zimki blog

Zimki Service Announcement

Zimki — 2007-09-25T10:43:59.223+00:00

We regret to inform you that the Zimki service is to be withdrawn and therefore will no longer be available from 24 December 2007. We would like to apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause.

One of the first things that will be disabled is the token usage section so unfortunately you will be unable to view your realms' usage (code, bandwidth, storage etc.). You will still be able to create and manage your realms, and realms will not be suspended for exceeding usage restrictions during the close down period.

As of 24 December 2007 all applications and data remaining on the Zimki service will be deleted and the servers decommissioned. Users are advised to move their applications along with any associated data before the closure date. There are no plans to opensource Zimki.

We hope that Zimki has helped to increase your knowledge and understanding of the possibilities that utility computing and an online application framework can bring. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank you for your interest and support with beta testing the Zimki service.

The Fotango Team
–
Fotango Limited
64 Ironmonger Row, EC1V 3QR, London, UK
Registered in England & Wales, Company no. 03945045

New Zimki Documentation Site Released

Bill Hawes — 2007-07-23T08:41:02.911+00:00

We have today released an updated site for the Zimki documentation. The site features a new interface with improved navigation. The documentation is divided into several sections:

Getting Started - a series of articles to help you to get started with Zimki.
Tutorials - a series of step-by-step guides to getting what you need from Zimki.
Knowledge Base - More advanced technical articles to help you make the most of Zimki.
API References - references for the server-side JavaScript API, the external APIs and the libraries.

We are continuing to work hard to extend the content available in the documentation.

As noted on the home page at https://docs.zimki.com, please feel free to [email protected]?SUBJECT=Zimki%20Documentation%20Feedback">submit feedback on this documentation.

Wiki template

Stig Brautaset — 2007-07-19T16:24:55.673+00:00

I've just released a new Zimki realm template; this time for creating a Wiki. A Wiki created using this template is, like the blog template, an application that you can start using straight away.

Out of the box the Wiki provides live as-you-type preview while you are editing articles, editing articles using Wiky syntax, Recent Changes page, editing history for individual pages & simple searching. Any features the Wiki template don't currently have can easily be added. It comes with unit tests that allow you to make extensive changes to the code base while staying confident that you haven't broken any of the existing features.

As with the Blog template we've keept the design simple to enable you to put your own mark on it without jumping through too many hoops. Nevertheless we've made a little more use of colour this time.

To create a Wiki using this template go to the portal and create a new realm then select 'Wiki' from the template drop-down. Click Add, then visit the Users section in your new realm to add a user account. Then visit your new realm. Your new Wiki comes pre-populated with a Help page that contains a bit more information.

Blog template

Stig Brautaset — 2007-07-16T08:59:56.677+00:00

Today we have released a Blog template realm. In contrast to the other realm templates this is a realm application that you can start using straight away. In fact it is a modified version of the engine that powers this one, with a simplified design to encourage you to develop your own look and feel.

Creating a blog using the blog template gives you live as-you-type preview while you are writing blog posts, multiple authors, author photos, offline editing (through the built-in MetaWeblog API), spam-resistant commenting using captchas, RSS and ATOM feeds.

To create a blog using this template: go to the portal and create a new realm, then select 'Blog' from the template drop-down. Visit your new realm for instructions about what to do next. The Blog Template article in the documentation has more details.

Zimki 1.13 released

Stig Brautaset — 2007-07-03T12:58:58.691+00:00

We have just released version 1.13 of Zimki.

There's not a lot of user-visible changes in this release. Some of these under-the-hood changes can be noticed indirectly, however, as they include making applications hosted on Zimki run even faster.

One important change in the portal is that restoring a backup into an existing realm now deletes existing content of the target first. This behaviour was decided on since it's what we believe to be the expected behaviour: restoring a backup into a realm should result in that realm being an accurate reflection of the realm that was backed up.

We're currently working on improving our documentation site, and we're adding to the selection of template applications you can choose from when you create a new realm.

Stay tuned!

