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ProjectPlan—unladen-swallow. A branch of Python 2.6 aiming to radically improve performance (the target is a 5x improvement), by compiling Python to machine code using LLVM’s JIT engine. I think this is a Google 20% time project (or maybe not, see the comments). An early version without LLVM is already available for download.
Development virtual machines on OS X using VMWare and Ubuntu. Bradley Wright provides detailed instructions for getting the JeOS (VM optimised) flavour of Ubuntu running with VMWare tools so you don’t need to run samba just to share your desktop.
Future roadmap for mod_wsgi. mod_wsgi 3.0 isn’t too far off, and will include Python 3.0 support, WSGI application preloading and internal web server redirection (similar to nginx X-Accel-Redirect). Version 4.0 plans a major architectural change that will allow multiple versions of Python to be run from the same Apache.
Building Fast Client-side Searches. Flickr now lazily loads your entire contact list in to memory for auto-completion. Extensive benchmarking found that a control character delimited string was the fastest option for shipping thousands of contacts around as quickly as possible.
Pwn2Own trifecta: Hacker exploits IE8, Firefox, Safari. You just can’t trust browser security: Current versions of Safari, IE8 and Firefox all fell to zero-day flaws at an exploit competition. None of the vulnerabilities have been disclosed yet.
Parrot 1.0.0 “Haru Tatsu” Released! Parrot hits 1.0! Anyone know how complete Pynie, the Python implementation on top of Parrot is?
Streams, affordances, Facebook, and rounding errors. I asked Kellan about scaling activity streams the other day. Here he suggests the best technique is not to promise a perfect stream (like Twitter does)—Facebook used to get away with 80% loss of update messages, but their new redesign has changed the contract with their users.
Load spikes and excessive memory usage in mod_python. “The final answer? Stop using mod_python, use mod_wsgi and run it with daemon mode instead. You will save yourself a lot of headaches by doing so.”
slippy faumaxion, take two. Mike Migurski made a slippy map using triangular tiles, based on the same principle as Buckminster Fuller’s famous Dymaxion World Map.
Parallel merge sort in Erlang. Thoughts on an Erlang-y way of implementing a combined activity stream (e.g. Facebook and Twitter). Activity streams are a Really Hard Problem—as far as I know there’s no best practise for implementing them yet.
Fixing IE by porting Canvas to Flash. Implementing canvas using Flash is an obvious step, but personally I’m much more interested in an SVG renderer using Flash that finally brings non-animated SVGs to IE.
redis (via) An in-memory scalable key/value store but with an important difference: this one lets you perform list and set operations against keys, opening up a whole new set of possibilities for application development. It’s very young but already supports persistence to disk and master-slave replication.
Concurrence. Exciting: a Python framework for “creating massively concurrent network applications” (the tutorial benchmarks a Hello World web server at over 8,000 requests a second). It’s implemented on top of libevent using pyrex, can run on either Stackless Python or Greenlets from the py library and ships with a WSGI server, an HTTP client and a DBAPI 2.0 compliant MySQL driver.
Ruby on Rails 2.3 Release Notes. I’m impressed with how thoroughly Rails has embraced Rack (Ruby’s standardised web framework API, inspired by Python’s WSGI).
maps from scratch. An idea whose time has come: using EC2 AMIs for tutorial sessions to give everyone a pre-configured environment.
Southerly Breezes. Andrew Godwin is slowly assimilating the best ideas from other Django migration systems in to South—the latest additions include ORM Freezing from Migratory and automatic change detection. Exciting stuff.
Understanding Bidirectional (BIDI) Text in Unicode. It turns out you need to sanitise user input to ensure there are no unicode characters that switch your site’s regular text to RTL.
Practical, maintainable CSS (via) Nat’s posted slides and a video from her latest talk at last week’s Brighton Girl Geeks evening.
Get our full university data. “The Guardian’s university rankings are the most visited part of Education Guardian”—and now they’re available as a spreadsheet.
Guardian + Lucene = Similar Articles + Categorisation. Alf Eaton loaded 13,000 Guardian articles tagged Science in to Solr and Lucene and is using Solr’s MoreLikeThisHandler to find related articles and automatically apply Guardian tags to Nature News articles.
django-gae2django. An implementation of the Google App Engine API (datastore, memcache, urlfetch, users and mail) that runs on Django, allowing you to take an existing application written for App Engine and deploy it on your own server on top of Django.
What happened to Hot Standby? Hot Standby (the ability to have read-only replication slaves) has been dropped from PostgreSQL 8.4 and is now scheduled for 8.5. “Making hard decisions to postpone features which aren’t quite ready is how PostgreSQL makes sure that our DBMS is ”bulletproof“ and that we release close to on-time every year”.
Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added To Curriculum. “West says the school inadequately prepares students for the black seas of infinity.”
Imminent Death of the Net Predicted. Well, maybe not, but the way Windows Vista deals with round-robin DNS A records (using a new IPv6 algorithm from RFC3484 backported to IPv4) means that domains that serve up multiple A records to load balance between data centres will find that the IP nearest to the 192.168.* range will get the vast majority of Vista traffic.
It’s time for a change. Jacob Kaplan-Moss is joining Revolution Systems, who will now be offering professional Django support “to companies who need a Django expert on staff, but can’t afford someone full-time.”
Panda Tuesday; The History of the Panda, New APIs, Explore and You. Flickr’s Rainbow Vomiting Panda of Awesomeness now has a family of associated APIs.
Combine JSONP and jQuery to quickly build powerful mashups. jQuery’s JSONP support is one of my favourite little-known features of the library.
Django snippets: Smart {% if %} template tag.
Chris Beaven's drop-in replacement for Django's {% if %} tag that adds comparison operators (less than, greater than, not equal etc) while staying backwards compatible with the less able original. I love it. This is one place where I no longer favour Django's stated philosophy: I think it's perfectly reasonable to use comparisons in presentation logic, and I've found that in my own code the lack of an advanced if tag frequently leads to pure presentation logic sneaking in to my view functions.
How search.twitter.com uses Varnish. Includes examples of the configuration options they use.
Database Sharding at Netlog, with MySQL and PHP. Detailed MySQL sharding case study from Netlog, who serve five billion page requests a month using thousands of shards across more than 80 database servers.