Author: skyrien

aka: Skyrien.
scientist, engineer, pursuer of knowledge, maker of things

“(c) 2010” is already on the web for massively scalable services? How?

by skyrien

As someone avidly interested in web services and their path from concept in a vision planning room, to the point where they leave their impact on the world, I find it fascinating that Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have changed their (c) 2009 to (c) 2010 on their front pages, but Yahoo, Twitter, Amazon, and even Yelp still read (c) 2009. I have my own reasons for finding that interesting, but that’s not important. What IS important is when the flip happened, and the deep understandings of each that the answer to ‘When?’ represents.

Sure, I don’t expect most people to care. This might seem like an utterly trivial, ‘who the hell cares?’ question to many, but when you think about it, at any given point, every piece of the a page’s visible design and text has to pass through one person’s yes/no decision, and one computer (likely unencrypted). Since there are so few software companies operating websites at distributed scales like this, there isn’t a lot of non-proprietary software that can manage these gargantuan services. This probably means the service management software isn’t very well updated with the latest data visualization software. Every change that might occur is either a bug, or something that was approved in a very deliberate fashion. Which is why when I see that several sites have already updated their copyright year to 2010, I realized that they must’ve had a team of people that discussed the importance of changing to 2010 immediately after the new year.

What kind of mindset is needed to get this resolved? I mean, at some point, close to the end of the year probably, some person had to stand up and say, “Hey, if we don’t do this when the year runs around, then we’re gonna look stupid.” And because of the yes/no process that ended in agreement with this guy, someone had to stay up and edit the year in, sync it across all required web-facing servers hosting the site, and then finally, produce it on demand, to the world. What I’m really curious about is speculations on the drama that could’ve surrounded this process.

I wonder… Did the engineer really stay up that late at work (on New Year’s Eve, no less) just for this? Or was there a decent chunk of dev/test resource time spent to make it happen with server-side code? Could he just pay Chinese gold farmers a couple bucks to press the button at the right time?

Let’s remove one simple but hugely complicated problem just to make the scope of the 2009->2010 challenge easier to understand than it actually is, and assume that there’s only one timezone to care about. (Actually, this might be more true than not, since most sites only have a centralized team managed page). Or maybe there was a legal team that warned the product groups that there was a potential for lawsuits if the year was misrepresented on a site with their logo. Nevermind the ridiculous legal precedent that must’ve been quoted to give the lawyers fear in the first place, or the BS they must’ve used to convince the PG it was important enough (heck, maybe the legal department was just playing a practical joke). Okay, fine, that last one is a little too unlikely.

I’m going to bet that this miraculous change was the decision of a single engineer, with a religiously singular internal desire to see this ridiculously low-pri task completed, and sitting on the cloud by 1/1 12:00. Probably a program manager, but with the collaboration of someone with world-server access. They probably worked with someone in operations that snuck it in at the last second before the RTW VS. [This could never happen at any of these, now-massive corporations… or could it? 😉 ]

Of course, my now immersed-in-the-web mind wonders some more: How was this change done? I wonder if a clever engineer decided to hardcode a date change script into the next build. What did this code do?
Would it still do it’s thing when the year rolls to 2011… and not throw some unexpected exception and take down the livesite? Could it really have been a Find-Replace that just changes all instances of “2009” to “2010”? Nah, it wouldn’t be that stupid, or we’d be seeing at least a few random instances of 2009 (that is specific to 2009) turn to 2010.
Maybe he/she made the change and had a script upload the new version at the right moment? Would they be able to secure buy-in from the deployment team for that?

[to be continued…]

Thoughts on American citizenship

by skyrien

I just got an email from my company’s Global Migration team about U.S. Naturalization Workshops they’re hosting. I laughed for a bit and then smiled at the fact that this is relevant in the company and then that something like this would be offered for free. It would be a 30 minute session, 1:1 with a naturalization attorney to discuss the family situation, and the process (there’s a LOT of process).

Then I realized that this actually applies to me too. For those who don’t already know, even though I’ve lived a total of 18 years (out of my 24) in the United States, I’m still technically a citizen of the Republic of Korea. Sure, I’ve been a visa holder, and now bear a Permanent Residency, but in some ways there’s always been some sort of invisible barrier, or mark that subtlely reminded me that I was still an outsider. Growing up, this wasn’t something that really seemed to matter, other than being a mental note and a BIG inconvenience when applying for colleges, jobs, etc. When I first came back to the U.S. in 2000, I as a J-2 dependent, under my dad’s J-1. J-visas, I believe, are for foreign contract workers, without the intent to immigrate; in other words, not allowed to apply for permanent residency. At some point, I shifted to R-2 under my mom, and had it until moving to PR status. Yes, what an honor; I am now a resident alien of this country, and have my fingerprints in some database in the Department of Homeland Security. Yay.

Not surprisingly, I’ve always felt that my relationship to the U.S. government and the country itself was a bit conditional; despite growing up taught that my story is one of many millions, and virtually every person with an immigrant story in their family history (yes white people, you fall into this category too–gasp), yet something seems to happen to those people bearing the U.S. Citizen title, and enjoy privilages not available to the millions of other non-citizens living in this land.

Let me say in advance, that I don’t quite use the terms “American” and “U.S. citizen” interchangably. I know U.S. citizens that haven’t spent more than a few weeks of their adult lives in this country, and certainly don’t relate to the culture, as well as non-citizens that are working for the political campaigns, pay dues to the NRA, and have kids in American public schools. Who’s the more “American” one of those two?

