Dawn Patrol

Preamble

Tweet is a plugin for Yahoo! Search. Such plugins are called SearchMonkeys in honor of Greasemonkey for FireFox browser. Like Greasemonkey, SearchMonkey allows developers to enhance the experience, the search experience in this case. SearchMonkeys can enhance presentation with images and additional links or by combining Yahoo!'s Search index with other structured data.

Yahoo! Search users can add SearchMonkey applications to their profile on an opt-in basis. Add Tweet to yours if you like to get much improved search results for Twitter user profiles.

Current Twitter search results

While Twitter user profiles are being indexed by all major Search engines, their summary is extremely poor. Google and Yahoo's results are nearly identical. Yahoo!'s summary of my profile (below) doesn't even include my full name (Bart Teeuwisse), which is on the page.

SearchMonkey to the rescue¹

Luckily with SearchMonkey you can replace standard summaries with enhanced summaries. To improve Yahoo!'s Twitter user profile search results I wrote a SearchMonkey application called tweet that is triggered for all URLs matching *.twitter.com/*. Tweet calls Twitter's API to fetch user profile information not in the Yahoo! Search index. The result is a rich overview of a Twitter user, including last message (aka. tweet).

Tweet's challenges

Sounds simple doesn't it? Contact Twitter's API, get profile, present profile. The SearchMonkey's architecture splits this into 2 monkeys:

• A data monkey to contact Twitter's API to get the profile, and
• A presentation monkey (Tweet) to present said profile.

Well, not quite.

Speed, speed, speed

It turns out that execution speed of a SearchMonkey is key. To make the SearchMonkey Gallery a presentation monkey such as Tweet has to complete within a fraction of a second. Any call to fetch 3^rd party takes too long to satisfy this requirement. Certainly calling Twitter's API whose fluctuating response times are all over the map.

Secondly, Twitter's profile API call takes a user ID, which first has to be extracted from Yahoo!'s indexed data. An additional data SearchMonkey can do that and whose output is the input to Tweet's profile feching data monkey. However, this chaining of data monkeys makes Tweet only slower.

Thirdly -as I mentioned earlier- Twitter's API has wildly varying response times. And is by no means predictable enough to guarantee a prompt response. Furthermore Twitter is having scaling issues already. Adding a SearchMonkey that calls Twitter's API for up to 10 search results for each query could make things should Tweet gain many opt-in users.

Perhaps caching can help? The SearchMonkey platform does has some caching. Unfortunately SearchMonkey developers have no control over SearchMonkey's cache. Emperical data suggests that SearchMonkeys are cached for only a few minutes. Tweet could be cached much longer without sacrificing functionality.

SearchMonkey + AppEngine = Fast Data Monkey

To mitigate these challenges I decided to use a proxy of my own in between SearchMonkey & Twitter.

• A proxy that could scale, should Tweet become popular.
• A proxy where I could control my own cache.
• And a proxy that eliminates the need for an additional data Monkey to extract the Twitter user ID from the search result.
• And lastly a proxy that returns DataRSS to minimize (XSLT) transformations in SearchMonkey.

Why not Yahoo! Pipes?

I first turned to Yahoo! Pipes, but Pipes doesn't give me caching control and the only XML output format is RSS not DataRSS. So I turned to Google's App Engine instead, which satisfies all my requirements. It offers Memcache caching, is build to scale, allows me to extract the Twitter user ID, make the Twitter API call and transform its response to DataRSS.

Developing for Google App Engine

Even though this is my 1^st Python application worth mentioning, I didn't have too much trouble writing it. App Engine's documentation combined with Python's tutorials were sufficient to answer my questions. The biggest obstacle I encountered is the lack of good XML/XLT libraries for Python. There isn't a clear winner to begin with and App Engine's restriction to pure Python libraries eliminates all candidates, as I learned the hard way.

I really like the Googel App Engine SDK. No hassle configuring a web server or data base. No need to be online even. I developped about half the proxy while vanpooling to and from work!

How the proxy works

My proxy takes the URL of the search result as input from SearchMonkey. Given the trigger URL pattern these are all URLs to *.twitter.com. E.g. twitter.com, explore.twitter.com or m.twitter.com. The proxy first extracts the Twitter user ID, if any. In Twitter's URL schema, user IDs are the 1^st part of the URLs path. E.g. bartt in twitter.com/bartt or twitter.com/bartt/friends

It then checks the Memcache for a profile for this ID. If it has one it composes the DataRSS response and exits. If it doesn't it calls Twitter's API. Succesfull API calls are parsed and stored in Memcache for -currently- 2 hours, before composing a DataRSS response. Failed calls return an empty DatRSS response.

