Michael J. Radwin's blog

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Meet Schmichael
Originally uploaded by evangoer.

PHP at Yahoo! presentation from Zend/PHP Conference

Slides for my PHP at Yahoo! presentation from the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo 2005 are now online in PowerPoint and PDF formats.

Abstract:

In 2002, Yahoo selected PHP for Web site development and began to phase out its own proprietary server-side scripting language. Three years later, Michael Radwin reflects on how the switch to PHP offered both technical challenges and productivity increases.

The first part of the presentation offers a look inside Yahoo's decision-making process to adopt an open-source scripting language. Radwin addresses why Yahoo selected PHP over other languages, focusing on the performance and stability required to serve billions of page views a day.

In the second part, Radwin discusses Yahoo's PHP development methodology, which has enabled its engineers to rapidly implement features while still creating software that is maintainable over long periods of time.

Arnold @ Yahoo!

Arnold @ Yahoo!
Originally uploaded by mradwin.

Burton Group report on P-Languages for Enterprise Scripting

The Burton Group published a report entitled The P-Languages: PHP, Perl, and Python for Enterprise Scripting yesterday. I'm quoted twice in the article.

Page 11 (PHP in Web Development):

Not only is PHP used extensively throughout the Web, it is also used by some of the busiest websites in the world. For example Yahoo!, which serves up 2.85 billion page views a day and supports 345 million visitors a month, uses PHP for all its presentation logic. For Yahoo!, searching and delivering web content quickly is a mission-critical issue, as is the ability to quickly add new features and maintain existing code. According to Michael Radwin, engineering manager in the Infrastructure Group for Yahoo!, "All of our presentation logic is in PHP. We avoid putting presentation logic in C/C++ because of the longer code-compile-debug cycle." Other busy websites that use PHP include the social networking site Friendster (http://www.friendster.com/), which switched from JSP to PHP in 2004, and Freshmeat.org, an open source resource site that uses PHP to process between 600,000 and 700,000 page views a day.

Page 12 (Perl in System Administration and Integration):

Burton Group found that Perl, more than any other language, is heavily used in UNIX and Linux system administration. Ford Motor Company, for example, has been using Perl with their UNIX systems in this capacity for years. In fact, it would be difficult today to find an organization that has a number of UNIX boxes that do not use Perl in some capacity. Michael Radwin of Yahoo! told Burton Group: "We use Perl all the time here for almost everything that's not web-related and not super performance-related. It's a superb general-purpose scripting language. We use it for all of the typical uses (text processing, system administration, algorithmic prototyping, automation, light data crunching, report generation)." Yahoo! owns 90 web properties (Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Store, etc.) and supports 345 million visitors per month.

Those Yahoo! statistics (pageviews, visitors per month) are from December 2004.

Ten years of Yahoo! Inc

The 10-year anniversary of Yahoo! Inc's incorporation is this week. We're having a party at work on Wednesday to celebrate. They put a big tent up on campus this morning. Apparently Sugar Ray is going be giving a private concert, and the weather has been threatening rain. Rumor has it that the www.yahoo.com site will have a special look on the anniversary. In the meantime, you can read about the company's history.

I heard another rumor (so far unsubstantiated) that as part of the 10-year celebration, the company would be offering sabbaticals for long-time employees. SGI, for example, offers 6-week paid sabbatical every 4 years. Alas, we don't have that perk (although we do have three espresso bars staffed with full-time baristas).

I've been at Yahoo! for more than half of its 10 years. I've often dreamed of taking a short break to try something else for a change of pace. If the sabbatical rumor proves to be true, I'd be sure to use mine for a semester at the Jerusalem School of Kosher Culinary Arts.

Yahoo == Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle? I don't know.

Great Wall

More pictures...

In Beijing

I'm in Beijing and checked into the hotel. Extremely nice place. Complimentary broadband Internet.

Air China flight 984 from LAX ended up being delayed 12 hours due to mechanical problems. It's a real bummer, since I was supposed to give a "Platform Overview" talk at the conference this morning, but I missed the entire first day. I've been rescheduled to speak tomorrow morning.

