Alex Le’s Blog

“The rate at which the Google computing system has grown is as remarkable as its size. In March 2001, when the company was serving about 70 million Web pages daily, it had 8,000 computers, according to a Microsoft researcher granted anonymity to talk about a detailed tour he was given at one of Google’s Silicon Valley computing centers. By 2003 the number had grown to 100,000.”

Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks More Power, Published: June 14, 2006, nytimes.com

100,000 servers?  Holy cow!  I also have a copy of this artilce in PDF format if you’d like to read it.

http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html  by Paul graham
This is a great article argueing the comtetitiveness of America compared to other countries in terms of starting up a startup.  I agree one of the great reasons why there are more startups in the States than anywhere else is the US is rich. In the US, people do not have to worry about their everyday meal - even in the case they are out of work, the government will support them.  Tax dollars go to work.  Back home in Vietnam, pretty much everyone has to work like crazy to support themselves and family.  It’s easier to work to feed yourself than to find something to feed and work on some other ideas.  You will be so starving that you will fall dead eventually because noone will try to feed you — frankly, other people are trying to take away your food!  Social security in Vietnam is just bad, bad, bad.
I love every seconds here in the States, even though I have had more ramen than I’ve ever wanted (US college students are in fact a different species)  I’ve had much stress and worries but being in the States opens up my eyes and allows me to grab the next opportunity out there.

Gamasutra reports on an AP Poll stating that some 40% of American adults play games. From the article: “The poll also yielded plenty of other results worth ruminating on - 45 percent of gamers play over the Internet, and those who do are notably more ‘hardcore’ than those who do not. Forty-two percent of online gamers spent four hours or more per week playing games, but only 26% of offline gamers did similarly. The AP/AOL survey also revealed that, of those who play online games, almost one in five said they had formed real-life friendships or relationships with those they play with online, showing the use of gaming as a social activity, even when playing remotely against others

– slashdot

This is a really good news for my baby Wars of Earth. If I can successfully create the game to enhance the level of player interaction, then there’s nothing else to say. Based on the above result of the Gamasutra’s poll, the social aspect of the game is very important and it’s one of the main keys to attract more players to come join and stay with the game.

Sugar: Corn vs. Cane

“The Wall Street Journal is urging Washington to discard the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imported ethanol. This tariff is effectively a subsidy for corn-based ethanol produced in the USA. Yet, producing ethanol from corn is highly inefficient and consumes 1 unit of energy for each 1.3 units of energy that burning ethanol provides. By contrast, ethanol derived from sugarcane (which is the sole source of ethanol in Brazil) yields 8.3 units of energy. Sugercane is about 7 times more efficient than corn. Some studies even show that corn yields only 0.8 unit of energy, resulting in a net loss of energy.”

Another news tid bit from Slashdot. I was wondering why people know that corn can be processed to make ethanol as alternative fuel source, but still it’s not widely available in the States. The Mid-west region has a huge corn production rate but why California cannot advocate more on corn-based ethanol? And why Brazil can sustain on ethanol for the past few decades?

According to the above article, corn is not very efficient in making ethanol. Sugar cane, on the other hand, has great conversion rate. This is true because cane sugar is carbohydrate with lots of alcohol (-OH) groups (still remember those organic chemistry stuff?) Hence the conversion of these -OH groups to make ethanol (CH3-CH2-OH) is not hard at all and efficient enough to produce larger amount of ethanol. Moreover, isn’t beers and wine all got to start with sugar of some sorts? See! You don’t ever drink corn-based alcohol, do you?
So why isn’t more sugar being produced in the States? I have no answer for that but I think sugar in the states are used to make alcohol for college kids’ consumption (Girls Gone Wild is one of the major customers). I’m just kidding, but the States is still importing sugar from other countries. It’s cheaper to import than to grow and produce cane sugar. More importantly, gas price is still NOT high enough to push the initiatives of finding alternative fuel sources. I suspect that if gas price rises and stay at $3.50/ gallon and above for unleaded, then it is now a big incentive for people to look for cheaper fuel, hence sugar cane comes to the rescue.

Maybe the States will life the embargo and start trading with Cuba again for dirt cheap sugar cane in exchange for excess tortilla made from corn. We’ll see.

