Archive for January, 2010

This Valentine's Day discover sweet savings with Google Checkout.

Now through February 11th, save $5, $10 or $20 on gifts for you and your loved ones. A variety of stores are offering exclusive discounts with Google Checkout, including BlueNile.com, FromYouFlowers.com and ShoeBuy.com.

It's easy to find places to save. Simply browse participating stores on the Checkout deals page or search for products on Google.com, and look for the Google Checkout promotion badge. Happy shopping!

Posted by Gina Del Vecchio, Google Checkout Specialist

If working alongside people like Douglas Crockford and on the team that created YUI (Matt Sweeney, Adam Moore, Dav Glass, Jenny Donnelly, Luke Smith, Tripp Bridges, Allen Rabinovich, Alaric Cole, Satyen Desai, and others) sounds like a good way to spend your time, read on: We’re hiring.

We’re looking for a great engineer to help us improve every aspect of our continuous integration (CI) process, including the way we build, document, test, and deploy our code. To succeed in this role, you’ll have to be:

• familiar with best practices in frontend engineering (e.g., this video should make good sense to you);
• knowledgeable about the goals and principles of continuous integration;
• interested in the emerging discipline of automated testing for frontend code (e.g. this video and the first half of this one should make sense to you, and projects like TestSwarm should be deeply interesting);
• able to solve diverse problems with a heterogeneous set of technologies (e.g. DHTML/Python/Java/Ant/linux/PHP/JavaScript);
• excited about creating a state-of-the art CI process for YUI and evangelizing it throughout Yahoo! and beyond.

YUI is an open source project, and many of the pieces you’ll be working with are part of the YUI ecosystem. That begins with our YUI Builder tools and extends to components of our existing CI process — tools like YUI Compressor, YUI Doc and YUI Test. You’ll have the opportunity to improve the tools themselves and to improve the way they’re documented and used.

The best part of any job in technology is having the chance to do influential work in an environment that both challenges and supports your growth. The YUI team provides just that confluence of characteristics: a huge, engaged community of users and developers and a team of brilliant engineers collaborating every day to improve the project.

If this sounds like your dream job, and if the people I mentioned above sound like people you’d want to work with every day, I’d love to hear from you. Tell me why you’re the right person for this role, including a link to your resume and professional portfolio, by emailing yui [dash] jobs [at] yahoo-inc.com. (Principals only; no recruiters.)

Posted by Brandon Badger, Product Manager, Google Books

Our recent AdWords API Hack Days in San Francisco and New York were a huge success, filled with presentations, question and answer sessions, and one-on-one coding help. We were glad to see that many developers have already started the migration to the v2009 API, and these events were a great way to kick off the process for those just getting started. Don't forget that most v13 services will be turned off on April 22.

We will be posting videos of the presentations on YouTube over the coming weeks, starting this week with Migrating from v13 to v2009 by Adam Rogal. The presentation gives an overview of the suggested migration process, provides some tips and tricks, and includes live coding examples.

This video is the first of many, and if you'd like to get the full experience there is still space available in our upcoming Paris Hack Day. Get more information and register for an upcoming Hack Day.



Best,
- Eric Koleda, AdWords API Team

Posted by Brad Chen, Technical Lead/Manager

As part of our series on research areas of interest to Google, we discuss some important areas relating to cluster applications in distributed systems. In the last two decades distributed systems have undergone a metamorphosis from academic curiosities to the foundation of an entire industry. Despite these successes, at Google we see distributed systems as a technology in its infancy, with huge gaps in the supporting research (some examples here and here) that represent some of the most important problems in the space. Here are some examples:

• Resource sharing: Stranded resources like idle memory, CPU, and disk bandwidth represent huge capital and operating expenses that deliver no business value. A cluster system based upon the best published research would be likely to leave 50% or more of hardware resources idle. We encourage researchers to explore hardware/software architectures that facilitate more supple sharing to avoid stranded and underutilized computational resources.
• Balancing cost, performance, and reliability: Current cluster applications tend to be excessively rigid and brittle, offering only coarse controls to tune the balance between reliability, performance and cost. We envision systems that allow cost to be optimized based on an input specification of performance and reliability requirements. An effective solution might allow service level settings to propagate downward through the layered structure of the system.
• Self-maintaining systems: The level of expertise required to troubleshoot today's large systems is one of the biggest barriers to more and larger deployments. The published research in this area has at best marginally improved the need for such rare expertise. We envision systems that can adapt automatically to changing conditions, in which redundancy and multiple geographically distributed data centers simplify rather than complicate manageability. This will require breakthroughs in monitoring and data analysis to address the diversity of failure modes and simplify the task of keeping systems healthy.

Research in these areas will improve the current state of cluster applications enabling systems that are less expensive, easier to monitor, and can scale more efficiently.

Previous posts in the series: Mulitmedia

About 200 people gathered in URLs Café at Yahoo! last night to take in the first installment of the Crockford on JavaScript lecture series. Douglas took the audience through a selective history of computer science and programming languages, focusing on the evolution of those features and conventions that would later give shape to JavaScript.

While we’re working on video from last night, we wanted to share a few pictures and to let you know that we’re adjusting our ticketing limits — if you visit the lecture series page and follow the RSVP links, you’ll now see availability for some of the sessions that had previously been listed as sold out.

At Google we're always looking for ways to take advantage of work being done in other parts of the organization. So when a team approached us with a way to follow changes from websites without feeds, we jumped at the opportunity. Post by Liza Ma, Product Manager.

Feeds make it easy to follow updates to all kinds of webpages, from blogs to news sites to Craigslist queries, but unfortunately not all pages on the web have feeds. Today we're rolling out a change in Google Reader that lets you create a custom feed to track changes on pages that don't have their own feed.

These custom feeds are most useful if you want to be alerted whenever a specific page has been updated. For example, if you wanted to follow Google.org's latest products, just type "http://www.google.org/products.html" into Reader's "Add a subscription" field. Click "create a feed", and Reader will periodically visit the page and publish any significant changes it finds as items in a custom feed created just for that page.

Here are some more example feeds for sites without feeds that you could follow:

• Macy's - special offers [view in Reader]
• NYU Computer Science homepage [view in Reader]
• Zillow.com homepage [view in Reader]

We provide short snippets of page changes to help you quickly decide if the page is worth revisiting and we're working on improving the quality of these snippets. If you don't want Google to crawl or create feeds for a specific site, site owners can opt-out.

If you have a feed-less page you've been dying to follow, sign in to Google Reader and try it out for yourself. As always, if you have any feedback, please visit our official help forums or our Twitter account.

The Following feature will be read-only for planned maintenance for about two hours starting Monday (1/25) at 2:00PM PDT. Any new Followers or other Friend Connect changes may not save during this time.

Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Three years ago we launched Custom Domains to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year's post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you're interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.

For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:

• We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
• We will be providing a dedicated blog and help documentation to provide as much information as possible to help guide users through the migration off of FTP.
• Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.