are the new hotness on the web nowadays … if bix is the American Idol of the web, you can think of this as being the American Idol of PowerPoint (yes, that is a weird idea!). Today youtube also launched a huge contest of their own, so it seems like the time is right for contests on the web.
The idea of an American Idol of PowerPoint may be funky, but the contest is serious. Every judge is a renowned presentation expert. Guy Kawasaki, for example, has serious rules about how long your powerpoint can be, and what should be on each slide of a pitch to potential investors. Garr Reynolds is the author of the amazing Presentation Zen blog, which was one of the first blogs I started reading about presentation design. Bert Decker is a top presentation coach who you’ve probably seen on TV (especially in election season, when he comments on the presidential debates for NBC’s Today Show). And Jerry Weisman is silicon valley’s go-to guy for executives gearing up for the grueling presentation hell that is the pre-IPO “road-show”. Presentation rock stars, all of these guys.
The prizes are pretty rad too. An alienware Area 51 laptop (w/Vista), plus two Xbox 360s and a ton of games, were generously donated by Microsoft. Thanks Seattle people! And Garage Technology Ventures sponsored the contest, which was really cool of them.
Judges will determine the final winners, but there’s also a prize for the “people’s choice”. Anyone can vote for the winner of the people’s choice, and there are ipods for the top three winners in that category.
The contest design was a lot of fun. We tried to make the contest really social, so you can always see the avatars of “recent positive voters” next to a slideshow that is in a contest. Warning, this is addictive!
Anyway, go on and upload your presentations to slideshare if you want a bad-ass new AlienWare laptop. What are you waiting for?
AJAX and Flash SXSW Talk
I gave a talk at SXSW a few days ago (AJAX & Flash: What we learned building SlideShare).
Here’s the slides. I also put my talk notes into SlideShare as comments, so if you’re interested in knowing what I actually SAID, go check it out here.
On a side note, SXSW is an AMAZING conference. The parties were out of this world: it really is “spring break for web hipsters”. I’m definitely going back next year…
Success Stories for Flash Sockets?
Youtube is the cannonical success story for Flash Video. I’m wondering, where is the big consumer success story for Flash Sockets?
I had long assumed that cool web chat applications like Meebo and GMail-Embedded-GTalk used Flash sockets. But on closer investigation both of them are using COMET.
What gives? What are some examples of massive scale webapps that use sockets? And please, no custom-built inside-the-firewall type app stuff. I want to know about popular consumer webapps that leverage Flash sockets.
Yahoo YUI hosting javascript!
OK I’m a few days late with this one. But Yahoo has announced that they will be hosting all current and subsequent versions of their YUI javascript library, for developers to use in applications, free of charge.
Why is this a big deal? Well, let’s take a look at some bandwidth stats for slideshare. 12.7% of our hits, and a monstrous 40% of our consumed bandwidth, are js files!
SlideShare don’t happen to use YUI (we use prototype and scriptaculous). But if we did, we would snap this up! Yahoo is effectively giving one more piece of distributed infrastructure to entrepreneurs looking to bootstrap a web startup. This is really generous of them.
Thanks, yahoo!
SlideShare: an evolving social system
We’ve been slowly adding more and more social features to slideshare over the last few months. You can now add slideshare members as friends, leave comments on their profile (we call that a “Ping”), or send private messages.
It’s been cool to see how all of this plays out. Here’s a nice article describing how Brian Kelly has been using slideshare to find like-minded slideshare members in his field. Excerpt below!
A few days ago I received an email alert which informed me that a number of the presentations had been added as a Favourite by a Slideshare user.
From his profile I discover that srains has a blog, Rolling Rains, which explores ‘the adoption of Universal Design (Design-for-All; Human-Centered Design) by the tourism industry’.
From the other slide show he has added to his list of favourites, I have found presentations which are of interest to me (including one on Two Trainers Trade Twenty Technology Training Tips and one on standards used on Oxfam Australia’s Web site).
Revisiting my uploaded slides I discover that the most popular of my presentations is Web 2.0: What Is It, How Can I Use It, How Can I Deploy It? with 666 views in two months, with 6 users including it in their list of favourite slideshows (jensjeppe, cezinha.com, noticiasmias2002, gerarddummer, erywin and MCL).
I can then follow their list of other favourites and the slides which they may have uploaded. And guess what: people who are interested in my slides on Web 2.0 are also interested in other slides on the same subject. So this ‘social network’ provides a form of resource discovery for me
Game Inspired RIA Design: Talk at UIE WebApp Summit
Game Inspired RIA Design: Talk at UIE WebApp Summit
I spoke a couple of weeks ago at the UIE WebApp summit in Monterey. It was a great event: lot’s of smart people working on building cool stuff. Some of the highlights: Bill Scott’s famous AJAX design talk, David Malouf’s talk on rich application design, Sean Kane’s talk about how Netflix was designed, and Thomas Vanderwal’s talk on tagging your world.
My talk was about game-inspired web design. Games, especially online casual games like bejeweled and the like, have been an important inspiration to the design of both mindcanvas and slideshare.
Rashmi gave a talk as well on designing for recommender systems.
The slides for both our talks are included below. If you’ve got any questions about my talk, comment on the relevent slide (on slideshare) and I’ll do my best to answer!
Google, yahoo, and hotmail spam filters compared
When a user signs up for slideshare, they receive an confirmation email that they need to respond to in order to activate their account. Frankly, the confirmation rate isn’t as high as we’d like (it’s about 87% since the site launched).
Most of this is due to spam filtering or blocking by the various email providers. For example, my own email provider temporarily rejects emails, causing a 5-10 minute delay in the arrival of the email!
I did some analysis of the conversion rates of users with different kinds of email addresses, and came to some surprising conclusions. This chart sums it all up:
Proto.in is gonna be huge!
Proto.in is a simple concept: it’s a clone of the hugely successful Demo conference, in India, run on a not-for-profit basis (for reference, the demo conference costs companies that choose to participate SERIOUS money). No powerpoints are allowed: you have ten minutes to demo a working product.
The list of companies that have been accepted is being kept under wraps until the event itself. I’ve talked to dozens of Indian entrepreneurs in the last month: I predict that there will be cool wireless stuff being demoed for sure!
Startups in India don’t have the nifty ecosystem that silicon valley companies do, so this is a valuable opportunity for anyone with working code to show their stuff to a room full of venture capitalists. Hopefully, press attention and possibly funding will follow.
More coverage at:
pullur
witopia
tggokul
inspirons
Slideshare mention in “The Hindu”
It’s only a small mention, but it’s nice to see that we’re getting press coverage in the national press of India as well as in the US. I DO think the Hindu should consider hiring a better copy editor, however. ;->
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