Alfonso Jimenez

The Ibracadabra Show starts

alfonso — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:10:03 +0000

How should a microblog search engine be?

alfonso — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:24:36 +0000

Lately people have been talking too much about searches on microblogging services. It’s been said that even Google is launching a new microblog search engine in the next few months. Some services exist already such as Twingly or Twitter Search (Summize), but none of them answer my queries as I would like. As a normal user, I would insert into a microblog search engine two type of queries: What’s happening right now? or What’s being said about ____ at the moment?, since it doesn’t make sense to look for information about the capital of Zimbabwe or if I want to know everything about a certain family of birds. It may be possible to guess one of these questions using a microblog search service, but I would use a classic search engine though.

Imagine that you’re a frustated Manchester United fan and you want to know what’s going on regarding your favourite football team. So you go to Twitter Search and look for the terms “Manchester United”. The results will leave you stunned because of the multiple kind of information found. Despite receiving hundreds of results each minute, 90% of the found messages are crap. You’ll get lots of duplicated messages, spam from the media Twitter accounts using twitterfeed, messages written in languages that you probably don’t understand (Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, ...), messages written by “irrelevant” users and so so so much crap.

How should a microblog search engine be? Are we retrieving useful information from these kind of sources?

Made in Heaven

alfonso — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 07:28:29 +0000

The dessert

alfonso — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:30:47 +0000

The main course

alfonso — Sat, 23 May 2009 20:30:22 +0000

The starter

alfonso — Wed, 13 May 2009 20:33:40 +0000

Rome, here we go

alfonso — Wed, 06 May 2009 20:14:44 +0000

This is a chorreo

alfonso — Sat, 02 May 2009 20:43:11 +0000

phpredis, 2 Fast 2 Furious

alfonso — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 08:00:01 +0000

Redis (REmote DIctionary Server) is a persistent key-value database with built-in net interface written in ANSI-C for Posix systems. Whilst it may at first seem like the wheel is being reinvented here, the need for something beyond a simple key-value database is pretty clear. It’s possible to use Redis like a replacement of memcached, with the main difference being the dataset is stored persistently – not volatile data – and Redis introduces new data structures such as list and sets. Furthermore, it implements atomic operations in order to interoperate with these data structures.

I released a PHP extension called phpredis a couple of weeks ago, which works as a PHP client API for Redis. The project is hosted at Google Code at the moment, and you can get the code directly from the SVN repository: http://phpredis.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/.

Despite a vanilla PHP client library already exists, I felt the need to write it since a PHP extension normally performs better and I wanted to make the most of Redis potential.

Let’s see a snippet of how to make a simple operation to Redis using the PHP client:

    $redis = new Redis();
    $redis->connect(‘127.0.0.1’, 6379);

    $redis->set(‘key’, 27);

    echo $redis->get(‘key’); // it should print 27

    $redis->incrby(‘key’, 3);

    echo $redis->get(‘key’); // it should print 30

The code above was quite obvious, it stored a value associate to key and it increments its value by 3. Let’s see another snippet a bit more complex, for example using a list:

    $redis = new Redis();
    $redis->connect(‘127.0.0.1’, 6379);

    $redis->lPush(‘list’, ‘val’);
    $redis->lPush(‘list’, ‘val2’);
    $redis->lPush(‘list’, ‘val3’, 1);

    echo $redis->lPop(‘list’, 1); // it should print val3
    echo $redis->lPop(‘list’); // it should print val2   
    echo $this->lPop(‘list’); //it should print val

Notice that depending on the last optional parameter (0 by default) it’s possible to append/extract an element to/from the tail or to/from the head of the list.

There is a list including all the available methods. At the moment, I’m working on the implementation of more new Redis commands and on the support for complex data structures such as arrays and PHP objects.

Apart from phpredis, there are more client API for languages as Perl, Python, Ruby and Erlang. You can find this and more at the Redis project homepage. Redis has been written by Salvatore Sanfilippo who I’m chuffed to bits with.

Essential Java resources

alfonso — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:40:26 +0000

Ted Neward, a consultant with ThoughtWorks and the principal of Neward & Associates, has published a list of libraries, tools and other resources - such as books, conferences or weblogs - any up-and-coming Java developer should have. The Java platform will be celebrating its 14th birthday soon, and it’s time to revise the story of one of most extended languages.

Link | Essential Java resources