Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Thursday, 8th January 2009

How we use IRC at Last.fm. With IRCCat, an elegant Java IRC bot that accepts Twitter-like messages to a network port (generally sent using netcat) and directs them to a user or channel. # 7:04 pm

why’s potion. why’s latest project is a small, fast language (JIT to x86/x86-64) which seems to take ideas from Ruby, Lua, Python and who knows where else. Everything is based around objects, closures and mixins, with the delightful inclusion of scoped mixins so you can modify an object only within a certain module (hence avoiding Ruby’s action-at-a-distance problems). # 6:37 pm

The simple truth is that in the age of Web 2.0/3.0, in the era of cloud and utility computing, the application server is a commodity. A commercial, proprietary app server simply cannot survive in this environment anywhere outside the lethargic, soft-padded walls of the enterprise.

Aral Balkan # 6:10 pm

Wetpaint no longer supports OpenID. I missed this, but they turned off their OpenID support in November due to low usage and high maintenance costs. # 2:53 pm