Ironically, as I cleared immigration, I heard over the loudspeaker that United Airlines flight 889 from SFO had just arrived.

Not off to such a good start

My flight to China was delayed 10 hours due to mechanical trouble with the plane. We're supposedly leaving at 12 noon today, but who knows if that will really happen.

雅虎中国 - Yahoo!

I'm off to Beijing tonight to visit the Yahoo! China office.

Open HTTP redirectors

There has been much discussion about open e-mail relays, but very little about open HTTP redirectors. An open redirector is hosted by foo.com, but will unintentionally send you to bar.com. This can have interesting effects on PageRank or can trick users into clicking on something that isn't what it seems.

After many months of abuse by spammers, the rd.yahoo.com redirect server is now closed.

Yahoo! has used a redirect server for a long time for tracking clicks from one Yahoo! website to another.

http://rd.yahoo.com/example/?http://travel.yahoo.com/

Last year, spammers started using rd.yahoo.com in email messages to trick unsuspecting users into thinking that they were clicking on a Yahoo! website. They started sending out emails with links that looked like this:

http://rd.yahoo.com/example/?http://204.92.99.152/

Users saw the yahoo.com domain name and figured it must be some official Yahoo! site, not realizing that the server would redirect to another IP address. So we started blocking those types of URLs (easy to do since we'd never use a dotted-quad for anything legit). So the spammers switched to something a little more clever:

http://finance.yahoo.com:80@204.92.99.152/

The trick here was a misuse of the clear-text "username:password@server" authentication feature. It made it look like you were accessing a yahoo.com URL, but in fact were going somewhere else. These were particularly insidious, since they didn't even go through our redirect servers, so there was nothing we could do to block them. Microsoft got rid of the problem for us with an update to Internet Explorer 5 and 6 that simply disabled the feature altogether. Mozilla followed suit by displaying a warning dialog box when this type of URL is used:

You are about to log into the site "204.92.99.152" with the username "finance.yahoo.com," but the website does not require authentication. This may be an attempt to trick you.

Is "204.92.99.152" the site you want to visit?

So the spammers went back to abusing Yahoo!, but this time with actual hostnames:

http://rd.yahoo.com/example/?http://www.online-casino.com/

This not only tricks email users, but when used on the web can (in theory) also influence PageRank-type algorithms.

We had no choice but to either maintain a whitelist (lots of server-side state to manage) or implement a digital signature algorithm. We went with the digital signature approach. So now you can safely click through to partner sites:

http://rd.yahoo.com/example/SIG=10knc8oqv/?http://www.hp.com/

But if you try to recycle the same signature with a different URL, you'll get a 403 Forbidden:

http://rd.yahoo.com/example/SIG=10knc8oqv/?http://www.online-casino.com/

Finally, rd.yahoo.com does what it's supposed to do and nothing else. Frustrated spammers out there have probably already started to abuse someone else.

http://www.google.com/url?q=http://204.92.99.152/
http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.online-casino.com/

:-)

Still a small office

Someone asked me at lunchtime what I thought of the Yahoo! India Software Development Center office. I answered that it reminded me of the Y! office 5 years ago in Santa Clara. It's still small enough that you can know every engineer, all-hands meetings don't require a microphone or PowerPoint presentations, and the cafeteria has a payroll-deduction scheme for lunch (instead of a la carte and cashiers like we have nowadays in Sunnyvale).

I thought this was a pretty original insight, but apparently I gave more-or-less the same answer as Zod, Filo, Ash and other old-timers gave. :-)

Only one more day in the office and then it's back to the US. We'll probably go back to doing weekly videoconference calls so we can continue the momentum on the project, but it won't be the same.

Mysore Palace at night

After visiting the temple we came back to the palace to get some nightime pictures. There were thousands of families on the palace grounds walking around or sitting on the grass. We got some boiled peanuts from a guy in the parking lot and then hopped in the car to head back to Bagnalore.

Elephant ride in Mysore

You can't actually see the elephant here, but trust me, we're riding one. Badi, Swaroop and I made a trip to Mysore yesterday and visited the palace and Chamundi Hill.

