OpenID8 items tagged “kellanelliottmccrea”
If you’re ever debugging a problem and you see the number 42-mumble-mumble-mumble-7295 you’ve run out of 32-bit storage. If you see 2-mumble-mumble-mumble-647 (2147483647) you’ve run out of signed 32-bit storage. 167-mumble-mumble-15 (16777215) you’ve run out of 24-bits and 65-mumble-mumble-35 (65535) you’ve run out of 16-bits of integers.
— Kellan Elliott-McCrea 
25th January 2010, 8:11 am
We’re using the same trick on flic.kr to avoid having to maintain a look up database, though we’re using base 58.
— Kellan Elliott-McCrea 12th April 2009, 4 pm
rev=canonical bookmarklet and designing shorter URLs
I’ve watched the proliferation of URL shortening services over the past year with a certain amount of dismay. I care about the health of the web and try to ensure that URLs I am responsible will last for as long as possible, and I think it’s very unlikely that all of these new services will still be around in twenty years time. Last month I suggested that the Internet Archive start mirroring redirect databases, and last week I was pleased to hear that Archiveteam, a different organisation, had already started crawling. [... 920 words]
Streams, affordances, Facebook, and rounding errors. I asked Kellan about scaling activity streams the other day. Here he suggests the best technique is not to promise a perfect stream (like Twitter does)—Facebook used to get away with 80% loss of update messages, but their new redesign has changed the contract with their users. 19th March 2009, 2:02 pm
The only down side is everyone I’ve talked to at Freebase seems pretty solid on this being their proprietary secret sauce, because a good, fast scalable open source tuple store might actually jump start a real semantic (small-S) web after all these years.
— Kellan Elliott-McCrea 29th September 2008, 3:29 pm
Twitter, or Architecture Will Not Save You. Kellan is not an armchair architect. He also doesn’t mention Rails once. Well worth reading. 29th May 2008, 1:16 am
Crowdvine, iCalico, Pathable, a Study in Collusion. Stitching sites together around a single user database using subdomains and simple signed cookies. 12th July 2007, 11:09 pm
PHP Library Tips
Kellan Elliott-McCrea (author of the popular Magpie RSS parser): A Few Tips for Writing Useful Libraries in PHP. Kellan makes the interesting observation that PHP encourages a culture in which most development occurs in the context of either full applications or C extensions, with few people devoting themselves to releasing libraries. [... 56 words]
