Raveen Vijayan

A Job queue is a list jobs that need to be processed and executed asynchronously. Job queues are an  integral part of distributed system which scales everyday. The big advantage of using job queues are running tasks in parallel thereby minimizing load on web server. Gearman, an open source , distributed job queuing library is originally developed by Livejournal to balance their load. Now it is used by many other organizations like Yahoo, Digg for queuing and executing millions of jobs everyday successfully.

Features:

• Opensource: Gearman is free and is supported by a strong developer community.
• Supports various programming languages and platforms( eg: Java, PHP, Perl, Python, Mysql UDFs etc)
• Multi lingual support.
• Flexible: Gearman is much compatible with other distributed computing architectures like Map/Reduce.
• Fast and lightweight.
• Embeddable: Gearman can be accommodated in any kind of application in spite of their size. It can be integrated to existing systems without much pain.
• Fault tolerance:
• persistent message queues: Gearman guarantees the delivery of messages. An acknowledgment will be received after the delivery.
• queue replication and improved statistics are available.

Installation:

Job server
Gearmand : It is written is C and is well suited for threading, persistent queues, and pluggable protocols.

http://launchpad.net/gearmand/trunk/0.9/+download/gearmand-0.9.tar.gz

Client & Worker APIs:

libgearman C http://launchpad.net/gearmand/trunk/0.9/+download/gearmand-0.9.tar.gz
Gearman::Client-Worker Perl http://search.cpan.org/~bradfitz/
Gearman::XS  Perl http://launchpad.net/gearmanxs/trunk/0.4/+download/Gearman-XS-0.4.tar.gz
Gearman PHP Extension PHP http://pecl.php.net/get/gearman-0.5.0.tgz
Net_Gearman (PHP) http://pear.php.net/package/Net_Gearman/
gearman-jms (Java) https://launchpad.net/gearman-jms/trunk/0.1/+download/gearman-jms-0.1.tar.gz

Gearman installation steps in Ubuntu:

Install gearmand:
tar zxvf gearmand-0.9.tar.gz
./configure
make
make install

Install Gearman PHP Extension:

pecl install gearman-0.5.0

These are some posts I found interesting about real time web.

• The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real
• Open data is the future of web discovery
• Web Hooks

• Blogs : Write at least two blog posts in every month.
• Books : Read at least two books in every month.
• Start something new : Spend a few hours every day on learning new things and trying out them.
• Spend a few hours in a week to learn more about web scalability, performance, architectures etc.
• Plan a train journey to a place far from home.
• Learn Violin: This one is too ambitious and nearly impossible. Yet, It’s an entry in my list

Postwitt is a simple utility built on Twitter api and Tinyurl . We can click on the Postwitt button on a site/blog and tweet the link to twitter. The utility comes handy when a quick post to twitter is needed for a blog post or a web page . I cant add the button to sidebar of this blog because the WordPress hosted blog does not support javascript addons .

Here’s the button

Hope Postwitt will create buzz among the twitter users.

Such is the way of the world
You can never know
Just where to put all your faith
And how will it grow

Gonna rise up
Burning back holes in dark memories
Gonna rise up
Turning mistakes into gold

Such is the passage of time
Too fast to fold
And suddenly swallowed by signs
Low and behold

Gonna rise up
Find my direction magnetically
Gonna rise up
Throw down my ace in the hole

I love this Eddie Vedder song. This is from the soundtrack of Into the Wild. Infact i like all the songs from the album. Its a wonderful movie too. Its a real life story. One man, after destroying all his assets and burning cash,documents like credit cards, degree certificates, leaves for Alaska alone. Sounds interesting, right?

Yesterday, we had a cocktail party at Anoop’s home. We celebrated Anoop’s birthday with Mohito ( Mojito). Jerry made the drink in his sophisticated style. I think he’s a professional in this business too . Photos are unavailable due to bad light

Here’s the recipe:-

ingredients:

Mint leaves
Lemon
Vodka/White rum (We used vodka)
Club soda
Sugar
Salt.
and ice cubes.

For each drink, add the following into cocktail shaker. Since we don’t have a cocktail shaker, we used glass.

10-12 fresh leaves of mint
One fresh lime squeezed
2 table spoon of sugar.
4 pieces of lemon

Crush these ingredients along with club soda and some ice cubes. Add vodka and put some salt. Later we can add more ice cubes.
Now the drink is ready. Enjoy!!

My room mate lost his job 3 weeks ago.
He was working as a trainee software tester in a MNC in Technopark, Trivandrum .It was expected that they will absorb him along with 6 six other people joined with him. He got the job through a IT finishing school exclusively for software testing. They are supposed to provide placements as well as placement assistance for the students. They will teach the students the various software testing methodologies and tools and will arrange industry internship in various software companies. They might be charging money for each trainee from the software firms. So this could be the revenue model for these kind of finishing schools. The software companies might also benefit , because they don’t have to worry more about the employee privileges since they trainees can be fired at any time without any questions. My friend was also getting a meager salary from the parent institution.

The trainees are told that the contract is valid for more than 6 months. During this period, they should not try for another job. But suddenly things turned upside down. The company had asked them to leave their position within one week.

Then comes recession:

The recent collapse of US financial giants – Lehman brothers and AIG (AIG recoverd after Federal reserve bank of US helped it to resove the crisis by acquiring around 80% stake) has hit the IT industry badly. These scenarios could lead the industry to another possible slowdown. The job market is also dull.
Thus my friend is worried about a comeback. He is now losing confidence of getting a better paying job.

Here’s the winner of World’s best presentation contest run by SlideShare

[slideshare id=504408&doc=thirst-upload-800x600-1215534320518707-8&w=425]

For the last few days, I’m reading various blogs. Well, that’s not a new thing. I always go through blogs (of technology, business more often) whenever I get time and a speedy Internet connection. But this time, I’m reading blogs of people writing about their life and memories.

Usually, I like to read no-nonsense stuff. But I do like to read when its about people’s struggles and their unique ways of keeping their spirits high and their quest for success in life. OK, I’m coming to the point. I am thinking about writing my life story. Yes, I’m inspired by the ‘others’ .