Riding a bull cart on the way to Mysore

Bangalore Traffic

Yahoo!ing in India

I'm currently in Bangalore, India for business. Yahoo! formed a software development center here about 3 years ago, and now the office has about 130 engineers.

I arrived a few days ago, but have been so busy with work that I haven't had time to post any pictures. This is my first trip to India (actually, my first trip to any part of Asia). The Y! office is located on Mahatma Gandhi Road, which is one of the busiest streets in downtown Bangalore.

Inside the office looks about the same as the Y! corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale. The cubicle walls are lower, but the purple-and-yellow (and grey) color scheme is much the same. Here are Badi and Kalyan in a typical 4-person bullpen cube:

I arrived Wednesday morning, took a tour of the office, met with my team to do a short presentation, and made it back to the hotel around sundown before going to sleep. Thursday and Friday I gave presentations to a larger group of new employees introducing them to a wide variety of proprietary Yahoo! technologies.

On Thursday night after work we went to see a theater group called MISFIT perform three short plays. Very entertaining. We were planning a trip to Mysore today but unfortunately I'm not feeling very well, so we'll probably go next weekend. I spent the entire day Saturday at the hotel in bed with a fever and dizzyness. Feeling slightly better today, but now I've got intestinal issues. Guess I should've heeded Venkat's advice and avoided fresh fruits and vegetables. Hope to be feeling better tomorrow.

One thing I've noticed reading the papers here is that Indians really like puns. Coverage of the recent elections has been peppered with groan-inducing headlines like "Singhing in the Reign" and "In Sihkness and in Health."

My Yahoo! RSS

After 2-3 years of stagnation, My Yahoo! has finally done something interesting. They have added a hosted RSS aggregator feature to the site.

For the time being, I'll still probably stick to using like Radio Userland better, because it organizes articles by date (regardless of source) and My Yahoo! is very source-centric. However, I'm hopeful that My Yahoo! will improve over time, including the ability to show full content of RSS feeds with inline images.

Yahoo! Year in Review

Here's my own personal Yahoo! Year in Review (i.e. the highlights of my job in 2003):

• In January, I started my new role as an Engineering Manager, leading my own 3-person team. The change of job responsibilities was just the thing to get me charged up about work again.

• A month later I finally got rid of my home office and started working in Santa Monica at the Yahoo! LAUNCH office.

• In March I got the good news that my Targeted Advertising Patent application had been published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. We submitted the application back in the Fall of 2001, but it takes the USPTO a long time to review these things. Hopefully the patent will issue in 2004.

• That same month I got news from my boss that my group (developer tools and core software infrastructure) was going to be growing in size. We started interviewing candidates, and by the beginning of August my group had grown from 3 to 7 engineers.

• In July, I spoke at OSCON 2003 in Portland. I got to have a beer with my buddy Sam Jackson who I hadn't seen in about 5 years, and I met a few cool folks like David Sklar and Adam Trachtenberg.

• I spent a good deal of time in July and August training Andrei and Ryan, the two newest members of my team.

• I gave my "One Year of PHP at Yahoo!" talk at PHPCon West 2003 in Santa Clara. This conference was more schmoozing than sessions; I spent quality time with Ze'ev, Rinat, Zak, George, Sterling, Thies, Shane, James, Luke & Laura, and local Yahoo!s Andrei and Brian. I also met Brian from Microsoft, who seemed like a really nice guy.

• I spent most of the remaining part of the year working on annual performance reviews. It was amazingly difficult and time-consuming, but I'm hopeful that it was worth the effort. The opportunity to reflect upon my group's work over the past year made me proud of our accomplishments.

• As a result of my new people-management job, I didn't manage to write too much code this past year. Our CVSdb checkin database shows that I added 7,257 LOC to the codebase this year, compared to 21,928 LOC in 2002.
  

There is only an hour and a half until the New Year, so I think that's enough for 2003.

Cancelled again

Ugh. I've been cancelled again.