Fast enough?

My proxy speeds up cached profiles by a factor 3x to 10x. Most of the time, that is. Despite App Engine's claim to scale, it does have performance issues from time to time. App Engine had an outage for a day while I tested my proxy for example.

Odly enough, Twitter's API holds the record of the fastest response time, yet its average is many times App Engine's average response time (for cached profiles). App Engine's response time is very stable - about 200 milliseconds round trip from a west coast data center.

This doesn't make Tweet fast enough to be included into the SearchMonkey Gallery though. Not only is the proxy not fast enough, to that you'll have to add the XSLT process and 'render' times by SearchMonkey. Still, Tweet is now eminently more usable and shields Twitter from API overload.

Tweet & FriendNet combined

Combine Tweet with FriendNet, one of my other monkeys for an even richer search result. FrienNet displays profiles and contacts embedded in the page. It combines hCard profiles with XFN links embedded on the page to present a social graph.

In collapsed mode -the default- FriendNet shows the number of profiles, cards and contacts found on the page by Yahoo! Search.

Expanded, FriendNet shows details of Twitter friends.

Create your own SearchMonkeys

Got your own ideas for improving Yahoo! Search? Start monkeying around! You find everything you need at SearchMonkey on the Yahoo Developer Network.

Check out the SearchMonkey Gallery for more monkeys you can use. Or take my Better Amazon monkey for a spin.

1. You'll need to have tweet installed to get the same result.

FriendNet is a plugin for Yahoo! Search. Such plugins are called SearchMonkeys in honor of Greasemonkey for FireFox browser. Like Greasemonkey, SearchMonkey allows developers to enhance the experience, the search experience in this case. SearchMonkeys can enhance presentation with images and additional links or by combining Yahoo!'s Search index with other structured data.

Yahoo! Search users can add SearchMonkey applications to their profile on an opt-in basis. Add FriendNet to yours if you like to make your search more social aware.

FriendNet leverages microformats indexed by Yahoo! Search to make visible embedded user profiles and social connections. Numerous sites enrich the HTML markup of their pages with hCard and XFN microformats to make profile information and social connections machine readable.

Following are several examples of profiles and social connections presented by FriendNet.

Flickr

We all know and love photo sharing site Flickr. But did you know that people pages are marked up with microformats?

The example below shows Yahoo!'s standard summary for my Flickr profile followed by FriendNet's display of profiles and connections found on this page: 3 profiles, 10 contacts and 1 hCard. (For brevity not all contacts are shown.)

Above the grey line is FriendNet's synopsis. If you search for Flickr profiles ¹ you'll notice FriendNet's synopsis below results that contain hCard markup. Below the grey line are the expanded details for FriendNet which one gets by clicking the blue triangle in the synopsis.

The 1^st profile comes from the 1 embeded hCard. The 2 other profiles come from me XFN links. The hCard only included my full name and location. If Flickr adds my buddy icon it would replace the placeholder smiley.

The 10 contacts are all XFN links marked contact. FriendNet combines XFN links and hCards by the hCard's homepage URL for a richer presentation. As Flickr didn't have any hCards marked up for my contacts, FriendNet displays just the URLs. FriendNet's Twitter example further down the page shows how combining hCards and XFN links enriches the presentation.

FriendNet also turns Yahoo! Search into a social graph walker. Click on the magnifying glass next to a profile or connection to inspect the 'social graph' of that profile or connection.

A personal blog

FriendNet works with any kind of site that has embedded hCards. Take Dougal Campbell's personal blog for example. His homepage includes links to a number of contacts which he has tagged as 'colleague', 'acquaintance', 'met', etc. to indicate his relationship with them. See what FriendNet presents for Dougal's last connaction at Yahoo! Search.

Dougal doesn't have a XFN me link to dougal.gunters.org, which is why FriendNet placed Dougal's own hCard in the contact section instead of under his profiles.

The University of Notre Dame

The University of Notre Dame ¹ simply included 1 hCard with the universities contact information. Simple but effective.

Pownce

Pownce is another social messenging site. A bit like Twitter except that you can also send links, files and events. And a whole lot more confusing. As the example below shows, their use of hCards could be improved. The name and photo of my 1 contact on pownce weren't included in the hCard. If they add them FriendNet will dutifully show them. Add an XFN me link to pownce.com/bartt/ and my hCard will move from the contact list into the profile list where it belongs.

Twitter

Twitter is a service for friends, family and co-workers to send quick updates on what they are doing. Twitter has been growing like a weed.