Breaking a few Eggs

Simon Wardley — 2007-06-13T17:09:57.089+00:00

So, Zimki is a really cool software project - the kind of thing that everyone in the office enjoys working on, from the eagle eyed developer putting in extra hours at the weekend to the marketing guy who can't contain his enthusiasm at the trade show. But, it is a software project, which makes it very hard to predict exactly how long all the elements are going to take to come together. Some of the elements are running a little late, and we're very worried about rushing them out - it's important to us to make sure everything is done properly in terms of our federated grid. To quote Brooks in The Mythical Man Month:

"The cook has another choice; he can turn up the heat. The result is often an omelette nothing can save–burned in one part, raw in another."

Our parent company have even commissioned a major industry report on what we are doing and the future direction of this market. Alas, this won't be ready in time for OSCON. With so much still to be done, with this report to be published and some final decisions to be made on licensing, we've been asked to hold back on our plans for Zimki at OSCON.

What does this mean? Well, it means, for now, we won't be having such a big presence in Portland this year, and we'll not be doing the Open Source just yet. Does this leave us with egg on our faces? A little, but we'd rather do it right rather than just right now. And to thank everyone for their patience, we're also going to hold off charging for tokens making Zimki completely free to use.

Zimki 1.12 released

Stig Brautaset — 2007-06-12T14:27:18.247+00:00

We've just released Zimki 1.12, mainly containing changes under the hood. However, as part of our ongoing effort to keep your data out of harm's way we've also introduced another security measure. The first part of this is that all HTTP POST requests now require a cryptographic token. The second part is that all calls that change state in the portal have to be POSTs.

Together, these measures guard against cross-site scripting attacks. Without them, you could put some client side code on site A that posts a request to site B which does something malicious. Client side code running client-side on site A cannot read authentication data stored in a cookie issued by site B. However, if poor Alice happens to be logged into site B at the time, the request could be honoured and her data deleted.

This is where the token comes in. Site B is augmented such that requests that change state on the server requires a secret token. Forms on site B come with a hidden field with the correct nonce filled in, so normal users don't see a change. The only impact is that people can no longer destroy or hijack your data from a client-side POST operation from a different web site.

System Administration - Tactical vs Strategic

dwilson — 2007-05-25T08:58:58.498+00:00

Contrary to my previous sysadmin blog posts we (unfortunately) don't spend all our time in the office trying new software and evaluating new hardware - even we need a lunch break. Instead we're working behind the scenes on Zimki and our other websites to keep things running happily, teaming up with our developers to answer any support issues that you lovely customers send our way and, sometimes, we even complete milestones in our longer running projects. Honest.

Despite the often recited "herding cats" analogy, creating an operationally efficient systems team is a pretty straight forward thing to do. Notice that I didn't say it'd be easy. It mostly requires an understanding that our workload has two main forms: tactical and strategic. I'm not including firefighting here - that's a topic for something longer than even one of my blog posts.

Tactical work is what most sysadmins spend their days doing. Helping customers (a much nicer term than users), fixing problems that appear, making small tweaks and changes etc. These tasks are often important to other people but they rarely help us achieve our own goals or complete our project work. The projects themselves, which are the strategic part of the workload, are every bit as important as user requests - they're just not as visible.

At Fotango the systems team is currently four people (we're looking for a fifth) and the work breakdown on a typical day looks a lot like this -

One person monitors the request tracking system. We track customer issues escalated upwards by our excellent (and very patient) front end support and all internal requests.

We've found that people have an expected response time for tasks. By assigning a dedicated person we keep our response time low while not constantly interrupting any one on a more involved task. The systems support person can also help with other, less focus demanding, tasks.

The second tactical role is the on-call bunny. She's first line for issues that crop up from our systems themselves. Problems detected via Nagios, suspicious lines in logs, performance bottlenecks and load spikes are all part and parcel of this role.

The other half of the team mostly work on our longer term projects, attend meetings that require a sysadmin to be present, or perform daily maintenance. These are often concentration demanding tasks (apart from the meetings) that are made much easier by having the other two providing an interruption shield. Of course, a big problem will drag them back off in to the trenches but there shouldn't be enough big problems to make this a real issue.

So now you know it's not all glamour in the systems team. Next time your page loads quickly and with no problems spare a thought for the effort we've put in so you don't have to.