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gkoberger

Some info about it:

* Like Firefox, it is open source! http://github.com/potch/glow

* Counter was started this morning at 6am PST.

* Each dot represents one download.

* Map is generated using SVG, "pings" are divs with rounded corners, country radial charts are canvas.

* The bars across the bottom shows downloads per minute.

* You can drill down to the city level, to see how many downloads from your town. (Click the bottom left circle graph)

* Created by Matthew Claypotch (http://potch.me) and Jeff Balogh (http://jbalogh.me) on the Mozilla Web Dev team.

[edit: added open source information]

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Whoops, I was wrong about the pings. It now uses canvas, not <div>s. For a while it was using a bunch of <div>s for performance reasons, but now it's using all canvas.

Wondering where did you get that map. Caspian sea is missing.

Also missing the Great Lakes in North America.

Also, there's a ton of downloads coming from a point in Northeast Siberia where, as far as I can tell on Google Maps, there isn't so much as a log cabin. Mapping anomaly, or giant, secret military base?

The svg was generated from the shapefiles here: https://github.com/potch/glow/tree/master/shapefile. I need to ask potch where the shapefiles come from.

Inner regions like lakes weren't included since they would complicate the svg without a lot of benefit.

The map was generated using continent-level shapefiles (I believe from here: http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2006/1187/basemaps/continents/). We stuck with continent-level outlines because adding country boundaries would have needlessly complicated the SVG, and borders can sometimes be disputed and controversial things :)

It would have been nice to have the great lakes and caspian sea, because they're such large features but with a team of two webdevs, some things have to wait until version 2.

> Map is generated using SVG

I thought the map was a static PNG image: http://glow.mozilla.org/maps/world_4.png

Edit: I stand corrected. I missed this call: http://glow.mozilla.org/maps/world_4.svg

Depends on your browser. If it supports inline SVG, you should see an SVG map.

http://grab.by/9C5w

Was it inspired by the original Zeus Global Load Balancer UI?

(seen top-right here http://www.zeus.com/products/global-load-balancer/index.html)

I've probably seen that picture before, but it wasn't a direct inspiration. We had a map like this for Firefox 3.6, so glow is a mix of that plus a little WarGames and Tron.

I only mentioned it because I thought you guys were using Zeus's Global Loadbalancers to distribute the load around the world. (Oh, and because I designed and built the original web-frontend for Zeus with little-lights-blinking-on-the-james-bond-baddy styled map).

We do use Zeus LBs. I am happy to report that one of the cogs that made this machine work much easier was the fact that we could have our zeus clusters send out remote syslog events for the site traffic in addition to the normal log files. That made it easy for us to use rsyslog to filter the data and aggregate it to be consumed by the app.

Pretty good GeoIP, it seems; do you know where the GeoIP data comes from?

http://www.maxmind.com/app/ip-location

We perform the lookup using the binary database and the Java client directly off of the web request and only store the location in HBase so we don't keep the IP around in a database.

The geo data comes from MaxMind. They give us latitude/longitude and country:region:city info.

Does it just do long-polling to receive the data? This seems another app where enabled WebSockets support would have been nice.

Simpler than that: It just displays the data in 60-second chunks, delayed by sixty seconds. Here's one of the blocks:

http://glow.mozilla.org/data/json/2011/03/22/16/51/map.json

This would actually be an excellent opportunity for http streaming (ie, the forever frame), too. Long polling is great when you're waiting for a singular event, but not so much when it's ongoing data being pushed down.

Nope, it is not a push data service. New data files are generated every minute and available to the client to pull down.

While it is possible to set up WebSockets or something similar to do a truly fancy data flow, we preferred to spend our bandwidth resources on making Firefox 4 available for people to download. ;)

Are you thinking on open sourcing it?

Already done! We open source everything we do.

http://github.com/potch/glow

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