I was planning to give an Apache-releated talk to a bunch of Yahoo! engineers in Sunnyvale next Thursday, but somone else has stolen the conference room from me.

Yahoo! Engineering has a great tradition of "Thursday Lunchtime Tech Talks." Every Thursday we reserve a big conference room upstairs from the cafeteria and someone gives a tutorial or a presentation on a technical subject while a handful of interested engineers listen and learn. It's a great opportunity to meet people you've only corresponded with over email, and very frequently you learn something about how to solve a particular problem that comes in handy.

In my 5 years at the company I've probably done 6 or 7 talks, mostly relating to ad-targeting, Apache, PHP, and our proprietary package-management tool.

I've actually been planning to give this Apache talk since early September and have had 3 separate dates reserved for this talk. But each time I've been postponed by a few weeks due to a room conflict. Next week there's some sort of three-day conference that wants to use the room.

So, I've been rescheduled for January 8, 2004. I wonder if I'll get preempted by the Q4 2003 earnings announcement...

How to scale PHP

With one week to spare, I'm finished with the slides for "One Year of PHP at Yahoo!," a talk that I'm giving next week at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland.

The finished product is a quite a bit different than the abstract I submitted, but I think it's a good thing. This talk ended up being much less about Yahoo! and much more about how to use PHP effectively in a high performance environment.

Here's the new outline:

1. Brief introduction to PHP
   • Where PHP fits in a web server architecture
2. Scaling PHP
   • Five general techniques for high performance
3. PHP Security
4. Managing PHP
5. Open Problems
   • Lessons learned after one year of PHP
6. Q & A

Folks who come to the talk hoping to learn from an insider about how Yahoo! works are going to be disappointed. The PR group won't let me give away any secrets this time. :-)

However, if you're interested in seeing how PHP can be scaled to 1.9 billion pageviews a day, this talk is for you.

This talk is packed with content. I've got 30 slides but only 45 minutes of time. I'll post the slides on Monday once I've got the final OK from PR.

[Update 8 July 2003: Slides for the talk are now available online.]

Working on my OSCON talk

It dawned on me recently that I've only got about 2 weeks before my One Year of PHP at Yahoo! talk at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland.

Here's the section title slide for one of the parts of my talk:

I like talks that have lots of graphics, even if they're a little goofy. I hate it when folks just put slide after slide of text. Those bullet-points communicate a lot of information, but they are really unpleasant to read.

[Update 8 July 2003: Slides for the talk are now available online.]

/usr/games/yfortune

If you're a Unix geek, you know about /usr/games/fortune.

If you know much about Yahoo!, you know that we like to name our software things that start with "y". For example, my Making the Case for PHP at Yahoo! talk mentions our legacy yScript language.

Today, a rather clever co-worker of mine suggested a list of mantras that our engineers should repeat frequently to reach enlightlentment.

"Check in your code."
"Document your APIs."
"Have you written unit tests recently?"
"FreeBSD is just as good as Linux (for our needs)."
"Make sure to search devel before asking devel-help."
"Microsoft sucks. But our users don't care."

Heh. Looks like a good start on yfortune.

BusinessWeek on Yahoo!

The cover story of the June 2, 2003 edition of BusinessWeek is entitled Yahoo! Act Two.

As an insider, the article seems pretty accurate to me. It does a pretty good job explaining what's changed about the corporate culture since Semel came on board. Our stock price is up almost 70% since the day he became our new CEO.

In the past two years, things have certainly changed a great deal. To remind yourself of the old Yahoo!, read the BusinessWeek cover story from May 21, 2001.

Dump the Junk Day

Today is Yahoo! Mail Dump the Junk Day in the United Kingdom.

If you've got a friend or colleague who bombards you with joke emails and "wacky" attachments, nominate them for the The Dump the Junk Award.

Apparently, you've gotta be a Brit to enter the contest.

Ask Yahoo! RSS release

Ask Yahoo!, a daily column that features Q&A with Yahoo!'s expert team of Surfers, is officially syndicating its content via RSS.

As reported here back in April, RSS support for Ask Yahoo! had previously been available as a Beta release only.

