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Thursday, 3rd September 2009

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. # 6:50 pm

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. # 6:28 pm

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. # 9:46 am

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.” # 9:25 am

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. # 8:56 am

2009 » September

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