Thursday, 10th September 2009
Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him.
— Gordon Brown # 11:39 pm
Tornado Web Server (via) An extremely exciting addition to the Python web landscape, Tornado is the open sourced version of FriendFeed’s custom web stack. It’s a non-blocking (epoll) Python web server designed for handling thousands of simultaneous connections, perfect for building Comet applications. The web framework is cosmetically similar to web.py or App Engine’s webapp but has decorators for writing asynchronous request handlers. The template language uses Django-style syntax but allows you to use full Python expressions. FriendFeed have benchmarked it handling 8,000 requests a second running as four load-balanced processes on a 4 core server. # 9:32 pm
OpenStreetMap: QuadTiles. Fascinating explanation of a proposal for replacing lat, lon pairs in the OpenStreetMap database with a QuadTile-based addressing system. # 3:54 pm
RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win. A PubSubHubbub advocate explains the differences between the two proposals: most importantly, PubSubHubbub includes the actual new content with the “fat ping” whereas RSSCloud just notifies you that you should poll the RSS feed, leading to a potential thundering herd. I’m still hoping one of those specs will detail a way in which they can be used for scalable regular WebHook-style notifications without any feed infrastructure at all. # 3:49 pm