Open Source helps deal with 60yr Old War Wounds

As everyone around here get's ready for another great memorial day weekend, I had a few minutes before my own break to share a WW2 story. Its about a fascinating discovery and how the internet and open source was used to solve a 60year old WW2 mystery. You see my wife never knew her grandfather growing up, he served on the USS Grunion submarine in the 2nd world war, and was MIA. But about 2yrs ago his sub was discovered and the story behind how it was discovered and the forensics was quite fascinating to anyone who loves history.

Some background the USS Grunion, was an American submarine commanded by Lieutenant Commander Mannert “Jim” Abele, disappeared on July 30, 1942, in Alaska waters. After World War II ended, Japanese records were searched but they did not reveal any mention of the sinking so the mystery of Grunion’s fate endured for decades. One day one of the sons of the captain was on the internet and bumped into some recently posted information about the Grunion on the US Sub Command site by an amateur historian from Japan.

He posted some information about a battle between the Japanese freighter Kano Maru and a US sub on the morning of July 31, 1942 near Kiska Alaska, the freighter was hit by a torpedo which knocked out the ships engines. Over the next twenty minutes three more torpedoes were fired: one passed harmlessly under the ship while the other two hit but failed to explode. The submarine surfaced and Kano Maru began firing its forecastle gun. The freighter's crew observed that the 84th shot fired hit the conning tower of sub.

After discovering information on the internet in 2002 that helped narrow down the USS Grunion’s possible location, the sons of Grunion’s commanding officer, Bruce, Brad, and John Abele, began working on a plan to find the submarine.

“This discovery has come about through a stream of seemingly improbable events; it’s like we won the lottery 10 times in a row,” said Bruce Abele, eldest son of Grunion’s commanding officer.”

I think one of the key factors that led to the successful discovery of the USS Grunion was the use of the networking effect on the internet used by the Abele brothers. In the very beginning they had setup a website to share every piece of evidence uncovered with the world. And that led to the network growing with crew family members, naval sub experts, historians, history buffs and one very important Japanese historian.

My wife discovered that the first expedition was about to go to Alaska quite by accident by doing a yahoo search for the USS Grunion and it brought up the social blogging Wordpress site (a PHP site btw.) This site became the main vehicle to communicate about the search. It was very exciting to see the search all unfold online, day after day the Abele brothers posted pictures, sonar scans and wrote in there blog to keep everyone up to date. All this hundreds of miles from the Alaska main land, in the middle of the ocean using satalite communication to update everyone back home via the internet with the latest images and details of the search. For anyone following the day by day progress, it was exciting to wake up in the morning to read what they found during these expeditions. The second one was even more action packed with HD video images of the actual sub being uploaded for all including my mother-inlaw and wife to see. It was like we were all on the boat with them.

“The synergy of our group working together with the Navy for the common cause has been a wonderful group effort,” Bruce Abele said. “The teamwork combined with everyone’s compassion and wisdom has resulted in our success.”

According to Bruce’s brother John Abele, those responsible for contributing to this discovery included historians and engineers from the U.S., Australia, Israel and Japan. Of particular note was the involvement of Japanese naval architect Yutaka Iwasaki, who provided information critical to pinpointing the location of the submarine.

The search to find all the living family members of the crew was also challenging but I think the blog also helped the family members heal those old war wounds. If you read the online blog and letters from the family members you really get a sense of how things have changed in the past 60yrs. I read some of the original letters from the crews wives/girlfriends back to the captains wife and tears would swell up. You can just feel the frustration they felt when no information was shared by the Navy, so she became the focal point and sole support contact for the 70 wives about it. Back then letters were sent back and forth between her and the crews wives.

So 60 years later those families have grown, children, grandchildren, uncles and even son-in-laws spread allover the country, and they not only write to the captains wife, but to his children and other crew families on the Wordpress Blog, and also used Skype to call Japan to thank the historian that helped start it all. I wonder what Catherine Abele would say about how things have changed to help the families cope and heal their wounds from 60yrs ago? From my wife's and her mom's point of view, the social family network that was created by the Abele brothers helped heal those old war memories. I saw it first hand and it was amazing to watch it unfold and recorded for history online.