Twitter's use of hCard and XFN is pretty good. Both my Twitter profile and my contacts have been marked up with hCard and XFN. The combination of hCard and XFN data yields an enriched presentation. Contacts are listed by their full name and buddy icon. Compare this to Flickr's example where contacts are listed as URLs. The one improvement Twitter could make is including my buddy icon and location in my hCard.

Note: I'm working on another SearchMonkey called Tweet for enhanced presentation of Twitter profiles. You see Tweet's synopsis in the above example. More about Tweet in a later post.

Yahoo! Finance

Doing a blanket search for hCards on Yahoo! Search ¹ I came upon some interesting use of hCards. Yahoo! Finance for example uses it to list their financial experts.

Create your own SearchMonkeys

Got your own ideas for improving Yahoo! Search? Start monkeying around! You find everything you need at SearchMonkey on the Yahoo Developer Network.

Check out the SearchMonkey Gallery for more monkeys you can use. Or take my Better Amazon monkey for a spin.

1. You'll need to have FriendNet installed.

The new Yahoo! Video -code named project Playground- launched yesterday in the US. Various International Tiger Team members worked on this project: Marco, Tak, Daniel and myself. I've architected the i18n and l10n of the site. Can't wait for the localized sites to launch in the near future.

Here are a couple of videos in the new embedded player, which is part of the new site. They showcase 16x9 wide screen support, the awesome and fun video team and some high quality user contributed content.

The Launch of the New Yahoo! Video

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal

PostSecret - A Valentine Video

Postcard to promote Paintings & Prints by Ginger Crawford Tolonen on exhibit at Artemis Healing Center in Los Gaots from Jan 25 - Apr 25 2008.

By the ever entertaining Joy of Tech.

Today I'm publishing 3 Ruby on Rails plugins:

• Crumblr, a Ruby on Rails plugin to protect against Cross-Site Request Forgery.
• ImageBundle, a Ruby on Rails plugin to automatically bundle local images into CSS sprites.
• StringExt, a Ruby on Rails plugin that adds class method rand to class String.

All plugins are listed on Agile Web Development's Ruby on Rails plugin directory: Crumblr, ImageBundle & StringExt.

If you haven't already, install rapt, a script/plugin replacement. Rapt taps directly into Agile Web Development's plugin directory. Now you can search the plugin directory instead of having to hunt for plugin sources.

Let me know what you think about these plugins.

Casper's hand outlined on paper. He must have been about 15 months at the time.

The fine people of the Walker Art Center recently asked me if they could use some of my photos on flickr in their catalog and on the center's web site. Specifically if they could use some of my Millenial Territory Orchestra photos for Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra performance on Dec 1, 2007 at the McGuire theater.

I'm honored that both the Millennial Territory Orchestra and Walker Art like my photos of MTO's performance at the Jazz Standard in NYC well enough to represent MTO. MTO's page in the catalog and the oversized postcard of the Walker Art '07-'08 program featuring the same photo are gorgeous. See the scans included in this blog post.

See MTO's performance at the McGuire theater for use of some additional images. Go see the Millennial Territory Orchestra should you be near Minneapolis on Dec 1st, 2007, they're fantastic.

To verify ownership of this blog on Technorati, Technorati's spiders look for a link to my Technorati Profile at the Code Mill.

So now there is one. Let the spiders feast!

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

I've started to experiment with SketchUp. SketchUp is an amazing 3D modelling program. Using simple geometric building blocks one can create sophisticated realistic 3D models. I'm going to use SketchUp to design our new workshop/barn.

A few years ago Tatyana took me to see this house in the shape of a barn that she had come across. I took some pictures of it because we both liked the shape. SketchUp allowed me to load the image and create a model of it. The result you see on the left. Play the video to see the model rotate. The photo of the barn has been draped over the model to texture it.

It turns out that the ratio of length and width of the model exactly match the ratio we could build a barn in on the site we have in mind.

Oversized postcard to promote Artemis Healing Center's Sampler Day, come Saterday Aug 18, 2007.

Oversized postcard sent out to Tatyanna Teeuwisse's clients to inform them of Tatyanna's new contact information.

Postcard to promote Pascale Wowak's Images For Life Exhibit at Artemis Healing Center from Aug 17 - Oct 25, 2007.

The exhibit opens tonight, can't wait to see how they'll transform the clinic compared to the previous exhibit.

Our friend Angela Wilson is opening Avedano's Holly Park meat market in SF's Bernal Heights.

The space they're located in was historically the home of a butcher shop (1901). The most recent incarnation was as Cicero’s Meat Market, renamed to Avedano’s in honor of the proprietor's Italian grandparents who emigrated from Asti.

The sign in front of the store is now a historic land mark that had to stay. The store is once again a meat market but this time with extra's: seafood, great sandwiches, fresh produce, cheeses, teas, agua frescas and more.