This week, Ask Yahoo! marks five wonderful, question-filled years. To celebrate this momentous occasion, we've given the site a fresh look and some cool new features. So click around, read up, and ask away!

The Most Popular Questions page is my favorite of the new features.

To subscribe to Ask Yahoo!, click the green XML Sub button:

Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web

At lunch today we were talking about trademarks and whether Yahoo! is a brand name or a generic term. Since it's used in Chapter 1 of Gulliver's Travels, it clearly pre-dates the web company. And the first use with an exclamation point probably comes from the Erasure song which was released in 1988 on The Innocents album.

We never quite sorted it out, but the discussion morphed into the history of the company. We wondered how many links there are still pointing at akebono.Stanford.Edu.

Now there's one more. :-)

Capturing Tribal Knowledge

Someone at work today mentioned the problem of capturing "Tribal Knowledge" in an electronic format and making it easily accessible to new or remote employees.

When some new engineer joins Yahoo!, how are they supposed to know that they should build a website using Apache and PHP on FreeBSD? How do they know to use Nagios and not Big Brother for monitoring? MySQL and not Postgres? (Not that there is anything wrong with Postgres, but our Network Operations Center folks have familiarity with MySQL, so sticking to similar technology makes their lives easier which means you gets paged less frequently.)

We've got all of this information in our heads or maybe even in an email archive, but we need to distill it out and come up with a website that can capture it so other folks don't waste time and energy research options that aren't a good fit for our environment.

What's the right software for this job? Some sort of Wiki system? A message boards package? Blogging software? Maybe just a bunch of .txt and .html documents checked into some well-known place in CVS?

ask.yahoo.com RSS beta

Ask Yahoo!, a daily column that features Q&A with Yahoo!'s expert team of Surfers, is now syndicating its content via RSS.

Here's the link to the RSS file:

[Update: the XML now validates correctly.]

New Yahoo! Search

Launched today: "More Needle. Less Haystack. The New Yahoo! Search."

The new logo looks an awful lot like the Yahoo! Personals logo.

Resume Overload!

I mentioned yesterday that Yahoo! is hiring engineers. One of my open reqs just hit the join.yahoo.com site.

Our recruiter just sent me 7 resumes of potential candidates in the last 20 minutes!

I guess this is why they say that it's close to impossible to be a manager and still have time to write code.

Silicon Valley Tech Industry Recovery?

I've read recent reports that unemployment in Silicon Valley is at 8 percent. Sounds pretty dismal.

But it looks like Yahoo! is starting to hire again. If you search our database, you'll see approximately 40 engineering headcount. I didn't check other positions, but I think the rest of the company is growing, too.

And Google, a much smaller company, has 24 engineering and 15 ops positions open.

OSCon2003 presentation details

Here are details about my upcoming talk at the O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention 2003:

Session ID: 4062
Title: One Year of PHP at Yahoo!
Date: 07/09/2003
Time: 11:30am to 12:15pm
Location: Salon D

Unfortunately, I won't be at PHPCon East 2003 this April.

[Update 8 July 2003: Slides for the talk are now available online.]

Free Bagel Fridays

I've been working in the Yahoo! Santa Monica office for about a month now, and I'm still really enjoying it.

Today, like all Fridays, is a Free Bagel Day. In the kitchen are dozens of bagels and about 6 different kinds of cream cheese. Reminds me of the Free Bagel Tuesdays we used to have in 1998 when Y! was at 3400 Central Expy. That was before we quintipled in size and got all corporate and stuff.

When I walk in the door each morning, Dionne greets me by name. She's not reading it off my badge; she actually knows who I am. It's like working for a small company again. And I didn't even need to switch jobs!

Code re-organization

I just spent the better part of the day shuffling some C++ code around in our CVS tree, and then trying to make sure it builds properly from its new location.

I didn't add any code, just moved it to a new place. And it took me 8 hours to get the thing working again. This stuff is suprisingly complicated.

One Year of PHP at Yahoo!

I will be speaking at the O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention 2003 this summer in Portland, Oregon.

