diffuzed

We went to Formentera, Baleares with my girlfriend for a week of vacation. The pictures are on Flickr at http://flickr.com/people/diffuzed.

6 days before the launch of the
service of my new company ! We think it will be a huge, unseen service in France, even maybe in Europe.

We’re using lighty for all http requests, php to generate the pages, postgres as the database backend, mapserver for the tiles overlay on top of Google Maps, some jquery for some basic frontend enhancements, Memcached to speed up the whole stack and a bunch of others technologies.

We’re following the “no-framework attitude” from rasmus lerdof himself, as well as tips’n'tricks from the exellent Steve Souders, google employee, former chief exceptional performance at yahoo! and author of YSlow, or Cal Henderson, chief architect at Flickr, amongst others…

Everything is running on 7 dedicated servers to get started, 2 of wich dedicated to the database and its mirror, the others handling the http requests.

I’ll try to describe the architecture a little bit more later, when the site will be up and running :)

A long week in perspective :)

I usually don’t post a lot about private matters, if at all, but I just come back from a week end in London where a friend brought me to a club named the shunt, which was mui wunderbar ! :) I’ll post some pics on my flickr account soon ! Really really a great place to go !

I switched to the new iPhone 3G the day it came out in France. Nothing really new from the old one with 2.0 firmware. 3g speeds are disappointing, the first connection is really slow like with any mobile technology I know. Download speed is good however, one the connection has been established.
Nice one, but I’m not as excited as I was when I get the first one :)

Wordpress for iPhone is pretty cool though ! And CubeRunner is a really good game, nice and sleek !

just get my iPhone up to date with 2.0 firmware, and it works just fine !

Download iTunes 7.7 from apple.com, download the standalone ipsw image from this link, shift+click (option+click) on “Check for updates” in iTunes to update from a local ipsw.
You can access apple store from this link.

Do a full backup before updating, 2.0 will wipe out all data from your brick.

I’ve installed a bunch of free applications, it’s nice to get something new on this phone since mine wasn’t jailbreaked.

Search in contacts book is also welcome !

I’m subscribing to all sort of new services these days: twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed…

You can follow my thoughs at http://twitter.com/diffuzed, my pics at http://flickr.com/diffuzed or the whole package at http://friendfeed.com/diffuzed.

FriendFeed seems to be a nice way to gather all the information generated by those new services.

Just read the post from Johan Sörlin on Ajaxian and I don’t agree on this one.

In the sample, the onunload event don’t trigger because the page is still loading. I think its a proper behavior, since, in this case, the onload event did not either. In my opinion, there is no reason to unload the document since it hasn’t been loaded yet. So, if you use the onload event to attach your events and the onunload to detach them, it’s perfectly fine in all cases, but you may have lag and incorrect behaviors in your application.

The problem is when you use some kind of “DOMReady” technique to attach your events sooner to try to prevent bad behaviors from early clicks, and I think we are a lot to do that :)
In this case, events may have been attached prior to onload and thus, need to be detached. Using onunload may not work as expected in this case, and I totally agree with Johan on this one.

I think we cant’ blame browser vendors for “incorrect behaviors” when we use the browser in a way it was not intended to handle, like the current hack of DOMReady.

By the way, Safari 3.1 on Windows has the exact same behavior.
IE6, IE7 and IE8 share a consistent behavior in both QuirkMode and Standard mode.
In fact, only Firefox is playing alone with this one :)

I think it’s time to find a way for some kind of reverse “DOMReady”, lets call it “DOMDisposed” :), and Johan’s solution is the best I have seen so far.

After 8 years (!!) in my first job as a web developer, I decided to move and accepted a job in a french startup. It was a tough decision to make, but I finally did it and announce it to my (now former) boss on friday evening.

It’s a complete technological breakthrough for me: I will now work on PHP, PostgreSQL and Linux when I was working with XML/XSL on Windows platform using a homebrew framework. I will miss you, dear XSL :)

And for the anecdote, my boss came in my office on friday afternoon with a nice little surprise in a small leather suitcase : “Here it is, Nicolas, your Macbook Air !”. He didn’t know I had decided to leave yet. I’m still trying to manage the Air as a departure present, I’ll keep you updated :)

He told me later that day he didn’t understand in the first place why I didn’t get completely histerical when I saw the MacBook. I’m used to get sort of weird when I get new gadgets :)

lot of work ahead !

References:

• http://talks.php.net/show/php-best-practices/42
• http://pear.php.net/manual/en/standards.control.php
• http://www.scribd.com/doc/201662/Scalable-PHP-Applications-Zend-conference

Cache:

• http://pear.php.net/package/Cache_Lite/redirected
• opcode: http://pecl.php.net/package/APC

Debuger/Profiler:

• Xdebug : http://xdebug.org
• http://pecl.php.net/package/apd

To read:

• http://hardened-php.net
• http://planet-php.net
• http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regex/

Frensh ISP Free has disclosed an iPhone SIP application to make phone calls using the Wifi VoIP networks provided by the provider’s adsl boxes. You need a 1.1.2 or 1.1.3 jailbreaked iPhone, you can find the howto there. It seems Free has used works from touchmods.

It seems to be the good time to jailbreak my lovely iPhone :)