Would you like to be part of one of Yahoo!'s strategic software development initiatives? Do you prefer to work on a wide variety of projects in a challenging environment? Have you ever felt that your job was monotonous or repetitive? Are you a builder, not a maintainer? Do you enjoy change?

If so, Yahoo's International Tiger Team may have the job for you. We are looking for world-class engineers with big ideas and big talent who enable Yahoo!'s innovative products and services for all languages and cultures. We're looking for people like you.

The International Tiger Team at Yahoo is dedicated to providing highly skilled, senior engineers to a variety of projects. International Tigers act as an internal "consulting" team, providing short term resourcing to dedicated product engineering teams that have critical globalization needs. In the past International Tigers have worked with highly visible products such as Y!Answers, Y!Video and My Yahoo!.

The ideal Tiger is a technically strong engineer who likes a dynamic environment and assignments that change every 6-8 months. As a member of the International Tiger team you will get wide exposure to a variety of Yahoo's products. Due to the rapidly changing team environment, strong communications and teamwork skills are a must.

Interested? Apply to this awesome position.

Casper rocking out to the Arbiters's remix Pappa Was A Crashing Car, shot by his grand parents last winter when they came to escape another Montana winter.

After months of furniture walking Casper has taken the plunge and is now walking across the room.

Inspired by his friend Noah, Casper took his 1^st unassisted steps on Tue Jun 05, 2006. The photos below were taken 2 days later.

Casper loves to walk. He will clap for himself when he succesfully has walked across the room.

Soquel is what Brooklyn is to New York.

Introduction

For as long as we have lived on Rodeo Gulch Rd, we've wanted to reduce the tall Monterey Cypress trees lining our property along Rodeo Gulch Rd and Hidden Valley Rd. One of the 1^st things we noticed inspecting the property when it was for sale was how much sun the trees block.

There are almost 80 trees al together. The trees along Rodeo Gulch Rd block sun in the morning after the sun has rissen over the ridge. As the sun moves across the sky it peaks out over the Cypress trees only to disappear early in the afternoon behind the trees lining Hidden Valley Rd. As a result most of our land is in the shadow for most of the day. In particular in the winter when the sun isn't as high in the sky.

With 80 trees we knew that this would be an expensive endeavor. Other tasks took priority but finally we're in a position to act. Yet our budget remained tight so we had to select a contractor who could do work economically.

As it so happens R&S Tree Service had just dropped of their flyer in our neighborhood. Tatyana called them for a quote on Thu. Their quote was relatively low and in our ballpark. Both Robin and Jamie have years of tree cutting experience. Recently they struck out on their own and formed R&S Tree Service.

They we're confident they could do the work quickly. In 3 or 4 days with the help of crane they would cut down all but 3 Cypress trees to 20-25 foot. Pile bruch into 3 piles for us to burn and stack firewood in 3 foot lengths on the side. A buddy with a crane would give them a deal.

We signed a contract, gave them a deposit and said goodbye until Sat when the work would start.

Day 1

As promised, Robin, Jamie and Daniel arrive at 8AM along with Lowell of West Coast Cranes. Robin & Jamie's original plan was to use the crane to hold the tree from the top while it is being cut at 20-25 foot height. Once cut they would lift the top and place it in our meadow to be cut into pieces. Lowell doesn't think this would work and they embark on a different tactic.

They start out limbing the tree branches from the top down. This turns out to be an arduous process as the branches they cut get entangled in the branches below, still on the tree.

Tatyana and I quickly realize that they won't be able to do the work in 2 days. Somehow the 3 to 4 day estimate from Thu had turned into a 2 day estimate by the time they started the work. In order to be done in 2 days they would have to limb and cut 3 trees/hour. Those 1^st trees take more than an hour each.

Still we're not too concerned as they had bid on the work expecting it to take longer than 2 days. Based on the $150/hour for the crane that Jamie had mentioned on Thu they would still make a (modest) profit themselves if it took them 4 days.

By the end of the morning a new tactic appears to work better. Instead of limbing from the top down trees are limbed from the bottom up. Limbs coming of the tree fall clear to the ground and it is easier to put the bucket -holding Jamie and Robin- in position.

The pile of branches on the ground at the base of the trees has rapidly grown to unmanagable proportions for Daniel who is doing cleaning. Many branches have fallen into the creek and need to be dragged out of the creek bed to boot. Daniel goes out to get some reinforcements. 30 Minutes later he returns with several day laborers. Robin and Jamie aren't too happy as it is an additional expense they hadn't budgetted for.

