Jitendra Kavathekar, Yahoo’s VP of Web Analytics, said that the next “big deployment” will be for Yahoo’s Small Business service users, and that the service will continue to be rolled out this year and into 2009.

Best of all…the service will be free! Really nice to see some more competition for Google in this space.

Check out the Web Analytics FAQ, and then read the article at Search Engine Land (both links below).

Yahoo! Web Analytics FAQ
Search Engine Land Article: Yahoo Launches Web Analytics

For future updates, sign-up on Yahoo’s Web Analytics homepage.

I’m really digging some of these designs, not to mention being totally impressed with how she was able to incorporate the circuit boards into so many different areas. I have to admit, they make my circuit board key chain look pretty weak.

This is just a sample of her Three Ring Circuits (3RC) line, enjoy :).

To learn more about Debby’s entire Three Ring Circuits (3RC) line, please visit the links below:

• Debby Arem Designs Online Store
• Esty.com
• About Debby Arem

What exactly did he mean by that? The simple answer I would soon learn was that he wanted to reduce our infrastructure overhead drastically. Heavy, like many popular online destinations, have hefty hosting fees (Storage + Bandwidth + Monthly Server Rentals). When I found out what the current infrastructure costs were, I almost died. Heavy serves a ton of videos, so naturally it costs a boat load of money to keep this puppy running and that’s where AWS comes in. AWS is just so cheap compared to Rackspace…how could Heavy ignore the possible cost savings (EC2 Pricing / S3 Pricing).

I’m happy to report over the past year, Heavy has made some serious progress with Amazon Web Services. The development team is really amazing and I’m proud to be apart of it.

I’m not going to go into anymore details, because Scott made a really amazing write up about how we reduced storage and bandwidth fees drastically and made Rackspace shit in their pants once they realized what we were doing.

Amazon AWS vs. Rackspace and Akamai

In addition to saving money, the team created a suit of tools for AWS, a control panel for administrating EC2 Instances, as well as built an entire product on top of the EC2 cloud.

Mike Brittain also posted an excellent article explaining How We Built a Web Hosting Infrastructure on EC2.

I recommend reading both articles, especially if you plan on using AWS in the future.

This talk aims to enlighten programmers new to Python about these fundamentals, the language mechanics that flow from them and how to effectively put those to use. Among the topics covered are duck-typing, interfaces, descriptors, decorators, metaclasses, reference-counting and the cyclic-garbage collector, the divide between C/C++ data and Python objects and the CPython implementation in general.

As an added bonus, I found this funny python introduction video. It might just make you LOL.

Python’s static methods have a similar implementation as Java & C++. Static methods were not introduced into Python until version 2.2

Example of version 2.2 and higher implementation:

>>> class Foo:
...     def bar(arg):
...         Foo.arg = arg
...     bar = staticmethod(bar)
...
>>> Foo.bar('Hello World')
>>> Foo.arg
'Hello World'
>>> Foo().bar('Hello')
>>> Foo.arg
'Hello'

Static methods can be called either on the class (such as Foo.bar()) or on an instance (such as Foo().bar()). The instance is ignored except for its class.

In version 2.4, function decorator syntax was added, which allows another way to define a static method. If you are using 2.4 or above, this is the recommended way of creating a static method.

Example of version 2.4 and higher implementation:

>>> class Foo:
...     @staticmethod
...     def bar(arg):
...         Foo.arg = arg
...
>>> Foo.bar('Hello World')
>>> Foo.arg
'Hello World'
>>> Foo().bar('Hello')
>>> Foo.arg
'Hello'

If you are looking to do more advanced static methods, look into using classmethod instead of staticmethod. One of the differences between the two is that class method receives the class as implicit first argument, just like an instance method receives the instance. For further reading on class method, refer to the built in functions page. If anyone is interested in seeing example of class method in use, let me know.

One way to see if a variable exists in the namespace is by catching exceptions when trying to access the variable. Here is an example:

try:
    if foo:
        # variable is set, do something
        pass
except NameError:
    # variable not set, do something
    pass

Avoid code like this were ever possible. This is not a recommended best practice. If you need variables that you don’t know the name of, trying using a dictionary (hash table) instead. They are made for that exact purpose.

