February 2009
Feb. 25, 2009
The Cost of Accessibility. Drew McLellan comments on the seemingly inevitable march towards JavaScript dependent applications, and argues that JavaScript frameworks such as Cappuccino have a duty to integrate accessibility in to their core.
What I’ve Learned from Hacker News. I’m always fascinated by online community war stories.
Feb. 26, 2009
It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again. Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.
— Ryanair
Kestrel. Twitter’s Robey Pointer rewrote their Starling message queue in 1500 lines of Scala, adding reliable fetch (where consumers can confirm their receipt of an item) and blocking fetches, which reduce the need for consumers to poll for updates (and hence solve my only beef with the original Starling). I haven’t tried running this on a low spec VPS yet but it looks very promising.
Accessibility and Degradation in Cappuccino. Ross Boucher from 280 North responds to Drew McLellan.
Feb. 27, 2009
How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data. The pain of altering/ adding indexes to tables with 250 million rows was killing their ability to try out new features, so they’ve moved to storing pickled Python objects and manually creating the indexes they need as denormalised two column tables. These can be created and dropped much more easily, and are continually populated by an off-line index building process.
Magic properties make Firefox synchronously load the Java plugin. Even defining a function called sun() (or several other symbols) will trigger the Java VM to be loaded, dramatically hurting the performance of your page.
jQuery Sparklines. Delightful Sparklines implementation, using canvas or VML in IE. A neat nod towards unobtrusiveness as well: you can specify your data as comma separated values inside a span, then use a single jQuery method call to convert the span in to a sparkline image.