Moments with Twitter..

I was recently playing with a few tools, that let you have a look into your past tweets. All My Tweets is an interesting service, that lets you view all your tweets in a simple page, from the beginning. Interestingly, another service, named Twitario gives a view of all your tweets, as a diary. Though Twitario provides a nice interface to find the tweets easily, based on the calendar, it doesn't support Unicode characters, which is surely a minus for those who tweet in Unicode languages. "All My Tweets" include the link to the original tweet itself, where Twitario provides the option to delete the tweets. Having analyzed these tools, I should mention that these tweets were really useful, and brought a few interesting memories back.

Now time to look into the trail of my tweets. Here are some of my tweets, since the 26th of March, 2009.

is finishing the documentation. Mar 26, 2009
It is notable that my first tweet is on documentation. It was probably on the documentation on the project done during the internship. I have always been a supporter of good documentation - It helps the blood flow of open source.

Abiword Cross-compiling using wine successful on Ubuntu. Apr 16, 2009
At that time, uwog was still completing the MSVC build for AbiWord. I found Cross-building useful, since it was complete and gave me a usable AbiWord build for Windows, with no issues. This was indeed a remarkable point, which gave me further confidence to work on AbiWord Windows API, using Ubuntu as my platform.

Summer Love with Abiword... Apr 20, 2009
This was a happy announcement of me getting into the Google Summer of Code 2009. This was my first Google Summer of Code, and I was pretty much excited. AbiWord community was super-friendly, and I am proud to be a member, since then.

with Anjuta.. an IDE similar to Visual Studio... for Linux. May 08, 2009
Anjuta DevStudio is a Gnome Integrated Development Environment. I have mostly used Anjuta as a syntax highlighter for my C/C++ projects including AbiWord development. For compiling and building of AbiWord, I just use make directly.

needs a mute option and filtering for facebook messages. Any suggestions... Jun 01, 2009  
At that time, there was no way to opt-out from the Facebook notifications from the photos that we commented, or to remove ourselves from the facebook threads. I was annoyed, when someone sends group messages directly to inbox. It is great to see that these options are now available for facebook. Now we can remove ourselves from the messages. However, filtering is still not possible. Neither muting (receiving the messages, but not getting the notification of that red one for the new message, for the uninteresting thread).

#AbiWord Turns 11! Happy Birthday to dear Abiword! Happy Birthday to you... Jul 16, 2009
That was remarkable to mark the 11th year of AbiWord, since it started as an open source project in the year 1998.

My computer never complained abt me repeating the same build million times, and I've never complained abt its time delays. We <3 each other. Aug 17, 2009  
Some romance with my computer.. ;)

10 reasons to avoid talking on the phone http://theoatmeal.com/comics/phone from @oatmeal Feb 23, 2010  
Oatmeal never fails to amuse me. Many of its posts deserve a tweet.

my #javascript has gone wild and bigggggg and GO #bananascript GOO.. http://www.bananascript.com/ Compress it.. :) #fb Mar 03, 2010  
Bananascript is a nice online tool to compress javascript files.

A periodic table of visualization methods http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html Apr 04, 2010  
Each of these visualization methods deserves a blog post on its own. Visual-Literacy.org provides interesting learning resources, such as an introduction to argumentum. I have also enrolled to their online courses, full of study materials.

I should create some of my own thought experiments as well.. :D http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thought-experiment/ Jun 06, 2010  
Thought experiments are fun, and it enhances your ability to think, weird. ;) Follow the above link to realize that. Again, each of these thought experiments deserves a post on its own.

GSoC welcome package once more. Special thanks and love OGSA-DAI, OMII-UK and Google. Reminds me the lovable days of GSoC2009 - Abiword too. Jun 19, 2010  
A blog post that happily announces my second welcome package from Google. Yes, this was for my Google Summer of Code with OMII-UK.

Also make sure to read Moments with Twitter - II, the successor of this post.

Performance Testing and WSO2 Carbon

Finally we were wrapping up the Messagebox program we had created using Apache Axis2. Now comes the final point. Yes, we had to do a performance analysis using Apache Jmeter. Our Messagebox program has four operations: createMessagebox, storeMessages, takeMessages, deleteMessagebox. Being a web service, we have the axis2 archive (.aar) of our program.

We have developed a client to run our web service. Given the WSDL, wsdl2java will auto-generate the Client Stub and the Server Skeleton. Completing server skeleton with the necessary logic obviously has cost a much longer time, when compared with the writing of client code using the client stub. Now during the performance testing, we are going to use the same web service, but we will not use the client we have developed. Rather we will be using our test plan generated using JMeter, as the client to run our server. Now we need SOAP/XML-RPC Request for each operation.

