Unlike Bamboo, Cedar does not offer Varnish as a reverse proxy cache, nor does it automatically gzip content. You need to do it yourself. Heroku recommends:

1. Use memcached, with Dalli as the memcached client. Make sure to follow the Rails 3 section.
2. Use Rack::Cache as a substitute for Varnish. Heroku links to this article which explains how to integrate Heroku with Rack::Cache. I couldn’t get it to work, so I hunted around and pieced together the folllowing riff.

require 'rack-cache'
My::Application.configure do
...
  # Enable Rack::Cache
  config.middleware.use Rack::Cache,
   :metastore => "memcached://#{ENV['MEMCACHE_SERVERS']}/meta",
   :entitystore => "memcached://#{ENV['MEMCACHE_SERVERS']}/body"

You can also set HTTP headers in production.rb as follows. (3600 is an example value, make this whatever you want.)

# Add HTTP headers to cache static assets for an hour
config.static_cache_control = "public, max-age=3600"

And you may want to add this to your config.ru to get gzip working:

use Rack::Deflater

References:

Context: MongoHQ, which I’m using with one of my work projects right now, is a service that hosts MongoDB databases. It integrates with Heroku, allowing you to get started on a Heroku app using MongoDB very quickly. MongoHQ supports hourly and daily backup of their databases to Amazon S3 buckets, but alas, not yet for databases provisioned automatically via Heroku. So if you want to step up to a backed-up database you’ll have to set up your own. Here are the steps I followed to do it.

Secret decoder ring:
S3 = Amazon Web Services Management Console, S3 tab.
IAM = Amazon Web Services Management Console, IAM tab.
MHQ = Mongo HQ console.
HKU = Heroku.

Recipe:

1. S3 : Create a bucket for your app’s backups, e.g. “my-app-backups”.
2. IAM: Create an IAM User account for MongoHQ to use, e.g. “mongohq”. Download the credentials and store them safely.
3. IAM: Create an IAM Group to contain all users with backup permission, e.g. “myapp-backup-writers”.
4. IAM: Add the mongohq User account to the newly created Group.
5. IAM: Using the Permissions tab of the Group’s properties attach a new security policy, granting permission to write to the myapp-backups bucket. See below for a sample policy.
6. MHQ: Sign up for your own MongoHQ account.
7. MHQ: Create the database you wish to use with Heroku.
8. MHQ: Select the “Backups” tab and enter the IAM User credentials from step 2.
9. MHQ: Click “Save Settings”. If all is well you’ll see a message, “Setting Updated”.*
10. MHQ: Create a new user on the Database Users tab.
11. MHQ: Copy down the Mongo URI string from the Database Info tab, substituting your user name and password from step 10.
12. HKU: In the root directory of your Heroku app do “heroku config:add MONGOHQ_URL=’URI’”. URI is the Mongo URI from step 11. (Normally Heroku sets this variable for you when it provisions a MongoHQ database. You’re overriding it with a link to your own database.)

* Step 9 is where I got stuck. It worked fine with my own personal security credentials, but not with the IAM account I created specifically for MongoHQ to use. (I wanted more security… giving your main account credentials to a 3rd party site isn’t smart.) I fiddled around with the security policy for quite a while, and eventually discovered I needed the “ListAllMyBuckets” permission. Here’s the security policy that worked for me:

    {
      "Statement": [
        {
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Action": [ "s3:ListAllMyBuckets" ],
          "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::*"
        },
        {
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Action": [
            "s3:PutObject",
            "s3:PutObjectAcl"
          ],
          "Resource": [
            "arn:aws:s3:::MY-APP-BACKUPS/*"
          ]
        }
      ]
    }

Treat the world as flat, and find a defensible niche to start in. E.g. think of the world as the Risk game board, and pick an initial territory where your chances of getting established are high. If you start in Europe, you have lots of borders and the battle is much harder than, say, starting in Australia. (Or Kamchatka. Remember Kamchatka? I think I learned more geography in Risk than in school.)

Follow your own rules. In response to an audience question about mistakes he has made in his career, Howard explained that many of them stemmed from breaking his own rules when investing, e.g. (1) investing in the market when all signs still clearly pointed to down, (2) investing in companies whose CEOs did not have deep domain experience. (Howard likes such companies best, as a rule, for his investments.)

Have a sense of humor, especially about yourself. Howard’s self-deprecating humor made him a real pleasure to listen to, and he explained that his habit of poking fun at himself is part of why people like to follow him in social media. “I make fun of my own mistakes first, before anyone else has a chance to.”  He talked openly about passing on a few investments that would have been incredibly profitable, e.g. a chance to invest $25K in Twitter when it was valued at only $20M.