Most people don’t really think about citizenship this way–they’re either born into one country or the other, and they don’t bother doing anything else. If they choose to stay in the United States, they’re generally happy about it enough, and their citizenship status to care. Even activist Americans that seem to treat the term as if holding a little bit of shame don’t deny that they’re Americans. For most people, it’s really simple–it’s something associated with the country you happen to live in; it’s something you’re born with, and no more changable than the culture you live and breathe. Having spent 2/3rds of my life in this country (and probably 90% of my formative years), and yet still not being a citizen, I’ve always thought of the concept very archaic, and with regards to the process of changing citizenship, it’s filled with rules that I never really bought into logically. As a teacher, what do you teach a kid that’s learning about Thanksgiving in school, if there are non-citizens in the room? Do you call them out to recognize that they’re different, or that this history doesn’t apply to them, or teach that there isn’t anything different, and that many cultures come together to make this country? My second grade teacher (Mrs. Halversen, Willard Elementary; Evanston, IL–if you ever see this, you’re awesome!) chose the latter, and it seemed to make sense; for natural-born and naturalized Americans, as well as foreigners and hybrids like me.

Well that’s great when you’re growing up, or in college, grad school, med school. You’re paying money (or your parents are in the form of taxes) to get an education, and people will generally assume that you’re a contributing member of society. Growing up, many of my friends were in a simlar boat, and that made it very easy to discuss the challenges, and work through the ambiguous. Besides, our pride for Naperville North, the Fighting Illini, and Chicago was far more feverent than this abstract concept of national pride. Much of that changes if you choose to work, and take those skills/knowledge that you gained while in school to make money in the great U, S of A, like I’ve chosen to do. Sure much of the multi-culturalism is there, but now that taxes, elections, and societal impact are concerned, it seems to matter so much more what color your passport is. I believe I’m contributing to the larger world, but I’ve definitely been privilaged to have grown up, and to work and live where I do.

Do I consider myself American? Haha, that’s a tough question. Historically, I’ve said no, and understood that my status made me somewhat different. Do I consider myself Asian-American? Absolutely. The feelings, privilages, and difficulties as well as my story fits very closely. Is citizenship tied to it? It probably should, more than it does, but I feel my experience would have been the same even if I had been born as a citizen. If my parents I had moved to Chicago a year earlier, I would have been a natural-born American, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. As for citizenthip, despite the fact that it should be the ultimate representation of your heart’s loyalty to a culture, usually, the reasons why someone is one or the other is completely arbitrary, and influenced far more by practical reasons than one’s loyalty to the words of Francis Scott Key.

And you know what… I think I’m okay with that. Kind of like software patents, it’s an archaic system that’s broken in so many ways, that it might as well be scrapped. But it provides some value, and in a noisy world where we need to label and generalize to live and make sense of things, it helps a great deal. It’s not a problem that many have to even think about, my parents certainly didn’t, and my kids probably won’t–but as a very small segment of the story, I feel a need to write about my experience. I’ll do that some day. In the mean time, I’ll check out this workshop =).

Thanks Global Migration team!

Facebook/Twitter Connect, Disqus brings blogs together

by skyrien

In the last few years, there were leaps forward in web services world that changed how we think of digital identity and how it comes to be used in the blogging world; the former occurred when the idea of delegated authentication came to fruition via OAuth, Facebook Connect, Windows Live ID DelAuth, and others; and the latter happened via Disqus.

Previously, online communities were like closed silos of people and content; each member could post on a family of pages that the service provider operated, be it Blogger, Xanga, Live Journal, or Facebook. You logged into a site, and you got to use that identity within the site. This worked if your community of readers and writers were all affiliated with the same site, but the general web trends at the time were of users being on multiple sites, having multiple identities. For the blogging community, this posed a challenge, especially if you were hosted your own blog; each user had to register in order to give them a personalized experience. It was difficult to track comments from anonymous users, and verifying identity was very difficult. It was a world of anonymous cowards and spammers.

Things changed in late-2008 when Facebook released Facebook Connect and the opening of their developer APIs. Facebook Connect allowed your identity on Facebook to be used (in a secure fashion) outside of Facebook, and allowed external applications to get Facebook data for use. While the principles of Facebook Connect had been around since  2006 under a more generic term (delegated authentication), Facebook was unique since it had nearly global membership (upwards of 90% in most U.S. colleges).

Facebook represented a new wave of online services where people began to care about “Real ID”. Whereas most digital identity in the past had relied on aliases (who remembers who CrouchingTigr45 was?), Facebook emphasized real names, and real connections. This had two implications; first, the user was much more attached to their identity (changing an alias = easy; changing your name = hard); second, the identity was no longer was mentally constrained to the site (you use your name outside of Facebook, don’t you?). With Facebook Connect, this meant that nearly everyone on the web (that mattered) had a way to carry their identity across unrelated services, as long as the service trusted the Facebook identity. Then along came Disqus.

Disqus

Disqus,  is an outsourced commenting system that can rely on either it’s own identity, or a connected identity from Facebook, Twitter, or Open ID. Instead of hosting the comments directly within WordPress, you can install a Disqus plugin on your self-hosted blog, and suddenly the singular blog is entitled to all the features of a massive web community. Bloggers benefited since it allowed individuals to participate immediately in the discussion, upping the community’s activity, and also provided services at scale that individuals may have had difficulty managing on their own. For users, it let users seamlessly use an ID that they already knew how to use.

Advances such as this don’t come all too often in the web services world; but every few years, it can greatly change how we interact with the social web.

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This post was originally published by Skyrien on the Taco Bell on Ogden community blog.