My Opera Development

We've released new updates to My Opera very often since the last post, even if nobody is writing about them. In this case, I want to write about it, because I've been especially involved in the update that was rolled out live a few hours ago.

As usual, there's tons of changes. I'll mention the ones that I think have the most impact on our users.

Location-based timezones

If you go to your account settings (the "wrench" icon, then Account) in the Profile section, now you have a list of location-based timezone values, also called "Olson timezones" instead of the old "+0100", "-0400" values dropdown.

This allows us to adjust the displayed dates and times correctly when daylight savings time (DST) is in effect. Have you ever noticed the timestamps on My Opera were 1 hour off? That's why. Now the dates and times should be shown correctly. Also the activity feed items, even the ones coming from external services, should be displayed according to your timezone.

You can set the correct timezone for your account now! The initial value that will be selected could be slightly off. We tried to use some heuristics to correctly detect the location-based value from the previous offset-based, but it's not perfect. And some timezones like Asia/Kathmandu (+5:45), were not even there... :)

Single Sign On

Having a single sign on system throughout all Opera web sites has been a constant request from users for a long time, and something we've talked about for even longer time. We've rolled out a first milestone of our new Sso system a few months ago in "stealth mode". This release completes a second major milestone, with lots of bugs and small quirks fixed. If you had problems accessing My Opera with two different browsers, or you would be suddenly logged out after some inactivity period, we fixed all the known issues now. Sso is also used to implement persistent logins.

However, how useful is an Sso system with just one site where to log in? Pretty much useless in fact. The exciting news is that we've been working on a new awesome mail service currently in closed beta that is already integrated under Sso. And hopefully other major Opera services like Portal, Unite, Addons, etc... will join in soon.

Rename account wizard

Some of our services require special constraints on usernames. A valid Unite username must be part of a valid domain name (username.device.operaunite.com). The vast majority of you already have a valid username. For those who don't, we provide this wizard that helps them rename their account. This is now updated to handle the new username validity rules.

That's it for now. Soon there will be more news. Stay tuned! :)

Bigma has been the My Opera master database server for many years. When I joined the My Opera team, in November 2007, it was already in service.
Lately Bigma served as secondary master since after the master-master switch.

I remember at least 3 total panic crashes of this machine, but even with some shaking, she recovered and was up and running again, so let's all say thank you to bigma. She is probably in servers heaven already

And of course, say welcome to Bigdog (why oh why we have these silly names? that is now our shiny new secondary master database. Just to leave a trace for the future, this server has got:

• 2 x Xeon X5560 (quad cores)
• 64 Gb of RAM
• 600 Gb of 15krpm disks in RAID 0+1

So, earlier this week we switched bigdog for bigma as our new secondary master database. We will soon be re-testing the master failover procedure, hopefully without problems

My Opera was on Slashdot again today!

This time is Hallvord's fault :-)

Yesterday he wrote a blog post about an epic Javascript fail that today was picked up by several major web sites in Norway and in the U.S. and mostly probably elsewhere.

We realized there was something strange going on because of the unusual load and number of requests on our front-end servers. Analyzing the logs, it was clear that Hallvord's post was getting lots of pageviews per second, mostly from Slashdot, but also from Reddit and from the norwegian online magazine Digi.

The blog post was immediately put into our list of "hot content" to be cached, and everything was fine again in a couple of minutes. The idea for the future is to be able to automatically detect such high number of requests, at least for blog posts, and automatically cache them. Another alternative could be to enable blog post caching by default, but this should be done very carefully, because blog pages contain dynamic content that usually depends on the visiting user and on the user who is the "owner" of the page.

We'll see...

A link to the Face-Gestures blog post on My Opera is on the slashdot home page right now.

More traffic than usual, but everything is running smoothly.
Of course, it's because of Chuck Norris :-)