SodaHead - Tom's Blog

Coding?

2007-12-06T20:30:54Z

+4 raves

I have seen this effect, I just didn't know it had scientific proof. Oh well, for those of you who didn't know, this is how we REALLY built SodaHead. :-)

Its official, the votes are in and America has lost its mind

2007-10-31T21:14:11Z

Tom

+3 raves

Why have we become a nation that attacks preemptively? I have watched the insanity of King George for 7 years now and it seems to me that it must be rubbing off. How can a poll, by Zogby International, a creditable organization be right on this?

We, as a nation, need to try diplomacy as a first option. In a press conference the other day, Dana Perino, was asked by by Helen Thomas, 'Does Israel Have Nuclear Weapons?'. Dana responded, 'Helen I have told you before you will have to ask them'. But when we think about Iran, we don't ask.

Bush was asked in a press conference recently, "But you definitively believe Iran wants to build a nuclear bomb"

And he responded - "I think Tehran -- until they suspend and/or, you know, make it clear that they -- that -- that their -- that their statements are real, yeah, I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon. And I know it's in the world's interest to prevent them from doing so.

I believe that the Iranian -- if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would be a dangerous threat to world peace. It would -- this is -- we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. And I take this very -- I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously.

And we'll continue to work with all nations about the seriousness of this threat. Plus we'll continue working the financial measures that we're in the process of doing. In other words, I think -- the -- the -- the whole strategy is, is that, you know, at some point in time leaders or responsible folks inside of Iran may get tired of isolation and say this isn't worth it, and it me it's worth the effort to keep the pressure on this government.

And secondly, it's important for the Iranian people to know we harbor no resentment to them. We're disappointed in the Iranian government's actions, as should they be. Inflation's way too high; isolation is causing economic pain. This is a country that has got a much better future, people have got a much better -- should have better hope inside Iran than this current government is providing them.

So it's a -- it's -- look, it's a complex issue, no question about it, but my intent is to continue to rally the world, to send a focused signal to the Iranian government that we will continue to work to isolate you in the hopes that at some point in time somebody else shows up and says it's not worth the isolation."

Here we are again, pounding the drums for War with the nation drinking the same kool-aid as our fearless leader.

Why would you change the site?

2007-09-11T15:31:21Z

Tom

+4 raves

Since the first release of the site we have been adding features at an
incredible rate. We have been listening to our users and making
adjustments. This past weekend we released a new site interface, or
design. The design was a radical shift from the original incarnation
and left many users say, 'hmmm'. As one might expect it came with a few
unexpected 'ops we missed that one'.

So why did we change something that worked? Some thoughts I have read
have been, 'to keep up with the jones', or 'its something different'.
Keeping up with technology is an exciting and challenging endeavor,
especially in the public space. Decisions regarding how we implement
the solution to a given problem are not made lightly. Every one of them
requires forethought to measure the benefit verses the risk.

The first version of this site was built at a blistering pace. From conception to deployment took four months (see How we built SodaHead).
The core of development focused on the back end, something we could not
'change' in the future and had to be 'right' the first time. The front
end (the interface) was built with a good bit of 'how about moving that
there'. This may be a fast way to do it but it does not set you up for
future extensibility.

The interface redesign was done for the following benefits, enable
future rapid development, make the site easy on the eyes and enable
support for all modern browsers. We modularized all components for
consistency and ease of reuse. This is one of the reasons you see the
same components everywhere. We are reusing tons of code now instead of
writing new stuff. This will make the development of new features very
easy. The colors, layout and site compartmentalization are based on
'current' best practices in human factors. Human factors is the science
related to computer-human interaction. The colors, fonts and style are
ergonomically designed with forward thought for accessibility and
internationalization. The compartmentalization is based on a common
'summary/detail' pattern that allows for easy discovery of features and
function. The summary component is always on the right and the detail
is the main content.

Building in support for modern browsers is the hard one and the one
filled with risk. With the current trends in internet computing a year
is a very long time. The list of modern internet browsers is Internet
Explorer (IE), Firefox, Mozilla projects, Safari and Opera. Until this
release we only really supported IE, Firefox and Mozilla projects.
Safari and Opera support was 'weak at best'. Every browser comes with
its own quirks and anomalies. The best for 'surfing the web' without
fail are Firefox, Mozilla and IE 7.0. To ensure a happy internet
experience you should update your browser once a year. For example IE
6.0 was released in 2001. The internet has changed a bit since then. IE
7.0 was release in 2005 and has security updates every six months. We
still support IE 6.0 but it comes at a heavy work load that always
leaves developers saying, 'that's not in the spec'.

