Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Friday, 26th February 2010

Django Advent: Scaling Django. Mike Malone’s advice on scaling Django applications, including taking advantage of new features in 1.2. # 7:22 pm

PiCloud. An interesting twist on cloud computing for Python. “import cloud; cloud.call(my_function, arguments)” serialises my_function and its arguments, pushes it up to one of their EC2 servers and hands you back a job ID which you can poll (or block on) for a response. They suggest using it for long running tasks such as web crawling or image processing. # 6:25 pm

Internet Explorer Cookie Internals (FAQ). Grr... IE 6, 7 and 8 don’t support the max-age cookie argument, forcing you to use an explicit expiry date instead. This appears to affect the cache busting cookie pattern, where you set a cookie to expire in 30 seconds for any user who posts content and use the presence of that cookie to skip caches and/or send their queries to a master instead of slave database. If you have to use expires, users with incorrect system clocks may get inconsistent results. Anyone know of a workaround? # 12:25 pm