More information about the search and history of the USS Grunion can be found in the following links. I had the pleasure to be invited to the USS Grunion Memorial in Cleveland Ohio last year and wanted to thank the Abele brothers on behalf of my wife and her family for your success in finding the USS Grunion. As many of you who read my blog already know, I worked at Netscape in the early days of the Internet, but to see firsthand how it can help solve a 60yr old WW2 mystery was amazing. Happy Memorial Day everyone, its good to remember those that made the ultimate sacrifice and to thank their surviving families.

Read more: "The Search for the USS Grunion: How a Missing United States Submarine was Found After Six Decades


http://www.USSGrunion.com/

US Navy Press Release regarding USS Grunion (SS-216) discovery

Eternal Patrol The Fate of the USS Grunion and the Search article


The Search for the USS Grunion with HD images

USAToday Article, click Exploring the Vessel for video of the discovery at the top of article

TODAY show piece about the search and persistence of the Abele brothers:

Most Savvy use of Open Source in Gov awarded

I attended the April Boston PHP User group meeting to give the ELE award for the most savvy use of Open Source to the team at Blue State Digital that built BarackObama.com. If you recall back in Feb we announced the winners in this post, here is the video presentation from the April meeting and a snap of the awards given by me. Congratulations to all. Josh King and Chuck Hagenbuch share their experiences building and scaling the tools which powered my.barackobama.com and the millions of phone calls and billion emails that helped make history on January 20th, 2009: http://www.bostonphp.org/content/view/130/1/

Taking Zend Server for a Spin - (Part 2 Troubleshooting)

In my last article we took Zend Server for a quick spin, getting some Zend Framework demos to work and we started to look at application monitoring. In this article I will be configuring Debugging/Profiling between Zend Server and Zend Studio Eclipse to enable better troubleshooting and quicker resolution. When things go wrong in your app, you want to know about it ASAP and fix the problem quickly before it affects the end-user. Zend Studio Eclipse can be tightly integrated with Zend Server and gives you a powerful way to address application problems. I'll be building upon my last article so if you want to follow along, please install Zend Server and get everything working from my PART 1.

Zend Studio Eclipse (ZSE) by itself supports local debugging out of the box, when you install ZSE, it installs its own PHP environment and allows you to "Debug Scripts". The downside is that the bundled Zend Studio PHP environment may not have all the extensions and capabilities you need to replicate your production/dev environment. This is why Zend Studio also supports "Remote Debugging", and dont be confused by the name, since you can use Remote debugging on the same server. Think of it as Client/Server debugging. The Client is Zend Studio that can debug against any other Server side PHP with the appropriate Zend Debugger installed. In this article I will be using Zend Server with the preinstalled debugger to get all this working.

Steps That I will show in my Video

1) Pre-req to install Zend Server and Zend Studio Eclipse
2) Verify debugger is active on Zend Server
3) Configure debugging permission for the Zend Server
4) Browse website page and Debug from IE or FF toolbar
5) Test Debugging in Zend Eclipse
6) Test Event Debugging and Troubleshooting from Zend Server
7) Test Profiling of an application bottleneck

New Zend Application Server released today

It was an exciting day here at Zend today, we officially released Zend Server into GA, and I have to say this is an important milestone for the industry. It reminds me of the time 12 yrs ago when I was working on another new server technology at Netscape the very first Java Application Server that started a whole new category of software and opportunities on the web. Well NSCP's app server was technically not the first version as NSCP merged with the first one built by Kivasoft and release the next version under the new NSCP name. But it was that next version that made a huge impact on the internet and the name change was one of those things that signaled a maturing of the corprate market that was ready to adopt application servers as solutions. Websites needed better Scalability, High Performance and productivity improvements over the old way of doing things on the internet back then.

