Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Tuesday, 3rd June 2008

The Machine That Changed the World: Great Brains. I’ve been really enjoying Andy Baio’s series of out-of-print documentaries on technology and the internet, so a few weeks ago I got in touch with him to tip him off about the existence of “The Dream Machine”, a series on the history of computers from 1992 that had a huge effect on my then 11-year-old self. Thanks to Twitter, Jesse Legg and Andy’s awesome foraging skills he’s dug up the US version (same series, different name) and is posting it online. I really can’t recommend it enough! # 6:11 pm

Bird taught to fly by a MAN. ... but the Sun have video. # 9:45 am

The orphaned baby heron that had to be taught how to fly. Hooray for “Dude” the Heron. The Mail on Sunday have the best photos... # 9:45 am

SquirrelFish. WebKit’s JavaScript engine was no slouch, but that hasn’t stopped them from replacing it with a brand new “register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention”. It runs 1.6x faster and has the Best Logo Ever. # 7:57 am

App Engine Fan: Efficient Global Counters. Implementing efficient counters in Google App Engine, using shards and/or memcached. # 12:56 am

Facebook Open Platform. Facebook have open-sourced (under a modified MPL, does it still fit the OSI definition?) the code for the Facebook Platform, including their implementations of FBML, FQL and FBJS. This is no small release; the tarball weighs in at 40MB and includes libfbml, which depends on Firefox 2.0.0.4 for its HTML parser! # 12:21 am

2008 » June

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