The fresh crew catches up and moves all branches into one big pile for later burning. After an hour or 2 Daniel brings them back to Safeway's lot where he picked them up. Maybe they didn't want to work anymore because of the Poison Oak in the creek bed. Maybe they didn't like the work or the pay.

To pay the day laborers R&S asked us for cash. We start to wonder. Are they this strapped for money? Did they not anticipate they would be needing more people?

The crane leaves at 4:30PM. Robin, Daniel and Jamie clear branches on the ground for another hour and a half. They leave tired, disappointed in their progress but optimistic that they'll be able to finish the job tomorrow. We just shake our heads.

Day 2

A complete crew pulls up at 7AM ready to get the job done in one long day. Robin starts out limbing branches from the bottom up by climbing the trees. He actually makes pretty good progress. Once the has cleared some space along Hidden Valley Rd they go back to using the crane.

Like the day before, progress is slow. Much too slow to finish in a single day. Yet, at 9:30AM Jamie tells me that 'They will honor the contract' despite the lack of progress.

They are still a 2 chainsaw operation. Robin cuts from the crane's bucket with Jamie who guides the pieces Robin cuts off the tree as they fall to the ground. Daniel cuts the larger branches and the trunk chunks into 3' lengths while a crew of several day laborers pile the smaller branches onto the burn pile.

Shortly after noon the R&S Tree Service guys come and ask for more money. A lot more money, about 50% more money, thousands of dollars more money. Either that or the original amount of work for about 60% of the work. Tatyana is out walking Casper to sleep at that moment so I tell them that I'll have to discuss it with her. Amazed at the turn of events in a time span of only a few hours.

When Tatyana and Casper return we keep revisiting the predicament we're in. On the one hand we're sad that Jamie & Robin are stuck between are rock and a hard place. We could keep them to their bid, but we feel to sorry for them. It pains us to witness how the crane operator is getting his hourly rate of a $150 or more. Then again Robin & Jamie are the ones to continue to hire Lowell and his crane even when he charges overtime.

At the end of the day, Robin comes in to ask for money to pay Lowell, their friend who joined them for a day, the day laborers and them selfs. Not that we have a problem writing out separate checks to everyone but this rather unprofessional for a job that would be paid upon completion. It shows an utter lack of (financial) planning.

At this point about 55-60% of the scope of work has been completed and we've spend about the same amount of the bid we accepted. Seeing that planning and execution of a plan are not their forte we decide to end our relationship early. We're sorry it didn't work out as planned. We hope it has been a learning experience for R&S Tree Service (it has for us!).

Disappointed Robin & Jamie confer among themselves and return we a proposal to at least finish topping the trees already limbed up on Mon. They expect this will take them no more than 5hrs. As that is within our budget and a better point to halt the work and look for a new contractor I agree.

Day 3

Before I leave to take the vanpool to work on Mon at 5:30AM, I stick a note on the fence for R&S Tree Service summarizing what we had agreed to the evening before. I didn't want there to be any misunderstandings.

At 7:45AM Tatyana calls me at work. Robin & Jamie had woken her and Casper up at 7:30AM because they need more money. Apparently they owe workers money. I never get quite clear who they own what. They can't even remember what we paid them yesterday. Thank goodness I'd written it all down.

There is no crane either. Lowell isn't available (or doesn't want to come anymore). How come they didn't know this yesterday when they proposed to come out the very next day?

But we have a lot of fallen branches that need to be cleared from the creek. Plus there are a few more things they can do without a crane and so Tatyana agrees to hire some day laborers and pay them for what be plan # 99 by now.

Tatyana leaves for work early in the afternoon while work is in full swing. When I get home around 6PM I'm disappointed by the lack of progress. Mind you I left that morning thinking more trees would be topped. Only to come home and see that none have been touched. Instead some already topped trees have been felled, something we didn't ask for.

Day 4

This is it you would think, no? Not in this story. Robin, feels bad about the mess they've left behind. Rather insistently he keeps calling Tatyana -I'm in SF for work- with new plans. Tatyana can't see any of them work tired of hearing yet another plan.

Robin catches me leaving home on Thu when I'm about to cycle to the Ugly Mug to 'work from home'. Robin's latest plan is to work for an hourly rate. He'll climb the trees that haven't been limbed and limb them as high as he can get. Jamie is with him but doesn't want to have anything to do with it. In part because Robin is even offering to do work for free.

We settle on $30/hr for Robin and $15/hr for Jamie. I specifically ask them to top some of the trees that have already been limbed. Robin is confident they can attach a rope to the trunk of a tree which Jamie can then pull as Robin tops the tree. The rope will guide the tree to fall into the meadow instead of falling backwards into the powerline along Hidden Valley Rd. I'm not sure how much time would be involved and would like to find out.

