Thursday, 9th July 2009
CCP often touts this sort of thing with the bland marketing lingo of 'player generated content.' What that actually means is that you get to share a galaxy with Russian aluminum magnates, French-Indonesian nightclub-owning hackers, self-aggranziding 'spymasters,' and people who will cut the power lines to your house to destroy your internet spaceship.
Desktop Couch initial code. More from Stuart Langridge on the project to make CouchDB available as a desktop service, providing free synchronisation between machines and a way for different applications to interrogate each other’s structured data.
Tools of the Modern Python Hacker: Virtualenv, Fabric and Pip. Ashamed to say I’m not using any of these yet—for Django projects, my manage.py inserts an “ext” directory at the beginning of the Python path which contains my dependencies for that project.
App Engine outage postmortem. Interesting peek behind the scenes. The primary cause of the error was a bug in a GFS (Google File System) Master server caused by a MapReduce process sending a malformed filehandle, reminiscent of the error which took down S3 last year.
Unlike progressive downloads, HTTP Live Streaming actually does stream content in real time, although there can be a latency of as much as 30 seconds. [...] the content to be broadcast is encoded into an MPEG transport stream and chopped into segments that are around ten seconds long. Rather than getting a continuous stream of new data over RTSP, the new protocol simply asks for the first couple clips, then asks for additional clips as needed. This works great through firewalls, and doesn't require any special servers because any standard web server can deliver the chopped up video segments.
Social Media Icons. Paul Robert Lloyd: “ In the past I’ve used site favicons, but these can often be visually inconsistent”—so he’s put together a tasty set of icons for different social websites with a consistent visual feel, available in four different sizes.