Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Monday, 1st February 2010

Follow a Museum day. It’s follow a museum on Twitter day. Useful directory of museum Twitter accounts around the world, organised by country. # 11:15 am

Distributed lock on top of memcached. A simple Python context manager (taking advantage of the with statement) that implements a distributed lock using memcached to store lock state: “memcached_lock can be used to ensure that some global data is only updated by one server”. Redis would work well for this kind of thing as well. # 10:15 am

Plurk: Instant conversations using Comet (via) Plurk’s comet implementation sounds pretty amazing. They’re using a single quad-core server with 32GB of RAM running 8 Node.js instances to serve long-polled comet to 100,000+ simultaneous users. They switched to Node from Java JBoss/Netty and found the new solution used 10 times less memory. # 10:13 am

jQuery source viewer. A neat way of browsing the source code of jQuery itself, complete with hyperlinks to other jQuery methods. Kind of a single-purpose IDE. I can see myself using this a lot. # 10:01 am

HTML 5 audio player demo. Scott Andrew’s experiments with the HTML5 audio element (and jQuery)—straight forward and works a treat in Safari, but Firefox doesn’t support MP3. Presumably it’s not too hard to set up a fallback for Ogg. # 9:58 am