As before they start out with they easier work; limbing up the remaining trees. They do make good progress. When I get home at the end of the day Robin has done as much work as they did with the crane. If they keep up this rate they could finish the job within the original bid. That is of course if they can top the trees using a rope.

Day 5

Fri morning, R&S Tree Service do not show at 7:30AM as promised but close to 9AM. Jamie arrives 1^st in a mini van. Driven by a driver I haven't seen before.

It turns out they have bought a little 5HP chipper/schredder for Daniel (or is it on behalf of Daniel?) at the flea market. Robin pulls up a few minutes later. The owner unloads the chipper, puts it together and gets paid.

Robin is eager to test the chipper, he pulls it over to one of the massive woodpile and starts it. The machine pales in comparison to the pile. Perhaps intimidated, the chipper neither chips nor shreds very well. In fact is has trouble with even the smallest of branches. Twigs really. Robin & Jamie schrug it off as this is Daniel's problem.

Fri is another burn day and I had started a fire at 7AM. Tatyana has to go to work in a few hours, Jamie needs to spot Robin while I have to telecommute. As it is also a foggy day which makes it more dangerous to work close to power lines, Robin offers to get us a day laborer from Safeway giving the sun a chance to burn off the fog.

It is past 9:30AM when they return with Star Bucks coffee in hand and day laborer in two. I quickly change and head out. Robin & Jamie have started on the Cypress at the bottom of our drive way as they deem too moist to work on the trees along Hidden Valley Rd, close to the power line.

When I return home a little after 4PM to get the car to pickup Casper from daycare, the Cypress they started on has been limbed and topped. Nice work. Yet still none of the Hidden Valley trees have been topped. Casper and get home by 6:30PM, cash in hand to pay everyone. I got cash out so Robin & Jamie didn't have to stop early to go to the back to cash our check. In those last hours no trees have been chopped, rather more trees that had already been topped have been felled. Grrr.

Day 6

After a weekend in which we burned more of the gigantic brush pile, Robin & Jamie return on Mon. A warm, clear day. Not long after they arrive, they nock on the door and tell Tatyana that there isn't much they can do. Push come to shove, they're not up for topping those trees along Hidden Valley's power line without a crane. So they've come to talk to Tatyana what else they could do. Perhaps work on that last Cypress, the one not to be topped? They could remove some of the big dying branches, those broken ones that look so bad.

Tatyana gives the go ahead, then goes out to get some day laborers herself to have them clean up the branches from the Cypress at the bottom of the drive way that now fill the creek bed. They get the job done in 3 hours. Perfect timing, Tatyana can take them back to Safeway as she heads out to work.

As I get home with Casper that evening, it is immediately apparent that Robin & Jamie didn't do very much that day. Not nearly as much as they have done on other days. I got the strong impression they wanted to get paid for some extra hours. The cleanup work on that last Cypress doesn't amount to much and all of the cut braches are in the creek bed.

Prologue

We've been able to burn all the branches. Next up are the trunks that need to cut to fire wood length. Then fire wood stacking.

We still have the chipper/shredder on our land. Daniel when you read this will you please come pick it up?

At Yahoo! we are proud to be the world's number one Internet brand, servicing over a half billion people. Each and every day, Yahoo! engineers deliver news, entertainment, information and fun to millions around the globe.

Would you like to be part of one of Yahoo!'s strategic software development initiatives? Do you prefer to work on a wide variety of projects in a challenging environment? Have you ever felt that your job was monotonous or repetetive? Are you a builder, not a maintainer? Do you enjoy change?

If so, Yahoo's International Tiger Team may have the job for you. We are looking for world-class engineers with big ideas and big talent who enable Yahoo!'s innovative products and services for all languages and cultures. We're looking for people like you.

The International Tiger Team at Yahoo is dedicated to providing highly skilled, senior engineers to a variety of projects. International Tigers act as an internal "consulting" team, providing short term resourcing to dedicated product engineering teams that have critical globalization needs. In the past International Tigers have internnationalized highly visible products such as Y! Answers, Y! Video and My Yahoo!.

The ideal Tiger is a technically strong engineer who likes a dynamic environment and assignments that change every 6-8 months. As a member of the International Tiger team you will get wide exposure to a variety of Yahoo's products. Due to the rapidly changing team environment, strong communications and teamwork skills are a must.

In this position, you will be responsible for creation of global products that cater to visitors from around the globe. You are highly self-motivated, innovative, and well versed in new technologies. The position requires a detail-oriented, product-focused professional experienced with building global services in a high-paced, high-volume environment.