This Jmeter performance analysis will be saved as a .jmx file. In the Admin Console of WSO2 WSAS (Web Services Application Server or WSO2 Application Server), we have "Add Axis2 Service" option in the left hand side panel. I uploaded our aar using that Add option. A success message appeared as expected. Then I clicked the List Menu for deployed services. There I clicked Try this service option for the MsgBoxService. I was taken to the Try the MsgBoxService service. 

WSAS has a nice GUI with textboxes to input the values. Getting the output instantly, I was walking through WSAS to see more. Found something under the monitor menu. SOAP Tracer! I configured the Configuration Status to ON. A warning says “Tracing will have a performance hit. Use with caution.” I will not overuse this functionality however. Then I went back to try the service. After trying all the four operations, I came back to the SOAP Tracer. SOAP messages for both the request and the response. Then it took me just minutes to copy-paste those SOAP messages for the four operation requests, into the respective SOAP/XML-RPC Request of Jmeter.

The conclusion of the performance analysis was not much difficult after that. Just adding a variable in place of the input value, a counter to have about 1000 users each user as a thread, timer, Loop Controller to send 10 msg for each user’s msgbox, and finally Graph results to see the performance of each operation visually.

Event Notifier Service for LEAD System

EventNotifierServce is a notification system developed for LEAD [Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery] System developed at the extreme labs of Indiana University.

When a scientist runs a workflow, he can provide his interested events to the EventNotifierService with a notificationAddress. The service will listen to the workflows invoked by the scientists and notify them when an interested event occurs. Hence the Scientist can leave the system as he adds a request to listen to a particular workflow in the LEAD System, and hence his time will be saved.

Requirements

The program is tested to be run in Windows XP and Linux environments.

Setting up the event Notifier Service [More updated information can be found here.]

1. Download the Event Notifier Service from the SVN Tree:

https://svn.wso2.com/projects/lead/repo/event-notifier/

You will need the authentication password to access this SVN tree.

Alternately, you can download the files as archives from here.

This includes the messagebox code as well.

2. Download and set up the WS-MESSENGER, a messenger service built at Extreme! Labs using XSUL.

http://www.extreme.indiana.edu/xgws/messenger/

3. Configure the parameters included:

You will need to configure these files, which are inside the resources folder.

db.config : This config files contains the details needed to connect to the relevant database

epr.config : This config file mentions the end point reference

MailSender.properties : This properties file mentions the properties of the mail server. Currently the properties file has gmail as the mail server. When chosing the other mail servers or when you create your own mail server, you have to replace this properties file with that specific to your server.

4. Include puretls.jar and notification-types.jar included inside the lib directory into the axis2/lib.

5. Create a database 'EventNotify' and create tables using the db-creation.sql file included inside the resources folder.

6. Manually install the jars included inside the lib directory, and build using mvn. Alternatively you may prefer to use ant to build the project.

wsmg-1.76.1_a5.jar can also be downloaded from the original location:

http://www.extreme.indiana.edu/dist/java-repository/wsmg/jars/

notification-types.jar is an XMLBeans generated jar file for the given events schema.

You also need to manually download and install three jar files from the sun java web site due to the licensing requirements.

7. Deploy the generated zip file into the axis2 server.

Running Event Notifier Service

1. Starting the Messenger Service

Start Tomcat

Start Messenger

2. Starting the EventNotifierService

Start Simple Axis2 Server

Now the EventNotifierService is ready to be used.

Architecture

EventGenerator

This program includes a simple LEAD simulator which generates LEAD event notifications by reading the log file, leadevents.log included inside the resources directory.

In case of unavailability of the real LEAD system, you may use this program to simulate the system.

For this you have to run the EventGenerator.java included inside the edu.indiana.extreme.www.xgws.eventGenerator package.

Client

Client program included inside the syncClient package can be used to test the service. It will get the WorkflowID, eventsInterested, notificationMedium, and notificationAddress as String input. Here you may give multiple addresses and the eventsInterested as a String with the elements separated by a comma.

Limitation

The default notification medium is assumed to be email, and in case of email, the notifications will be sent as the events are received. In case of the other media, the events will be saved into an events table. If the notification medium is set to email, our program will handle the notification part, that is, it will notify the users as well. But as we haven't implemented the code for the other media, like SMS and IM, the program will save the relevant notification to the events table, and the notification part should be handled separately.

It should also be noted, in case of unavailability of the database the program will run in inMemory mode, where concurrentHashmaps are used to represent the tables, clients, events, and interests.