The other major component in the risk department was user acceptance.
We didn't do the site redesign in a vacuum. It was shown to a number of
people outside of SodaHead. We spent a lot of hours working through
design issues and we think we have it right. Please let us know. We
want our users to enjoy the site.

This site is for you.

How we built SodaHead

2007-03-01T07:31:49Z

Tom

+23 raves

Everyone has heard the saying, ‘you can build it fast, you can build right, you can build it cheap. Pick two’. However, it seems that today you can have it all.

In the beginning of August I first began speaking with Jason about the idea that was SodaHead. He had three pages moc’d up that showed the concept, he had the resume, energy and passion for the idea that could sell anyone. Meeting two was at my favorite English pub, ‘The Rose and Crown’. ‘My people’ met ‘their people’ over fish, chips and beer and it looked like a go. They were marketing and we were engineering. We “opened the doors” on October 16.

During August and September I began looking at the hard part, how to make it work and survive at a scale that would be inevitable. This being my fourth start-up I knew the drill. First start researching the state of the art in web development and analyzing risk, performance and speed of development that would deliver the concept in a rapid inexpensive manor. Some core concepts seemed obvious, agile development principles, a small engineering team and leverage the open source community for all we could get. For the month of October there were 4 of us (two founders; Jason and Mike, one ops; Art and myself) sitting in a loaned conference room with cell phones. November introduced three more engineers (two client side; Bill and Tabby and one integration/backend; Eric) and an artist (Jennifre). The seven of us moved into a larger room, a common area in the building. As of today our company is composed of five engineers (we hired one more; Justin), two ops guys (we hired one more; John) and four marketing/business folks (Adi and Jennifre).

Now to the technology stack… The core platform was easy, hardware today is a commodity and processing, memory and disk are cheap. The development environment/tools are subversion/trac, your choice of Linux and vi. After dealing with every configuration management platform known to man I must admit I will never deal with anything less than a subversion/trac combination. Subversion is a configuration management for engineers. Build management has never been easier. Trac complements subversion with issue tracking, wiki and knowledge share capabilities and we have had no real issues with bugs in either. With ViewVC we have a rock solid environment. For an engineer, the day-to-day environment is critical. I left the decision up to the engineer. For the desktop support minded this sounds like an issue. Simply put, let your engineers support themselves. We have Xubuntu, Gentoo and Fedora. For client side development it’s the conventional Windows, OSX, Linux and every browser we can find. Giving engineers the freedom to manage their own environment makes them happy and much more productive. Last the IDE. Well it’s vi. We do have one emacs guy but I won’t begin the religious war. Eric has integrated vi with eclipse to create the best IDE I have ever seen. It takes the best of both worlds and integrates them seamlessly together. The sourceforge project is called eclim.

Off to the religious wars… Yes we are a LAMP shop, why is a better conversation point. I debated my preference for Postgres with our director of ops. I really like the disk image that Postgres lays down. I like the fact that it has the features and maturity that it has and all of the development I have done with Postgres has been good. The director of ops did a good bit of research and we compromised on MySQL 5.X. Transaction throughput for the front end was the core argument. We will see how the debate finishes as time goes on.

What about the P… a little background will help clarify the final decision. I have written C for micro-kernels that are used for routing transactions for Visa International, I have built complex C++ document processing systems on Solaris that leverage the STREAMS libraries and I have built Java based systems that scaled to the n’th degree. No matter what decision was made the fact remained that the base had to scale and we needed a web framework. I can see the writing that interpreted languages are the future of web app development. Ruby is an elegant language. The rails fan base is ‘happy’ and for rapid development it is a great solution. My main concern was surviving scale for the next two years. While interpreters are gaining momentum and speed, I needed the confidence that I could get beneath the core of the language and hit the iron. It was Java’s native interface that allowed me to scale huge systems previously. Python has a clean C interface if needed and Django offered a solid base for web development. After doing some prototyping I came to the conclusion we could do this fast and correctly with Python and Django.

So for the first two weeks of development I spent the time getting the environment into shape and working out the kinks and writing the user and its profile (establishing a security base including identity makes the rest of development move faster). When Eric and Bill showed up they hit the ground running. I have a friend who lives by the mantra, ‘make it work, make it work right, make it work fast’. Throughout November and December we lived by ‘make it work’. The core functions of the site were completed by New Years Day.