Come join an exciting and stimulating environment where you can make your mark on the world. How Big Can You Think?

Minimum Job Qualifications

• Minimum 5-10 years of industry experience producing production-ready, robust, scalable web applications in a Unix environment
• BA/BS, preferably in Computer Science or related technical discipline
• Expert level HTML, CSS, Javascript
• Expert level PHP, Perl, Python and/or Ruby
• Advanced AJAX experience
• Advanced Apache experience
• Strong database skills in MySQL, Oracle and/or PostgreSQL
• Solid understanding of the difficulties and methods of software internationalization and localization
• Solid understanding of performance optimization techniques, object-oriented programming and standard Internet protocols
• Experience in high-volume, high-availability web applications
• Excellent written and spoken communication skills

Preferable Job Qualifications

• Demonstrated history of success on large scale, high availability web projects
• Strong C/C++, Perl experience
• Strong shell scripting skills
• Strong version control skills
• Strong Flash experience

Send me your resume if you're up for the challenge.

Last Wed Casper turned 1! How fast that year went by. Just look at the pictures below to see how much Casper has changed in his 1^st year. These days he is on the brink of walking. He's a quick crawler, good furniture walker and a great climber.

A week or so ago he started to sign 'dog' when he saw Wiley or Loki, the black Labradors of our neighbors. Ever since he is absolutely facinated by dogs. He in addition to the sign for dog -which he learned by watching Singing Times before going to bed- he also knows the English word 'dog' and Dutch word 'hond(je)'. When we say 'dog' or 'hond(je)' he will sign dog and make soft woofing sounds. At times I think he even says 'dog'.

Wed was another 1^st for Casper: it was his 1^st day alone at day care. Tatyana found a promising babysitter for Casper in Scotts Valley. We interviewed Erin Brummett on Sat at her home where she would be looking after Casper along with 1 year old daughter Faith, 5 year old son Austen and their dog Poppy.

On Mon Tatyana and Casper both went over to Erin's house for a trial run. Tatyana acted as a fly on the wall while Erin looked after Casper. This went well. So on Wed -Tatyana's 1^st workday after the trial- Casper went for the 1^st time to day care by himself. Tatyana and me both felt guilty over leaving Casper with a stranger un his birthday, even though we could rationalize it and it was only from 1PM - 5:30PM. Tatyana dropped him off on her way to Artemis Healing Center. And I picked him up after my vanpool returned to the Scotts Valley bus station. It worked out very well for all of us.

We celebrated Casper's birthday that evening after we were all home with a little cup cake for Casper. Which he devoured with great pleasure and great speed.

Happy birthday son #1!

From left to right: Bart Teeuwisse, Sarah Lee, Tiago de Jesus, Pompeu Roberto, Benedicto de Souza Franco Junior, Edwin Chiu, Gerado Moad, Tak Yan, Julian Jaramillo, Oscar Pagani, Kalai Kandasamy & Marco Aurélio Carvalho

Working through Halloween night until close before dawn, the Yahoo! Video and Yahoo! International Tiger teams released Yahoo! Video in 5 new markets:

• Yahoo! Video Germany
• Yahoo! Video Telemundo
• Yahoo! Video Spain
• Yahoo! Video France
• Yahoo! Video Italy

Thanks everyone involved for all your hard work and dedication. Thank you Y!Video team for accepting us Tigers into your tight knit team.

Last but not least: Go Tigers Go!

On Wednesday November 1^st Tatyana Teeuwisse, Lac will resume to practice acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicine and massage in Los Gatos. Rather then returning to her old room in someone else's clinic she will opening her own clinic: Artemis Healing Center!

Artemis Healing Center is the result of a long standing desire to strike out on her own and form a more cooperative clinic. With partners Massage Therapist Lindsay MacInnis and Chiropractor Marilyn Moss the three offer a comprehensive set of services.

Located at 246 Los Gatos Saratoga Rd, Los Gatos, Artemis Healing Center is only a block away from her old location.

Introduction

Web development almost always involves developing on a remote machine, typically a Linux or BSD box. In my case I pretty much always make the connection from a Windows PC. Either the laptop Yahoo! issued or my desktop at home.

To hack I don't need more than a character terminal into the remote box. A secure shell is all I need. The results I check with the browser on my Windows PC. Putty is a free telnet/ssh client for Windows that I use connect.

The first thing I do after I ssh into the machine, is to start screen to virtualize the connection. Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal. With screen you can open mutliple terminals over a single connection. The best feature though is that you can return to your terminal sessions after the connection breaks. So you can initiate a session from one location and pick it up at another. Should you lose connection due to network errors you just reconnect and re-attach to the already running screen.