NSCP App Server was the beginning of the shift away from client/server corporate initiatives and desktop apps development like powerbuilder and visual studio onto the web. As of today only 33% of these internal employee applications have moved in 12yrs to the web, and that's mostly because of the lower productivity and high startup costs of early app server solutions. Scripting languages like PHP improve things at the language layer, but a complete solution is needed to addresses best practices and gain even more productivity while developing your next web ideas. As Yogi said once "This is like deja vu all over again"

Now fast forward to today's release of Zend Server, it offers PHP websites enterprise capabilities without the complexity and overhead of those first generation Java App Servers. Sure it can help with High Performance, it has the fastest PHP Byte Code accelerator technology out there. No other PHP caching technology is faster either, not even APC, and if you are running PHP applications on Windows then there is no other technology that is more reliable and tested for production environments under stress then Zend Server. We've implemented an APC function mapping layer into Zend Server that will allow your PHP apps using APC calls to utilize the faster internals of Zend Server without need to change your app code. So examples like phpBB modified to use it will run on Zend Server without code changes, and run even faster but with additional capabilities that will surprise you. Like better troubleshooting.

Quickly pinpointing the root cause of a problem and the tools to reproduce them faster is a major feature developers are surprised about when they start to use Zend Server. Like a sports car that you test drive because it performs well on the road, you the driver soon fall in love with the internals. As you sit behind that wheel you'll really get a good feel of the Zend engine and quick acceleration, but also fall in love with all the other things that makes driving it special. So take the new Zend Server out for a spin, you will also find many surprises that will WOW you even more then the thrill for speed as you sit behind the wheel. I'll be blogging more about those in the next few weeks, but since we are on the topic of speed. I had a meeting with one of our closest customers today, and used Zend Page caching to make a new PHP app more then 70 times faster, took only a few min after installing the server. I'll show you how to do the same thing in opensource using Joomla and Drupal in my upcoming article.

Zend Framework can save your weekends?

And maybe even your marriage. I wrote this on Apr 2nd so that its not mistaken for an April fools joke, but a customer of ours wrote a very interesting article about the benefits he sees from using Zend Framework. He listed many great benefits of ZF standardization at Panasonic, but one of the more interesting ones was a business value that I have not seen blogged about much.

Jim Plush wrote: Upsides to this for (my) developers is the fact you're getting trained on the most popular php framework out there and no longer will you have to spend your weekends learning someone (else's) code who just quite.

This indeed is a major problem faced by many managers who have to support not just PHP, but other legacy environments both old PHP ones and other apps like the one Jim writes about in his blog when the team changes over time. As managers we know that successful apps will live on for many many years so a good strategy of how to reduce support costs over time was an important factor for Jim, so his solution was to simplify and standardize on best practices with the zend framework moving forward. As he put it so well in his own words.

We're dedicating all in house development to Zend Framework. If it's a web app it's either built in our Zend Framework infrastructure or it doesn't get built (in Panasonic.)

This final statement was something I have been hearing a lot from development managers who are optimizing the productivity of their web development efforts using PHP. I hope to share this same scenario from one of the largest Fortune 500 firms in an upcoming article. Today I learned that they also are writing about their own results using Zend so I wont spoil the presentation. Stay tuned. But if you want to learn more about why Jim at Panasonic chose Zend Framework and PHP for his Enterprise, read on.

It looks like he's also looking for a few more good people to add to his Zend Framework team, read job post here - the March job numbers are expected to be horrible, but folks with Zend skills are doing very well indeed this year.

Taking Zend Server for a Spin (part 1)

April in my neck of the woods is when the weather starts to get nice and Spring is in full bloom, its also the time my wife and I take our classic car out for a spin. Its fun to drive with the top down to shake off winter blues and drive somewhere new. Well I've been doing a lot of that at work too testing the new Zend Server and seeing what's under the hood (not just the Zend Engine 2, but all the other things that make the new server go).

If you've missed all the news and announcements about Zend Server, take a look at Andi's blog, it has some real good posts and an insiders look at the Windows and Linux versions.

In my blog this week I'd like to take Zend Server for a spin, if you want to follow along you will need to install it first, and then activate all features by installing a trial license, your first screen should look all green on the right side like the figure above. If not, you may not have licensed your trial copy, click here for instructions, or if you originally decided not to active some features, its easy to reactivate.