The title of my 45-minute session is One Year of PHP at Yahoo!

The conference runs from July 7-11. Registration begins in April.

[Update 8 July 2003: Slides for the talk are now available online.]

New Business Cards

My new business cards arrived today.

Dude. Sweet.

My office in Santa Monica

Today is my first day at the Yahoo! Launch office in Santa Monica.

After two years of working by myself in a home office, it is a thrill to be in a real office environment again. Even though it's my job to be a computer geek, I supsect that I'm really a "people" person.

Many friends and co-workers I've spoken to about the move have expressed surprise that I would choose to give up such a sweet telecommuting deal. They wonder why I'd want to give up the ability to work in my bathrobe and set my own hours. They've never tried a permanent-telecommuting arrangement themselves, but they imagine that it's the good life.

On the contrary, working from home every day of the week starts to make you feel cut off from the rest of the world. There aren't any co-workers to say good morning and good night to, to go out to lunch with, and even to chat about politics or some stupid TV show we all saw last night. This might all seem trivial on the surface, but the social connection is a really important part of feeling productive. This is probably why I'll never go into the software consulting business. Too much alone time.

Moreover, working from home makes it far too easy work really long hours. Since the Internet connection is always on, I've found myself hanging out in front of my computer until 8pm, grabbing some dinner, and then going back to work. That's unacceptable; I refuse to let my workaholic tendencies take over my life. So I force myself to stop working by turning off my computer. It sits there in the spare bedroom, tempting me to turn it back on.

I'm hopeful that having an office in LA is going to help me to do a better job of keeping work separate from my personal life. I'm looking forward to coming home from work each day, having dinner with Ariella, and knowing that the rest of the evening is ours and not my employer's. Whatever unfinished business is left on my desk will be waiting for me tomorrow.

Even though I'm in an office here in LA, I'm still working in a remote fashion. My boss (and my direct reports) all work in the Sunnyvale office. So I'm still going to be doing the whole LAX-SJC-LAX commute that I know so well. So far this year, I've averaged about 1.5 days a week in Sunnyvale.

Thanks to some help from Laura in the IS department, I just got a network connection set up. Now I've gotta figure out my how to use the new voicemail system and maybe order me some new business cards.

Upgrade my servers? Yeah, right.

In software engineering, laziness is a positive attribute. If one can accomplish the same task in 3 lines of code instead of 30, a good engineer opts for the 3-line version. That's why libraries of code are so popular.

Engineers are also risk-averse. Every change you make to the system can possibly de-stabilize it, so engineers like to leave a running system alone. Fred Brooks writes in The Mythical Man-Month that every change has about a 50% chance of introducing a new bug. Two steps forward, one step backwards.

But laziness and risk-aversion can be really negative attributes. How can you ever make any progress if you never touch the system? What if WordPerfect 5.1 was still the state of the art in 2003? We'd be missing out on a decade of improvements like WYSIWYG.

Consider the hypothetical case of the guy who's trying to get the other 599 engineers at the company to upgrade their web servers to version N, when the vast majority of folks are still running version M.

If I'm happily running version M, what's my incentive to upgrade? Sure, the guy who maintains the web server says it's got some great new features, is faster, gives you some better management tools, and fixes a couple of bugs. But I don't have time to skim the README to see if any of those features would be useful to me. Version M seems just fine to me, and something could go wrong if I go to version N.

Most importantly, senior management does not require that I pay any attention to the guy who maintains the web server. Even if I procmail all of the web server guy's messages into /dev/null, I can still get a good review at the end of the year just for keeping my crappy property up and running.

The bummer for the guy who works on the web server is that he also happens to be one of the folks who spent the past 2 years trying to improve development process at the company. He helped build a software package-management tool that can tell you in near-realtime what versions of what software are installed on what servers. And when he checks the stats, he finds out that a lot of folks are running really old versions of the web server: versions J, K, and L. Getting people to upgrade to version N is going to be even more difficult.

Maybe this explains why most of his co-workers are still running Netscape 4.08.

Happy Birthday from My Yahoo!