Today is quite a productive day for me, not for schoolwork but personal research on the Web 2.0 Stuff. I still have a semester-long Inorganic Lab notebook to finish and turn it in by the end of this week. I will be leaving soon to work on that but I cannot resist the temptation to type this little report up, especially after I just did a quick Ajax experiment on low-lag client/ server communication (see my previous post.) Ajax works but fails when it comes to low lagging. So how come Meebo, Gtalk, and Gabbly can do this ultra low-lag? What is the special technology/ platform are they running?

Gabbly
I went to Gabbly and at the time, there were 2 people who claimed to be from Gabbly: Jon & Abe. I asked them about what webserver Gabbly was running on and there was no answer from them. Well, this is understandable as Gabbly is their (not verifiable) product. Anyway, using FireBug (a FireFox extension), I was able to see the request made from Gabbly. The header tells the whole story:

They are using Apache-Coyotte 1.1 as their web server!

How Gabbly Works: Ajax & JSON
I think this is how everything works, the comet way: Basically the page constantly making request to the server. The connection is kept-alive (will be the buzz word soon!) for a x amount of seconds (30 secs?) After this period, the server flushes the data back to the client. The client receives the ajax response in JSON format, which most of the time is empty (firebug says that it’s “not well-formed”) as nothing is returned.

On the other hand, if there is any new data, a sample JSON object being flushed by the server is:

The client, after receiving the JSON, will get busy right away by making another request to the server, waiting for more contents to be “pushed”. Of course the ajax engine will be parsing the JSON object to display the message to the user. Yay, happy communication.

The Problem
The ultimate question is: how the server can handle multiple keep-alive connections? There’s an article describing this problem, a.k.a the C10K problem (http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html). C10K means the server has to serve 10,000 concurrent connections. Apache is said to quickly fail this task as the server keeps forking (making a copy of itself) to handle more connections. After awhile, apache can consume all the system resource: game over. Obviously, for Comet to work, a new type of web server needs to be developed. Luckily, Gabbly has proved there is indeed a solution by providing a working product. But they are running Apache-Coyotte 1.1 as the header says. Truthfully speaking, I have no idea about Tomcat/JSP. I do know Java and J# but using Java for web, in my opinion, is an overkill and anti-cost effective for small web developers.

The new million-dollar question is: how the rest of the world, where PHP is the champion, can use Comet?

Meebo
I think Meebo is THE example of Comet applications. It’s fast and a pleasure to use. It can very much be used as an alternative to a desktop IM application. Quickly comes the C10K problem again. But again, if there is no viable and sound technology fundamental, Meebo won’t be able to exist and got funding from the california venture capitalist firms (I do monitor the VC news closely to see the trend of the web!) I did a little investigation using Firebug and I found the multi-dollar answer to our question.

The (hopefully) million-dollar answer: Lighttpd comes to the rescue. (And later on we expect to see Apache with its mod_mpm too.)

Ah hah! Lighttpd comes to the rescue! I quickly went to Lighttpd website and looked up the Features List: Lighttpd is indeed built for high concurrency. And more importantly, Lighttpd can fully support PHP. YAY for the opensource community and for me myself. I’ve been having an idea about a project that heavily involves Ajax and Comet. If I can use Lighttpd for Comet, then I can use PHP, and I am confident that my project is viable as I now have the fundamental technology to support my idea.

Again, we see the familiar JSON object from the Meebo server response. And similar to how Gabbly works, the web browser open up a connection right away to wait for new data to be pushed.

That’s it…
Well, that’s it for today. I have to go and start on my Inorganic Lab notebook. 2 more days till freedom. 2 more weeks to graduation and I’ll be done for good. I hope that I did answer your (and my) question about how Gabbly and Meebo work and the support technology behind.

PS: Comments are very welcome!

“Microsoft is like Coke,” Howe told NewsFactor. “It”s a secret formula, all the money is from distribution, and their goal is to get Coke everywhere. Open source is like selling water. There are water companies like Perrier and Poland Spring, but you”re competing with something that”s free.
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/17137.html

Interesting analogies … I do enjoy the microsoft “coke” by the way. Mac is … err … a mac, nothing special besides the candy-ui, and Linux is …err…. hosting/server linux. Still windows is the best for-everyone.