Simon Willison’s Weblog

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May 2007

May 1, 2007

The top 10 presentations on scaling websites: twitter, Flickr, Bloglines, Vox and more. I normally avoid linking to “top 10” lists on principle, but this one pulls together some great resources and adds extra context to each one.

# 1:51 pm / peter-van-dijck, flickr, bloglines, scaling, twitter, vox

Dell to Offer Ubuntu. That right there is why I find Flex more interesting than Silverlight.

# 6:39 pm / dell, ubuntu, flash, flex, silverlight, linux

May 2, 2007

MintCache for Django. Caching scheme for Django that solves the dog-pile effect, where high traffic causes many processes to regenerate stale cached data at the same time.

# 8:49 am / mintcache, caching, django, scaling, dogpile

How to debug JavaScript with Visual Web Developer Express. Microsoft’s best kept secret: a decent free debugger for Internet Explorer that doesn’t require you to install Microsoft Office.

# 2:06 pm / visualwebdeveloperexpress, ie, debugging, microsoft, javascript

People don't recognize how important URIs are. The notion that you have a huge, world-scale, information space, and that everything in it has an name and they're all just short strings that you can paint on the side of a bus; that's a new thing and a good thing.

Tim Bray

# 8:23 pm / tim-bray, rest, urls, uris

Silly season. Mark expresses exactly what I’ve been thinking. The fawning over Silverlight and Apollo is incredibly short sighted.

# 8:29 pm / silverlight, apollo, mark-pilgrim

Django Internships at the Journal-World. The Journal-World is an amazing place to start your career.

# 9:54 pm / intership, django, lawrence-journal-world, jacob-kaplan-moss

May 3, 2007

Introduction and Yahoo! Pipes. The official Google Maps API blog describes how to plot KML output from Yahoo! Pipes.

# 10 pm / yahoo, google, google-maps, yahoopipes, xml, maps

Dynamic Language Runtime. Miguel de Icaza describes how Microsoft’s new Dynamic Language Runtime lets you call JavaScript and Visual Basic functions from Ruby. Looks like they beat Parrot to the punch.

# 10:29 pm / migueldeicaza, microsoft, dlr, javascript, visualbasic, ruby, parrot

... Facebook has roughly 200 dedicated memcached servers in its production environment, plus a small number of others for development and so on. A few of those 200 are hot spares. They are all 16GB 4-core AMD64 boxes, just because that's where the price/performance sweet spot is for us right now.

Steve Grimm

# 10:36 pm / memcached, facebook, scaling, steve-grimm

Actual Steampunk Star Wars! I-Wei Huang made a steam-powered R2-D2.

# 11:56 pm / r2d2, starwars, steampunk, iweihuang, eric-poulton

Crabfu SteamWorks. More awesome steam-powered robots.

# 11:57 pm / steam, robots, steampunk

May 4, 2007

MSFT and Yahoo: two icebergs, roped together. Yahoo!’s engineering platform and culture is Open Source pretty much all the way down. Microsoft’s isn’t. I wonder how that would pan out.

# 5:50 pm / microsoft, open-source, yahoo

Migrating Microsoft Hotmail from FreeBSD to Microsoft Windows 2000. I’d like to see them try that with Yahoo!’s 100+ properties.

# 5:54 pm / yahoo, microsoft, freebsd, hotmail, windows, open-source

Inline SVG in MSIE. Sam Ruby has a neat proof of concept that converts inline SVG (currently only the path element) to the Silverlight equivalent.

# 7:29 pm / svg, sam-ruby, silverlight

Microsoft’s XUL. My take on XAML from back in 2003 seems strangely relevant.

# 11:40 pm / microsoft, xul, xaml, silverlight

May 5, 2007

The One True Object (Part 2). Jim Hugunin describes how the DLR let’s Python / JavaScript / Ruby talk to each other using a message passing abstraction.

# 1:27 am / dlr, jimhugunin, microsoft, python, javascript, ruby

May 6, 2007

CSS2.2. Andy Budd points out that CSS hasn’t had an update since 1998, and suggests rolling the most obviously useful parts of CSS 3 in to an incremental CSS 2.2.

# 10:45 pm / css, andy-budd, web-standards

May 7, 2007

Sun Microsystems Announces OpenID Program (via) “In order to explore the boundaries of OpenID as a trust system, Sun is offering an OpenID Provider service to its 34,000 employees.”

# 8:23 pm / openid, sun

Oakland crime maps VI: public, indexed data. Rather than serve content dynamically for his Oaxland Crime site, Michal Migurski plans to serve up various static indexes and have smart clients use them to quickly navigate the data.

# 8:26 pm / oaklandcrime, michal-migurski

hackdiary: ApacheCon Europe 2007 keynote. Matt Biddulph’s ApacheCon keynote, which is basically about having fun with cheap hardware prototyping and starting to build spimes in both physical and virtual worlds.

# 9:33 pm / matt-biddulph, spimes, apachecon, slidecast, hardware-hacking

The YUI Team Is Hiring an Engineer To Work on Firebug. “... we’re opening a search for a full-time developer to work with Joe on advancing the Firebug roadmap.”

# 10:40 pm / yahoo, jobs, firebug, yui

May 8, 2007

Using YUI with the Yahoo! Maps AJAX API. I got bitten by this today—if you’re using both YUI and a Yahoo! map on the same page you need to take a few precautions to avoid library version conflicts.

# 4:07 pm / yahoo, yui, yahoomaps

=drummond XRDS. Bookmarked so I can remember how to easily resolve someone’s i-name.

# 8:27 pm / inames, drummond, xml, xrds

A whole new experience for Google Analytics. I absolutely cannot wait to get my hands on the new interface. Maybe I’ll finally be able to find the search referrals page!

# 9:09 pm / google-analytics, google, jeff-veen

Just because Java was once aimed at a set-top box OS that didn't support multiple address spaces, and just because process creation in Windows used to be slow as a dog, doesn't mean that multiple processes (with judicious use of IPC) aren't a much better approach to writing apps for multi-CPU boxes than threads.

Guido van Rossum

# 9:21 pm / guido-van-rossum, threads, python, ipc, java, windows

VirtualBox. GPL licensed virtualization software; they recently released an OS X version.

# 9:35 pm / virtualization, virtualbox, open-source, gpl

May 9, 2007

I'd like to ask readers of this site which you're more interested in, Sun's JavaFX or signing up for TissueWorld 2008, the Premiere Exhibition and Conference for the International Tissue Industry.

Stuart Langridge

# 7:46 pm / stuart-langridge, sun, java, javafx, tissueworld, funny

May 10, 2007

Guardian Unlimited’s new look: Some background on templating. Nik Silver describes some of the challenges involved in building a complex new homepage using CSS and Velocity.

# 12:26 pm / niksilver, css, velocity, templating, guardianunlimite

Poly9 FreeEarth (via) Seriously sexy embedable 3D Flash globe, with a JavaScript API.

# 9:17 pm / javascript, flash, mapping, globe, 3d

2007 » May

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