Marc Hedlund: Swearing Off (and at) My Yahoo

My take: Mr. Grumpy-pants isn't too happy about being a year older.

Mikel's take: "You shouldn't be using your computer on your birthday anyway."

Compaq Evo Notebook N610c

The Yahoo! IS department delivered a Compaq Evo N610c laptop to my desk today. My almost-3-year-old IBM Thinkpad 390X has been sent off to the place where All Good Laptops Go To Die.

I had been schlepping the IBM 390X from LAX to SJC pretty much every week since fall of 2002. About 6 months after I got it, the internal 56K modem stopped working. Being modem-less was not such a big deal at home (I've got broadband), but turned out to be a pain in the neck when I really needed to check email while travelling. Then about a year later, the CD-ROM drive stopped working. Pretty crappy, but I resorted to sticking CDs in Ariella's computer and mounting them over the network.

Recently, the battery stopped charging. I could get about 7 or 8 minutes out of it before I needed to plug it in again. At that point, it essentially stopped being a laptop (I couldn't use it on the plane anymore) and started just being a portable computer. So I finally put in a request for repair or replacement, and the IS department opted for replacement.

I've had this shiny new replacement for all of 3 hours, and I'm already set up with Cygwin and GNU Emacs. But there's still one burning issue I need to resolve: how do I disable the Touchpad? It's got both the eraser-nub pointer (which I absolutely love) between the G, H, and B keys, but it's also got a trackpad/touchpad that I'll never use.

I went to the Control Panel (Windows 2000, by the way, even though there's a sticker on it that says "Designed for Microsoft Windows XP") and chose Mouse but there are no Touchpad options. There are 4 tabs that say Buttons, Pointers, Motion, and Hardware. But nothing that lets me disable the Touchpad (or turn off the tap-to-click feature). Any ideas? Maybe I'll call the IS help-line.

[Update: JR had the right solution. It's a CMOS setting, so you've gotta reboot the box and hit F10 to turn off the Touchpad. Hurrah!]

A leaner version of the Yahoo! homepage

There's a mean, lean version of the Yahoo! homepage. If you pull up search.yahoo.com in a web browser, you'll get a bare-bones page with no ads. It's even got the nifty little trick to put the cursor in the search box.

The total page weight (HTML + Images + JavaScript) comes in at 10.3K, which is actually lighter than www.google.com (12.3K). Both of these load faster than the 33K www.yahoo.com home page if you're using a 56K modem.

Now, if only there was a way to skip the banner ads in the search results...

Busy at work this week

I'm in the SF Bay Area this week for work and I'm really busy. I don't even have time to write anything amusing for my blog.

Now that I'm officially a pointy-haired (in the Dilbert sense) manager-type, there are lots of meetings. Some intersting new projects are on the plate for the coming year.

Speaking of the coming year, it will be interesting to see if 2003 is the year that Yahoo! Engineering really starts to move en masse to PHP, or whether properties will wait until 2004, when our infrastructure group cuts off support for yScript.

After all, it's just a perl script

Someone at work volunteered to port and maintain our proprietary package-management tool to Solaris. All twelve thousand uncommented lines of it. Good luck.

I'm sure someone is going to notice, and they'll want to spend the next 3 months of their time doing a Linux port, too. It seems to me like it would be a better use of their effort and port their app to FreeBSD instead.

We're a FreeBSD shop. Always have been, and probably always will be.

blogs.yahoo.com?

(Note: the views expressed here are my own, and not those of my employer.)

Home pages are dead. Yahoo! GeoCities should re-invent itself as a blog site.

Creating your own website (traditional homepage or blog) is, for most folks, an exercise in vanity and self-indulgence. "I'm John Smith, and here's my kewl website! Aren't I special and unique?"

Part of what makes publishing appealing is the fact that someone might be reading what you're writing. It's like getting to act in your very own 6th-grade play -- people are watching you and they care what you say! (Or, at least we web authors are duped into thinking that someone cares.)

When homepages first became a big thing in 1996-1997, people created these multimedia atrocities. There are tons of GeoCities sites that are nothing more than a collection of blinking GIFs that they found somewhere else.

