Sebastian Nohn

Weblog

chromium on linux

It compiles since some days, since today it isn't crashing when executing the ACID3, altough there still seems to be a problem passing it:

Posted Feb 21, 2009
Tagged as: Browser, Google, Web, Webkit

Google Chrome

So with Chrome, Google joined the browser market, having chosen Webkit, the same engine that drives Apple's Safari and some mobile browsers (including the Android browser and Nokia's Series 60 Browser) as their rendering engine. Originally based on KDE's KHTML, Webkit has always been one of the best engines from an architectural point of view, their HTML rendering accuracy however has not always been the best, which luckily changed since Apple stepped into the browser market.

But will Google have a chance in a game that's dominated by Microsoft and Mozilla (a company that generates most revenues from Google btw.)? Speaking of the desktop market, with IE 8, Microsoft has a promising browser in their pipeline. With Chrome, Google has a promising browser in their pipeline, with Gecko based Firefox, Mozilla has a good browser in the market and with IE 7, Microsoft has a browser that works well for a lot of people in the market. Safari and Opera currently are only relevant in some niche markets.

In the mobile market things are a bit different. Opera is a lot stronger, Gecko doesn't have a recognizable market share, although Mozilla is trying hard. The rest is divided up between IE and Webkit.

While the second browser war just cooled down with Gecko's market share stalling around 20-25%, Google now declared war on Microsoft in the browser market, but will it really be a browser war or more a rendering engine war? Will Microsoft be able to defend against Opera & Webkit in the mobile market? Will there be any significant changes to the desktop market?

What makes a browser a winning browser? I had the chance to try out Chrome and it's fast and renders accurate, but currently it's not viable for me for several reasons, including:

Google has a chance if it makes the browser really open, accepts contributions from outside Google and fixes issues for power users: Extensibility, configurability, privacy, maintainability (MSI packages etc.). Looking at today's numbers, Google was able to attract a lot of people to test out Chrome. Interestingly, Firefox lost, what Chrome won, IE kept untouched. Although it's to early to draw the consequences, but I bet, this isn't what Google intended. Webkit however has a real chance to become one of the leading rendering engines:

The Chromium code looks clean, so maybe we'll see forks for power users/people that have privacy concerns against Google. This in fact could be a serious threat for both Microsoft and Mozilla. We'll see what happens.

Posted Sep 05, 2008
Tagged as: Firefox, Google, Microsoft, Web, Webkit

(Ab)using twitter for Nagios IM/SMS notification

Two months after signing up for Twitter, I still haven't found a real use for it. I don't see any sense in telling everyone, what I'm doing right now, and it doesn't make sense as some kind of asynchronous multi-user chat as long as it doesn't support channels/rooms. So looking for something useful (well more or less) I tried to abuse their JSON interface for Nagios notification. It is dead simple, much simpler than implementing standard IM or SMS notifications in Nagios and it even seems to comply with Twitter's TOS:

define command {
        command_name    notify-by-twitter
        command_line    /usr/bin/curl --basic --user "user:password" --data-ascii "status=[Nagios] $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$ $HOSTALIAS$/$SERVICEDESC$ is $SERVICESTATE$" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json
}

define command {
        command_name    host-notify-by-twitter
        command_line    /usr/bin/curl --basic --user "user:password" --data-ascii "status=[Nagios] $HOSTSTATE$ alert for $HOSTNAME$" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json
}

Posted Jun 01, 2008
Tagged as: Hack, Nagios, Twitter

Ligatus DirectAds is live

With DirectAds, we launched our self service tool some days ago. In short, Ligatus is a performance marketing network (this means, you pay per performance i.e. clicks or leads, basically like Google Adwords, just better), delivering around 3 bn. ad impressions per month. So if you like to advertise in Germany, sign up, we're looking forward to your feedback!

Posted Apr 02, 2008
Tagged as: Work

MySQL & Skoll DCQA

On GTAC 2006 (which was called LTAC in those days), I met Adam Porter, professor at UMD and heard his talk about his project Skoll. Skoll is a system for continuously assuring the quality of software under different configurations while intelligently choosing which to run and thus basically saving time. Amazing stuff!

During that time, MySQL was looking for an easy way to integrate more people from their community into their QA process and started the MySQL Build Farm Initiative. Adam was searching for open source projects to demonstrate his technology on. So I brought them together.

This year's GTAC, UMD and MySQL launched the first beta of that project. Anyone running some UNIX-Flavour can and is encouraged to participate by running the Skoll community client. Now that the conference is over for some weeks, the first results are available.

tree map for a particular test

Posted Nov 01, 2007
Tagged as: Build Farm, GTAC, MySQL, Skoll, Software Quality

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