Next let's setup some PHP apps to work with, setting up the preinstalled Zend Framework demos are easy to do. If IIS is your web server I recommend using IIS7 that supports the apache rewrite rules module and just copy the demo zend framework directory into the www root.

If youre using apache web server you can also copy the "demo" directory from the Zend Framework install, to your htdocs web root. To find out where the demo's are located, you can do a browser page search in the following PHPINFO screen, it can be found in ZendServer Admin menu Monitor>PHP Info and then do a search in the page for the word ZendFramework. That will list out the entire path downto the library subdirectory, just go up one level and you will see the demo folder.

If you copyed it in the right place it should all work now, your first Zend Framework demo should display now in the browser, http://localhost/Demo/Gdata/YouTubeVideoBrowser and it should look like this screen (BTW you can click on any screen shot to zoom in and get a bigger view of it):

This Youtube demo is using the Zend Framework GDATA modules, there are many other examples that interface into Google apps like calendar, spreadsheet, photos, health, books, docs, and blogger. For full details of the ZF API for Google apps and all source is provided on how to do it in PHP. This would be a great way to build some of those web apps that I wrote about from Genentech last week.

There are quite a few web services examples, to run the Amazon book example type the following, http://localhost/Demo/WebServices/Amazon/amazon-search.php there is also a UPC lookup example http://localhost/Demo/WebServices/Protocols/xmlrpc-upc-lookup.php

If you try to run the flickr demo you will probably only see a white screen in the browser come up. http://localhost/Demo/WebServices/Flickr/flickr-search.php Is there something wrong with the demo or code bug? To help figure this out, let's go back to our Zend Server monitor screen and look at the latest error at the top of the screen, I highlighted it in grey here.Click on this first event to get even more details about the problem we are having. Click the ERROR DATA tab in the middle of the screen and we can see exactly why the problem is happening, its an INVALID API KEY.

So let us click Show File in Zend Server if you have that up and running and enter a valid key in the file flickr-search.php, you should register for your own key, its free at flickr and can be found here. There are a lot of problems scenarios like this that come up in real production and testing environments, that makes Zend Server ideal to track down quickly. Many times just looking at all the data collected is enough to figure out the problem like in this case, other times the applicaiton and problem is more complex and we would need to troubleshoot it with the Zend remote debugger or profiler. I'll have some more examples that will show how this is used, but for now let us just edit the file in Zend Studio and enter the API key in the code.

And save it, to test it goto http://localhost/Demo/WebServices/Flickr/flickr-search.php and if your key is valid you'll get a screen full of pictures instead of a blank window as before.
Next let us look at a feed demo, its a typical thing you would find in any content management system or PHP portal like Joomla, Drupal, or Dekiwiki. http://localhost/Demo/Zend/Feeds/consume-feed.php If you go back to Zend Server you will notice a new event at the top "SEVERE SLOW REQUEST EXECUTION", that's a bottleneck identified by Zend Server. On my laptop it sometime takes more then 2sec to execute this feed, I should know because on my firefox I have also installed a plugin to show me the rendering time of a page (FF plugin is called LORI)

There's another useful utility called the Zend Controller preinstalled in the bin subdirectory of ZendServer that can help us measure performance. Let's paste the feed URL into the utility and run a quick test to see how many requests per sec it can handle. Looks like only 1.1 requests/sec on my laptop, see figure below:

Now lets use Zend Server's page level caching to improve the performance of this feed as you can imagine this is a common problem in many portals and wiki's. I go back to Zend Server Admin, menu>Rules Management>Caching and will add a new caching rule.