My guess is that folks eventually realized that compiling a bunch of images that you stole from other people's sites doesn't make for a very compelling reason to visit a website. And since most of us aren't artists, it's too difficult to create our own images. For an amateur, putting together a professional-looking website is no easy task. So many of these websites have gone stale.

Enter blogs in 2001-2002. Instead of being graphics- and design-heavy, they are text-heavy. This makes sense, because everyone knows how to write. (Well, everyone who is literate knows how to write.) And everyone knows what's going on in their own life, too. So making an online journal suddenly doesn't seem so difficult. And you've got incentive to keep it up-to-date, because you've got all of those loyal fans who are waiting for the latest installment of your very-exciting life! To extend my 6th-grade play analogy, it's like performing in that play every single day!

Adding blogs to Geocities has significant costs. Aside from having to develop a whole bunch of new software, they'll have more customers using GeoCities' resources. Constantly changing content and archiving means more disk space and more pageviews because people are reading that content more frequently. Of course, GeoCities really would need to provide RSS feeds (this is de rigueur in the blogging world) and these feeds will be polled by robots, which will increase server load even more. So Geocities might need to beef up its resources to handle the increased demand from customers. And then there's the whole customer support issue...

Even so, a blog service would be a win for Yahoo! in the long run. Feeling some compulsion to keep your blog up-to-date is sorta like email -- it's very "sticky". That means increased customer loyalty, which is always a good thing in the business world (even if it costs you some money).

YHOO is buying INKT

In a not-so-surprising turn of events, Yahoo! is buying Inktomi for $235M.

There has been a lot of discussion both outside and inside the company about search engine competitor Google, so clearly Yahoo! is doing this to stay competitive in the search space. Whereas Yahoo! has something like 74 different properties in 25 countries, Google does one thing and they do it well. But search is an important part of a portal. Very important. And Yahoo! knows this, or it wouldn't invest a pile of cash.

I just hope that this acquisition goes smoothly. Peter Lynch wrote in One Up On Wall Street that after a M&A goes through, the new combined business is usually worse off than if the two companies had remained separate. And I think Yahoo!'s track record has been better than average. On the one hand GeoCities seemed to go pretty well, but whatever happened to all that great content from broadcast.com?

Yahoo!/PHP media wrapup

After the buzz on slashdot several more reputable news websites published stories about Yahoo! and PHP. Here's a summary so far of the press coverage:

• slashdot
  
• CNET News.com
  
• MSNBC
  
• internetnews.com
  
• TechWEB
  

I doubt this sort of thing ever makes it into the New York Times, but it's really novel for me nonetheless. All sorts of people I know from years back have emailed me over the past couple of days to say "Dude, you're famous!"

15 minutes of fame, part 2

The PHP-Yahoo! story got picked up today by CNET News.com. My favorite excerpt:

"(Yahoo) is a cheap company. (It) can't afford to waste engineering resources."

--Michael Radwin, Yahoo engineer

I hope I don't get fired for pointing out that my employer is stingy. :-)

Yahoo moving to PHP hits slashdot

Quite a buzz at the office today. My Making the Case for PHP at Yahoo! presentation appeared on slashdot, a news website about technology. I hardly ever read slashdot, but I spent all afternoon in total browser-refresh mode.

My colleague Jeremy Zawodny wrote about Yahoo! getting Slashdotted.

A quick recap of the events:

The talk itself was pretty uneventful. About 50 people attended the talk, and it went pretty well. No media or press attention.

What happened after the talk is kinda bizarre. Someone picked up on it and posted it on slashdot , a nerdy news website about technology.

Then the reporters started calling. The PHP-Yahoo! story eventually made it onto CNET News.com.

Pretty incredible. Overall, it generated quite a bit of positive buzz for the company because even though many people on slashdot thought Yahoo! should use perl or python or [name your favorite technology here] instead of PHP, at least people were pleased to see a internet site embracing open source technology.

PHPCon 2002

I spoke at PHPCon 2002 today. My talk was entitled "Making the Case for PHP at Yahoo!"