The schema is very warehouse centric. If looking at an ER model you would see lots of dimensions and surrogate keys. Of the ~60 tables 2 have natural primary keys. Djangos’ OR mapping framework made persistence tier development quick and easy. Eric and I have worked together enough over time that we simply developed the site in a like mind.

The full text search functions on the site are not backed by MySQL. They are a nifty piece of integration work that Eric created. He wrapped Solr (The Jakarta project) with Djangos model/management interface making it so that the calling application has small modifications in the semantics to utilize the Lucene search engine.

Coding standards helped make development of the middle tier quick and efficient. Bill and Tabby made fast work of the front end. We created a number of tags and filters that enabled richer functionality in the template API’s. While Bill developed the AJAX libraries, Tabby focused on the templates. Djangos’ template engine made the separation of control and presentation clean enough that Tabby was able to develop the presentation tier quickly.

January was all about ‘make it work right’. Jennifre spent tireless hours stylizing the pages and making graphics for everything you see. Defect management and refactoring consumed most of the month. During this time Eric was also finding, correcting and submitting back inefficiencies in the Django framework.

In February we jumped into ‘make it work fast’ mode. We introduced caching via memcache, C based NLP functions from Levenshtein, PIL and PyCaptcha. Jmeter was the load-testing tool and profiling was done using kcachegrind. We have noticed inefficiencies in the cmemcache client and switched to the python client for reasons of availability not performance. February was also the alpha month. The alpha test went very well and unveiled a number of usability issues. At this point we have an amazing product that represents an unbelievable team effort developing a rich product in a very short period of time. I am proud of the work and effort put forward by our small yet efficient team and I am looking forward to our public release. At this point I only have one concern, while we have planned for everything we could think of, there is one great unknown in the world of the web…can we survive the ‘Digg Effect’?

So What About David Beckham

2007-01-30T07:07:47Z

Tom

+7 raves

I guess I can't resist now that the basic hype is dying down. So what about David Beckham and his trip to the US? Is it really for Victoria? Is he washed up and this is the only place he can go?

The English press is bashing him now, but why not. He has had a rough year. Lost the skipper ship of the national team, sitting on the bench in Spain. I would be willing to bet that David wishes for the day when he was at the academy in Manchester. He was part of one of the greatest teams in the history of the sport. He played with giants, always serving and passing with the vision of one of the leagues greats.

To me this is actually a brilliant move on the part of David Beckham. He has always loved working with kids. He and Victoria are regarded as terrific parents and he is moving to a place that is ready for a football revolution. His 'academy' is doing well in LA but its nothing like the academy where he did his residency. The US national team has now developed a residency program and we are starting to yearn for a competitive team.

Sir Alex always believed in his academy. The same place where David started. David worked under the tutelage of one of the great minds of the game. He is now at a point in his career that he will begin to think about 'what is next'. Why not setup a working system in a place where the game needs it. In southern California youth soccer is at a level that is par to none. The Cal South region dominates in all aspects of the youth game. David is coming into this world with a wealth of knowledge.

If he can pull this off he can help lift American soccer to the 'next level'. Are we as a nation going to all of the sudden compete on the international stage? Not a chance. Soccer is a cruel sport that takes years to develop. It is one of the few sports that requires discipline and patience. It has taken Europe over 100 years to develop the game to the level they currently compete at today. We as a nation don't understand the nature of the game. People commonly tell me, 'they don't score enough'. I always reply, 'how many times do you say check mate in a chess match'.

At any rate, European clubs are opening up a presence in the US. Chivas has a team in the MLS and we now have David Beckham. Within the next ten years we will be able to compete on the worlds stage. In twenty we will be a force. David Beckham's arrival is at the turning point and maybe for his 50th birthday he can coach the US national team in the world cup with a team loaded from his academy.

Torture and the United States

2007-01-24T16:50:14Z

Tom

+2 raves

The Bush administration’s handling of the case of Maher Arar came under new scrutiny Thursday when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, now controlled by the Democrats. Arar is the Canadian citizen who was seized by U.S. officials during a stopover flight in New York in 2002. He was secretly sent to Syria as part of the Bush administration's extraordinary rendition program.

In Syria, Arar was held for almost a year in a grave-like cell. He was repeatedly tortured. He was released without ever being charged with a crime. Last year, the Canadian government determined Maher Arar was innocent but the Bush administration has never apologized for its actions.