Spot and leverage the big waves. He spoke to only one slide during the 30-or-so minutes, and it showed two graphs depicting the meteoric rise in Twitter and Facebook usage. His main point was that when you can get in front of a huge market-changing trend (like social media) you are maximizing your business opportunities to do well. “You don’t need to catch every wave. Just one amazingly great wave in your lifetime is all you really need”. Also, fighting a paradigm-changing trend is futile. So, in this specific example, which Howard calls “the social leverage trend”, figure out which of Facebook and Twitter it makes best sense to align your business with first, then integrate and try to ride the wave.

Use your dashboards. He talked about dashboards and his view that they’re essential to business success. From memory, “What’s your dashboard? It’s never too early to start building your dashboard. … Figure out the one or two pages you need to look at every day to understand both the macro market picture and the micro [i.e. the key signals/metrics from your own business]. For me it’s http://techmeme.com, http://angellist.com, and market all time highs.” These dashboards give him “the very early market signals [from AngelList] and the loudest public market signals [from all-time highs]“.

Thanks Howard for a fun and frank talk.

Here’s the chart, showing Facebook likes (fans) in blue and Twitter followers in red. The gaps in the lines are gaps in data sampling. I sampled every 5 minutes.

Notice the funky little blip in the blue line right around the 1 million mark? Here’s another chart that zooms in on that timeframe within the red circle:

A significant acceleration starts around 1710 EST. During this period the average number of new likes per minute (LPM, it’s the new RPM) goes from 89 or so up to a peak of 516, and then decelerates back down to 83 LPM at 1800 EST, followed by a continuing decline from there onwards.

At first I thought the lift was tied solely to prime time East coast US and Canada news., i.e. people might have logged on to Facebook immediately after hearing news stories about Wikileaks. That probably happened, to some degree. But if that were the only factor, we should have expected a similar bump, or sustained high growth, through the 1800-1900 hour, which is also news-heavy. And that’s not the case, as you can plainly see.

My best guess is that a crowd of people were aware the Wikileaks Facebook page was almost at 1M fans, and they all piled on when it got close to push Wikileaks over the 1M mark. Probably some of them hoped to be the 1 millionth fan. (Is there a badge for that?)

In case you’re interested, below is the raw data for 1500 EST to 2000 EST. Note I’ve calculated average new likes per minute, as I’m sampling every 5 minutes.

Why bother with all this analysis? Ethics and aims of Wikileaks aside, I just think this an interesting phenomenon at the intersection of math, psychology, and social networks. It’s not often you get to watch a meme go viral, in realtime, with accurate metrics available for tracking it. Lucky us.

I’ll keep my samples running for a while, in case anything else interesting happens.

Extrapolating from that average, in about 16 hours, Wikileaks will have over 1 million Facebook supporters.

How ’bout Twitter? Wikileaks’ Twitter account gained 1907 followers between 13:32 EST and 15:32 EST, up from 406,018 to 407,925.

I wish I’d been looking at the data earlier on. It would be neat to see the points where the growth accelerated, and correlate that with big news events. The only historical data I have is that on Dec 4, just two days ago, Wikileaks tweeted  they had hit 600K Facebook supporters.

Amazon, PayPal, and EveryDNS (not EasyDNS!) have all dropped support for Wikileaks’ internet presence. I wonder whether and how long Twitter and Facebook will allow these accounts to stay up.

In that main triangle of people in the center, the back three rows or so is lifted directly from a photo of the Live Search team. I’m in it — back row, 3rd from the left — so it must have been taken in late 2004 or early 2005.

Scott’s in it too, from many moons ago when he worked at Microsoft. In fact he’s in there at least twice.

Can’t wait for my ship-it award!

The City is hosting an “Open Data Lab” on Nov 2 to kick off their community engagement on open data.

The Open Data Lab is an opportunity to explore the innovation possibilities of open civic data in Toronto. Join City subject matter and technology experts, community stakeholders and talented members of Toronto’s vibrant technology and design communities in an interactive and collaborative afternoon imagining commercial, social and civic applications of the City’s newly launched open data program.

Let’s get started.

It’s not just an interesting story. He talks in fine detail about costs, salaries he paid himself and employees, equity, business model… all the things you’d need to know if you wanted to build your own company. This sort of detail is usually kept hush-hush.

The accompanying slides are here.

Every startup founder should watch this.

The New York Times says:

Contestants will have access to more than 170 data sets supplied by over 30 city agencies, including weekly traffic updates, schedules of citywide events, property sales, restaurant inspections and mappable data around school and voting districts.

Exciting!

We ought to do something of similar spirit in Toronto, once people have had a chance to dogfood a version 1 “sandbox” release of open data.

See also: Open Data: What’s on Your Wish List?, Open Data: Making Toronto a Better Place to Live

The 5 Blocks Out Blog will mainly chronicle the development of the site.We’ll also post some city-related musings from time to time, similar in spirit to the posts Katrin has been writing on the Mukodu Blog.

Currently 5BlocksOut.com is in the early stages of development – but already a great deal of fun. So whether you are interested in hearing about early stage start-ups, adventures in the City or how to get the most out of the site, the blog should have something for you.

Send me a line if you would like to learn more. Or check out the new blog as it gains momentum.