My editor of choice is GNU Emacs. Not only extensible, customizable and self-documenting, but also runs just as well within a character terminal as in a graphical UI. Important if all you have at home is a dailup connection.

The problem

The problem I encountered at work was that I couldn't get BIG5 characters to display properly on my Windows laptop. After several days of prodding, research and help from Yahoos I was eventually able to get to the bottom.

The solution

First of my dev box doesn't have any locale support which means that you have to tell every application that it should use UTF-8 encoding. Applications can't look at the locale and learn what capabilities the terminal has.

For screen this means starting it with the -U option. Also include the following lines in your ~/.screenrc file:

# Set default terminal and character set to utf-8 defutf8 on defencoding UTF-8

To get less to run in utf-8 mode you'll have to set the LESSCHARSET environment variable to utf-8. Best achieved by adding the following line to your ~/.bashrc file:

export LESSCHARSET=utf-8

Make sure you run putty in utf-8 mode.

Install the Traditional Chinese language support files from Microsoft on your Windows box.

Configure putty to use the MingLiU font with the CHINESE_BIG5 script.

Compile and install GNU Emacs from CVS as this version (currently 22.0.50.1) has much better utf-8 support than the last release (version 21.4.1).

As you may know I write these blog entries over at Yahoo! 360 for the time being until I have hacked up the Teeuwisse family site.

Each time I go to Yahoo! 360 I'm annoyed by 360's home page. For users with a 360 account the home page prominently shows you the latest from your Yahoo! friends and favorites. Great you'd think I get the latest blog posts, reviews, answers and questions from all the people I care about. But no, you also get all the feeds that your friends are subscribed to.

I find this so annoying because the content I receive borders on spam. I'm not interested in Yahoo! Answers's latest questions to which 2 of my friends are subscribed to. And because 2 friends are subscribed I get the same latest questions in duplicate. Other friends are subscribed to a variety of news steams. So I end up with a mix of random entries and personal contributions by my friends.

Including your friends and favorites feeds is 360's default setting. It wasn't until writing this blog entry that I discovered the Control Feed Updates link at the bottom right of the 'Latest' segment. I find the title 'Control Feed Updates' a bit of a misnomer as it doesn't control the update of the segment but rather what to include/exclude. Perhaps 'Control what to include' would be a more intuitive title. Having said that, I'm relieved to see that 3 mouse clicks weed out all crap leaving me with content contributed by my friends personally. And that's what I'm interested in. My friends other interest are still only a click away.

While hacking up the mirror of this blog on thecodemill.biz I ran into a couple of Firefox limitations I hadn't expected from my favorite open source browser.

I mirror the blog from 360.yahoo.com by parsing the RSS feed. The feed has the most recent entries. Each new entry is added to an XML file published at thecodemill.biz. When visiting the XML file the browser transforms it to HTML using the XSL stylesheet linked to from the XML file. The layout of the HTML file is then styled by a CSS stylesheet linked to from the generated HTML.

This may sound convoluted but is really straight forward separation of content from presentation. The XML file holds the data (pure content). This makes adding new blog posts much easier then if it were in HTML. Transformation to HTML and styling is off loaded to the browser. (Not that thecodemill.biz gets that much traffic to make this necessary.) Both the XSL stylesheet and the CSS stylesheet are very simple and easy to maintain.

As always, not all browsers display the XML file the same. Normally though, Internet Explorer (IE) is the browser to code around, but this time it was Firefox who caused me grief. First there was the issue of Firefox ignoring my instruction to disable-output-escaping. Then Firefox 'hung' during the XSL transformation after including my Flickr badge.

Most of time was lost trying to find out why Firefox didn't render the XML file the way I wanted/expected it to do. With IE displaying the file correctly I had an inkling that it had todo with Firefox's interpretation of the various standards involved: XSLT, XSL, HTML and JavaScript.

It turns out that Firefox doesn't support disable-output-escaping because disabling output escaping would require adding a parsing step to the output generation. While understandable, this position seems a little harsh now that RSS feeds are ubiquitous. Soon Atom will grow in importance as well.

The problem with my Flickr badge boils down to another topic listed on Firefox's XSLT FAQ: document.write. The Flickr badge consists of a serious of variable assignments building up a string of HTML which is then inserted into the HTML document using document.write. With a little bit of head scratching I was able to work around it using an IFRAME. The XSL stylesheet includes the IFRAME tag which pulls in a 'pre-cooked' HTML page consisting of my Flickr badge.

What should have been a quick and easy thing ended up taking several hours. Oh, the joys of developing for the Internet! You can see the end result on thecodemill.biz.