On Thursday Attorney General Alberto Gonzales refused to state why the U.S. detained him and why he was sent to Syria instead of his home in Canada. The attorney general was questioned by Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy – the new chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Senator Patrick Leahy questioning Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Maher Arar is still awaiting for an apology from the Bush administration. Three months ago, Arar was honored in Washington DC by the Institute for Policy Studies. But he was unable to attend the ceremony because he remains on the U.S. no-fly list even though the Canadian government has publicly acknowledged he is innocent. This is part of a video message Maher Arar recorded for the awards ceremony.

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: Attorney General, I’m sorry. I don't mean to treat this lightly. We knew damn well if he went to Canada, he wouldn't be tortured. He’d be held; he’d be investigated. We also knew damn well if he went to Syria, he would be tortured. And it's beneath the dignity of this country, a country that has always been a beacon of human rights, to send somebody to another country to be tortured. You know and I know that has happened a number of times in the past five years by this country.

It is a black mark on us. It has brought about the condemnation of some of our closest and best allies. They have made those comments both publicly and privately to the President of the United States and others. And it is easy for us to sit here comfortably in this room, knowing that we're not going to be sent off to another country to be tortured, to treat it as though -- well, Attorney General Ashcroft said, “We’ve got assurances,” though assurances from a country that we also say now, “Oh, we can't talk to them because we can't take their word for anything.”

ALBERTO GONZALES: Well, Senator, I dis--

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: I’m somewhat upset.

ALBERTO GONZALES: Yes, sir. I can tell. But before you get more upset, perhaps you should wait to receive the briefing --

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: How long?

ALBERTO GONZALES: I’m hoping that we can get you the information next week.

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: Well, Attorney General, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll meet you halfway on this. I’ll wait next week for that briefing. If we don't get it, I guarantee you there will be another hearing on this issue. Canadians have been our closest allies, longest unguarded frontier in the world. They are justifiably upset. They are wondering what's happened to us. They are wondering what's happened to us. Now, you know and I know we are a country with a great, great tradition of protecting people's individual liberties and rights. You take an oath of office to do that. I take an oath of office to do that. I believe in my basic core nature in that.

Listen to the interview at Democracy Now!

Will the press ever be free

2007-01-24T16:14:35Z

Tom

+2 raves

The veteran broadcast journalist Bill Moyers spoke on Friday before 3,500 at the opening of the National Conference on Media Reform in Memphis. He announced his return to the airwaves and outlined his vision of media reform. "As ownership gets more and more concentrated, fewer and fewer independent sources of information have survived in the marketplace; and those few significant alternatives that do survive, such as PBS and NPR, are under growing financial and political pressure to reduce critical news content and to shift their focus in a mainstream direction, which means being more attentive to establishment views than to the bleak realities of powerlessness that shape the lives of ordinary people."

BILL MOYERS: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN ONCE SAID, "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner."

"Liberty," he said, "is a well-armed lamb, contesting the vote."

My fellow lambs -- it's good to be in Memphis and find you well-armed with passion for democracy, readiness for action, and courage for the next round in the fight for a free and independent press in America. I salute the conviction that brought you here. I cherish the spirit that fills this hall, and the camaraderie that we share here.

All too often, the greatest obstacle to reform is the reform movement itself. Factions rise, fences are erected, jealousies mount, and the cause all of us believe in is lost in the shattered fragments of what once was a clear and compelling vision.

Reformers, in fact, often remind me of Baptists. I speak as a Baptist. I know whereof I speak. One of my favorite stories is of the fellow who was about to jump off a bridge, when another fellow ran up to him crying, "Stop, stop, don't do it."

The man on the bridge looks down and asks, "Why not?"

"Well, there's much to live for."

"What for?"

"Well, your faith. Your religion."

"Yes?"

"Are you religious?"

"Yes."

"Me, too. Christian or Buddhist?"

"Christian."

"Me, too. Are you Catholic or Protestant?"

"Protestant."

"Me, too. Methodist, Baptist or Presbyterian?"

"Baptist."

"Me, too. Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Savior?"

"Baptist Church of God."

"Me, too. Are you Original Baptist Church of God or Reformed Baptist Church of God?"

"Reformed Baptist Church of God."

"Me, too. Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God Reformation of 1879, or Reform Baptist Church of God Reformation of 1917?"

"1917."

Whereupon, the second fellow turned red in the face and yelled, "Die, you heretic scum," and pushed him off the bridge.

You can listen to the entire interview at Democracy Now!