How glow.mozilla.org gets its data | Hacker News Reader

How glow.mozilla.org gets its data

blog.mozilla.com

84 pointsetaty13 comments

http://glow.mozilla.org/

An interesting snippet from the Python backend:

  # We're not supposed to show downloads for these countries (607127#c10):
  # Cuba, Iran, Syria, N. Korea, Myanmar, Sudan. Go figure.
  REDACTED = ('CU', 'IR', 'SY', 'KP', 'MM', 'SD')

From https://github.com/jbalogh/glow/blob/master/glow.py

Access to that particular bug ID is blocked:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=607127

Didn't Mozilla get a special exemption from the US government to allow them to export their crypto ("arms") to those countries? I don't see why they would try to hide the fact that they are allowing downloads from those countries.

http://www.internetnews.com/government/article.php/3839831/M...

Anyone have any idea of what SQLstream actually does/how it works? Looking at http://www.sqlstream.com/Products/products.htm all I see is marketing material aimed at execs.

Try http://www.sqlstream.com/Products/productsTechSQLXMPLS.htm or http://www.sqlstream.com/Products/productstechnology.htm

Hrm. Happy to answer any questions. I work for SQLstream. (I'm not speaking officially for SQLstream at this moment, of course.) The upshot is that it's a realtime query and manipulation engine that works with standard SQL. There's a relatively simple SQL app running under SQLstream that gets the live data, does GEO IP lookup and other manipulation, and then vends it to a the webserver in 60-second chunks.

Why didn't they just get the location data from the geo-load balancers?

I don't know the intimate details of Mozilla's server configuration, but the way I understand it, these geographically disperse load balancers don't know specifics about the requester locations -- just IPs.

It's a beautiful visualization. While browsing through the source code, I noticed that there are a few numeric keyboard shortcuts. "9" is especially handy!

It will be interesting to write a second kind of web app that show analytics break down in different manner: continent, timezone, and even cooler will be to see the correlation with the number of tweets about FF4 split on the same geolocation / timezeone when the data is available. I wonder too if the JSON data available will provide break down by OS platform.

Some of what you're asking for you get by clicking on the bottom left.

Great app. Africa doesn't seem to be much of a fan of FF4 though. ;p

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