I called my rule "FASTFEED" I filled in the URL to cache the output "http://localhost/Demo/Zend/Feeds/consume-feed.php" and then set the rule to cache the output for 360 sec and saved my script. Be sure to RESTART PHP after saving rule for it to take effect. Now I re-run my performance benchmark in Zend Controller, here's a screen shot of both the feed and performance test:



Notice in the Zend Controller I now have 3.75 times more requests per sec, and in Firefox the page speed went from 2-0.9/sec to 0.24/sec a dramatic speed improvement. Since this is a RSS feed, the timings vary wildly at different times during the day but this example is representative of realworld situations. Also note the Zend Controller measures first byte returned so tools like Apache Benchmark, JMETER and LOADRUNNER are good tools for further benchmarking.

So download Zend Server and take it for a spin, if you also use open source projects like SugarCRM for example, many will detect the installation of Zend Server and its data caching and will perform significantly faster automatically. In an upcoming article, I'll take some of those for a spin too and list out all the ones that I have tested. For more news on Zend Server release, click here.

The band I've been listening to the most while taking things for a spin this month is Kings of Leon

Genentech Future vision of Tech Business

Wednesday I was invited to a meeting at the Princeton Nassau Club to hear Todd Pierce VP CIT of Genentech talk about the "Future of Technology in Business". The company is considered to be the founder of the biotechnology industry , and the IT leader was talking about the future of tech at one of the most advanced biotech firms, I had to go.

He first started with a little history of the company. The company's goal was to develop a new generation of therapeutics created from genetically engineered copies of naturally occurring molecules. The first discovery was targeted at insulin growing needs, many millions of animals were slaughtered to meet the diabetic needs of patients, but it couldn't scale. Within a few short years, Genentech scientists proved it was possible to make medicines by splicing genes into fast-growing bacteria that produced therapeutic proteins. in 1978 Human insulin was cloned by Genentech scientists. The latest research developments provided a new way of looking at Alzheimer.

Mr. Pierce was very optimistic about these economic times we are in these days, he sees a bright future for innovation during these tough times. He noted that one of the founders Robert was unemployed at the time that he discovered a new scientific field called recombinant DNA tech. It was during that time that he saw opportunity to build a new business and partnered with Dr. Boyer and founded Genentech, with the first breakthrough just two years later. He wondered what new innovations would spring from the current crisis.

Today Genentech continues to use genetic engineering techniques and advanced technologies to develop medicines that address significant unmet needs and provide clinical benefits to millions of patients worldwide. Kleiner Perkins was an early VC and invested $100K to start Genentech and its worth something north of $360mil now, not a bad return since Roche is trying to buy the rest of the company that it doesn't already own.

Then he discussed the corporate culture at Genentech, the first idea was about the company becoming more efficient during these times. Like most companies, Genentech has many new research initiatives, a growing customer base, and many new partners - collaboration is key. To facilitate better efficiency without sacrificing creativity, they decided to use Google Apps. The entire organization moved to using Google calendar, and he shared the risk that his organization was faced moving the entire enterprise into using a mostly consumer web service. He said at one meeting they had over 150 change requests that were implemented by Google web team in only a few days. It was that kind of business efficiency and agility that allowed him to move all his 2.5mil MS Outlook meetings onto using Google apps. The company is also a big user of Wikis and crowd sourcing like I discussed in one of my earlier articles.

He also talked about the opportunities of mobile computing, using the iPhone as a specific example. Only one week after the phone was released he saw the opportunity for collaboration on the go, and worked with ATT to create a corporate plan so that Genentech could do corporate purchases. He also discussed this weeks new iPhone 3.0 demo from J&J of a diabetes application that would monitor glucose/sugar and transmit the patients data back to a website to help them better manage their blood levels.

Since Genentech is on the cutting edge of cancer treatment (read more about Avastin) I asked a question about how devices like iPhone could be used in personalized medicine a movement to more efficiently treat cancers, is Genentech using this kind of device to collect research data from the field?

IT has been a big enabler for the scientists and researchers, but now IT departments will be in the middle of patient care just as important to the treatment as the pills and doctors and hospitals, because the devices will be with the patient all the time. Monitoring vital stats, creating alerts for the patient, auto-scheduling dr. appointments when needed, and preparing the doctor ahead of time for his patients condition, etc.

It was a real enlightening meeting and I can't wait for what comes out of the labs at Genentech next.