Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Wednesday, 17th February 2010

Search Engine Time Machine. Detailed explanation of how ElasticSearch provides high availability, through clever sharding and replication strategies and configurable gateways for long-term persistent storage. # 10:32 pm

The Case For An Older Woman. OK Cupid’s fascinating statistics blog uses cleverly plotted aggregate data from the dating site to illustrate the difference in age tastes between the genders (men try to date younger women) and show why that might not be the best strategy. An infographics tour-de-force. # 10:20 pm

do. A library for Node that adds a higher level abstraction for dealing with chained and parallel callbacks. # 5:43 pm

How To Node. New blog about Node.js, with a superb series of tutorials aimed at both experienced and new JavaScript developers. The stuff on managing callbacks (including running them in both series and parallel) is pretty eye-opening. # 5:42 pm

Werewolf: How a parlour game became a tech phenomenon. The legendary “everyone’s a villager” game from Foo Camp ’08 gets a write-up in Wired. # 5:30 pm

A new global visual language for the BBC’s digital services. Detailed explanation of the BBC’s new “visual language” for their digital properties. # 12:34 pm