September 2009 Archives

I'll start by saying that this book-- Palm Pre The Missing Manual-- is a must-have for any new Palm Pre owner. Sure, the pamphlet that comes with the Palm Pre is adequate for getting you started and on your way, but there are so many figurative nooks and crannies in the operation of the Palm Pre that you won't even know about unless you've happened across them by accident or you've read this book.

I've owned a Palm Pre since the first week it was available. A long-time user of older Palm smartphones such as the Treo line and Centro, I enthusiastically and anxiously followed the the technology news about the forthcoming Pre. The concept of Synergy -- the Pre's software mechanism for collecting data from various online sources such as GMail and Facebook into centralized databases on the phone -- was incredibly appealing and frightening at the same time. I often wondered if Palm really could pull it off or if the Pre was going to be Palm's dying gasp and I would be left to the mediocrity of Windows Mobile or Blackberry or the cult of conformation using Apple's iPhone.

Thankfully, my experience with the Pre has given me hope. Being an early adopter, I've had my shares of bumps along the way, but generally, the Pre is an awesome device. Now that the Palm App Catalog is filling up with new, exciting applications and there's talk of more operating system updates on the horizon, I'm really enjoying myself with the Pre.

Let's get back to the book. Ed Baig's book seems fairly typical for a "Missing Manual" book. It is fairly short, witty, funny, and packed full of valuable information interspersed with plenty of callouts to "tips" and "notes" along the way.

The book is extremely easy to read and shouldn't intimidate those who are nowhere nearly as geeky as me. My daughter was easily digesting the book before I started reading it she's nine years old.

Had I had this book the first week I owned a Pre, it would have saved me some frustration figuring out the best way to get my contacts and calendar data onto the Pre.

Palm Pre, The Missing Manual is available directly from O'Reilly and Associates and probably from any of your favorite online booksellers. The MSRP is $24.99. $24.99 seems a bit much for this book, even if you're probably never going to pay full price. For what you get, I would think $10 less would be more reasonable.

I think I have finally, really arrived.

I’ve been doing contract work for a company in Provo that is launching a new website called YoManSports.com, which is in beta right now. At first glance, the site may appear to be a “YouTube for sports,” but it so much more than that. The concept is centered around video sharing, but includes familiar social networking elements you’d find on sites like Facebook or MySpace. In addition, there are several applications within the site that are sports-related — things like competition bracketing, scorecards, and groups. Perhaps the coolest feature that rounds out the list is the broadcast feature. This lets a person go to a sporting event with a video camera, even something as simple as a USB webcam, and set up a live web broadcast that anyone with a web browser can watch. The person managing the broadcast can mix prerecorded video, pictures, and even live video from other users into the broadcast. There’s even a news ticker for embedding clickable URL links into the broadcast. It’s pretty cool stuff.

Now, I said at the beginning of this post that I have arrived because we’ve been asked by management to blog regularly about the site and what we’re doing with it as part of our marketing plan. So, yeah, it’s cool to be able to do this and not be wasting my time at work.

My job has been designing and building the server architecture that sits behind the scenes and makes it all work. I was brought in late 2008 when the site was pretty much in a prototype stage. All the code was running on a single server and it really wasn’t designed to scale beyond that one server. So, one of the first things I did was figured out what we’d need to do split things like streaming video, web services, and database services onto their own dedicated servers.

After that, I went through and figured out how we were going to accomodate loads higher than we could with individual servers. In a nutshell: load balancing. That has now been implemented.

Another thing I’ve had a big hand in is offloaded encoding and conversion. The developers had created routines to do all the video encoding in PHP on the frontend of the website. Of course, doing video encoding on the same server Apache is running on can be detrimental to the experience of other website users. I developed a distributed encoding system that handles all the video conversion and encoding on a separate set of servers. I did it with Perl, of course.

I’m pleased with the technology being used on the site. I’m not a fan of PHP, but it’s doing the job well for frontend development. We’re making use of a lot of open source technology in dealing with videos. For example, all our transcoding is being done with the formidable FFMPEG software along with libraries like x264 and FAAC.

We’re leveraging Flash pretty heavily pretty heavily to make the site work so it’s fortunate that Flash support has nearly ceased being a problem for cross-platform compatibility. YoManSports.com works almost seamlessly across Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.

Watch this space for more info to come.