Example of Best Practices

>>> unknown_vars = {}
>>> unknown_vars['foo'] = 2323
>>> 'foo' in unknown_vars
True
>>> 'bar' in unknown_vars
False

OR checking against globals (Thanks to bsdemon for this tip)

>>> foo = 2323
>>> 'foo' in globals()
True
>>> 'bar' in globals()
False

OR checking against locals (Thanks to bsdemon for this tip)

>>> def test():
...     a = 12
...     if 'a' in locals():
...             return 'OK'
...     else:
...             return 'SORRY'
...
>>> test()
'OK'

UPDATED: My first gut reaction was to quick make a function to handle checking against globals, but as bsdemon pointed out in his second comment, you won’t be able to use the function to check local variables. Thank you again for catching that mistake.

No one can deny that the excitement around the Android platform has dwindled down to nothing (No thanks to Google and the Open Handset Alliance), but that doesn’t mean in the long run, Android will be a viable competitor to Apple.  History has shown us over and over again, that executives have ignored new technologies, because of a lack of understanding and/or only concentrating on what’s hot.

My prediction for Android is this. A wave of new phones will finally start coming out with Android installed. These phones will be slightly cheaper or have features that the iPhone lacks (such as a physical keyword), which will cause a decent percentage of people to buy these new phones instead of the iPhone. Plus, you know mobile companies like T-Mobile are going to push consumers to buy their phones instead of Apple, duh.

Jump ahead a year or so and people’s awareness of Android will start coming around. Companies who ignore the current noise and have apps on the market for Android and will enjoy the first big profits. Naturally everyone else will jump on the bandwagon once they see money is being made.

In my opinion, the only real problem for Android is the hardware that the platform sits on. If the hardware is not up to par with Apples iPhone, Apple will win out. People will dish out money for an alternative to the iPhone, but it has to have similar or better hardware specs, end of story. Imagine if this new T-Mobile phone comes out without the capability or hard drive space for music or video’s, shit who cares about what platform it’s running then. (hmmm…kind of reminds me of the wars between Apples and PC’s which is till going on today.)

Tech Crunch is right in saying they should keep dreaming, but only if mobile companies fail to provide the adequate hardware specs. The Android platform itself may take longer to become mainstream, but over time, consumer demand for applications will be there.

Developers will be provided pretty loose restrictions on what will be aloud to be used, so expect too see some really kick ass apps coming out soon. Apple has said it will keep 30 percent of the revenue from applications sold through Apple Store, but will not charge developers credit card, hosting or marking fees. The developers themselves get to set prices for applications. Apple’s developer program costs $99 to join.

A quote from http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1388…a little fluff from Apple never hurts right?

“Today, we’re witnessing history: that’s the launching of the SDK, the creation of the third great platform, the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Think about it. What the iPhone is all about is in your pocket, you have something that’s broadband, and connected all the time. It’s persona, it knows who you are and where you are. That’s a big deal, a really big deal. It’s bigger than the personal computer.”

“So, [iFund] is about this great opportunity. But more than the money, it’s really about the people, the entrepreneurs, it’s about the great team at Apple, and most of all it’s about the great talent that we can recruit together and go build these amazing companies.”

The SDK can be found here http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/. Though I wouldn’t get to excited, because as some of my co-workers found out this morning, it will take a bit of time to download. The SDK is over a 2GB in size (ouch right! Take that Facebook and Google).

<a href="page.php?id=<? echo $_GET['id']; ?>&title=<? echo $_GET['title']; ?>&q=<? echo $_GET['q']; ?>">XXX</a>

This isn’t a horrible practice and of course it works, but the code snippet below will make your life ten times easier, believe me. It’s much more expandable and easier to strip and encode data if needed. Plus, the first way can be lead to bugs in your code if not properly handled.

In addition, you need PHP 5+ to use the http_build_query() function. (You could easily build a similar function yourself if needed).

<?
$queries = array();
if(isset($_GET)) {
	$keys = array_keys($_GET);
	foreach($keys as $key) {
		$queries[$key]=$_GET[$key];
	}
}
//http://us2.php.net/http_build_query
$params = http_build_query($queries);
?>

<a href="page.php?<? echo $params; ?>">XXX</a>

If you need to add parameters to your URL, just append to the $queries array.

Anyway on to the code. I found this awesome code snippet at: http://netevil.org/node.php?nid=937

I encourage you to check out some other parts of this guys site, pretty good stuff.

 array(
                  'method' => 'POST',
                  'content' => $data
               ));
     if ($optional_headers !== null) {
        $params['http']['header'] = $optional_headers;
     }
     $ctx = stream_context_create($params);
     $fp = @fopen($url, 'rb', false, $ctx);
     if (!$fp) {
        throw new Exception("Problem with $url, $php_errormsg");
     }
     $response = @stream_get_contents($fp);
     if ($response === false) {
        throw new Exception("Problem reading data from $url, $php_errormsg");
     }
     return $response;
  } 

?>