Thursday, 3rd September 2009
apache.org incident report for 8/28/2009. Various apache.org sites were down for a while last week—here the Apache Infrastructure Team provide a detailed description of what happened (a security breach on a minor server, which provided non-priveleged SSH access to mirror servers via an SSH key used for backups) and how they are responding. Useful for neophyte sysadmins like myself.
On Influenza A (H1N1). “It’s humbling that I could be killed by 3.2kbytes of genetic data. Then again, with 850 Mbytes of data in my genome, there’s bound to be an exploit or two.”
And so it goes, around again. Charles Miller on Java, pointing out that if you don’t have closures and first-class functions you end up having to add band-aid solutions and special case syntactic sugar. Python’s lack of multi-line lambdas leads to a similar (though less pronounced) effect.
Chris Heathcote: loca london. Chris’s new guide to exhibitions in London is presented as an enormous (5100px wide) page with horizontal and vertical scrollbars—as Chris points out, this interface may be a bit clumsy with a mouse but it works wonderfully well on touchpads and touchscreens.
Ravelry. Tim Bray interviews Casey Forbes, the single engineer behind Ravelry, the knitting community that serves 10 million Rails requests a day using just seven physical servers, MySQL, Sphinx, memcached, nginx, haproxy, passenger and Tokyo Cabinet.