Items in 2011
Filters: Year: 2011 × Sorted by date
On HTTP Load Testing. Mark Nottingham explains that running good HTTP benchmarks means understanding available network bandwidth, using dedicated physical hardware, testing at progressively higher loads and a whole lot more. # 18th May 2011, 10:17 am
When and where was the first An Event Apart held?
We have a list of all 29 An Event Apart conferences here:
[... 38 words]What are the top events for Internet startups in 2011?
We have a bunch of startup / entrepreneurship events listed on Lanyrd—try these pages:
[... 40 words]What are good websites to post online content about an event?
For posting slides from an event, http://www.slideshare.net/ is definitely the most popular. http://scribd.com/ is a good choice too.
[... 112 words]Why does Django still not have support for multiple joins?
I don’t fully understand the question, but if you’re talking about doing a single join across multiple tables the Django ORM handles that just fine. Let’s say you want to get every BlogEntry written by a User who belongs to the Group with the name “admins”:
[... 67 words]What are the main conferences taking place in the US dedicated to Open Source?
We have a list here: http://lanyrd.com/topics/open-so...
[... 63 words]Where can I get a calendar of upcoming tech conferences in South Africa?
Try our list here: http://lanyrd.com/places/south-a...
[... 25 words]What are the best bachelor party ideas (other than strip clubs)?
My bachelor party (we call it a stag night over here) ended in a Karaoke club—one of the ones with private booths. It was awesome.
[... 44 words]Are all Lanyrd conferences uploaded by users?
Yes—all of Lanyrd’s events are added by a regular user of the site.
[... 28 words]We Need to Stop Google’s Exploitation of Open Communities. Mikel Maron from OpenStreetMap is justifiably angry about Google MapMaker, which copies OpenStreetMap’s model of crowdsourcing geographic data (even copying the OSM idea of Mapping Parties) but keeps the data under a much more restrictive license, and uses the Google brand to market itself to African governments. # 22nd April 2011, 10 am
Why Facebook open-sourced its datacenters. Jon Stokes speculates that Facebook plan to use open source hardware to compete with Google at datacenter efficiency . This isn’t a new pattern. Years ago when I worked at Yahoo! I was furiously jealous of the secret sauce technologies that allowed Google to build big applications faster than anyone else, such as BigTable and map/reduce. Today, the open source world has created better, free alternatives—sponsored in part by Facebook, Yahoo! and other Google competitors. # 9th April 2011, 7:54 am
Which database engine does Lanyrd use?
We’re on MySQL (InnoDB), using Amazon’s RDS. We have enough to worry about without tuning and configuring our own database server.
[... 33 words]Qwery—The Tiny Selector Engine. A quarter of the size of Sizzle (1K gzipped and minified) due to only supporting ID, class and attribute selectors. Could be useful for things like embeddable widgets and badges, where depending on a larger library is impolite. # 2nd April 2011, 8:27 am
Product design at GitHub. At GitHub, every employee is a product designer. # 2nd April 2011, 7:51 am
YC Is Not a School for Startups—It Is Marine Corp Boot Camp for Startup Founders. This is a great description of what it’s actually like to do YC. If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t blogged much over the past three months, this is why. # 20th March 2011, 5:27 pm
Your Web, Half a Second Sooner. Google AdSense now serves a tiny bit of JavaScript that loads everything else in a dynamically populated iframe, thus avoiding blocking the rest of the page load. It’s about time online advertising providers started taking page performance seriously. # 17th March 2011, 5:39 pm
DNS Prefetching Implications. deviantart use a subdomain per user, which meant the DNS prefetching feature in Firefox and Chrome was costing them an extra 10 billion DNS queries per month. Disabling it with a meta tag saves them $1600/month in DNS service charges. # 9th March 2011, 10:54 pm
What Y Combinator companies are going to SXSW this year?
Lanyrd (W11) will be there, we’re promoting our SXSW schedule planner / coverage tracker tool: http://sxsw.lanyrd.com/
[... 33 words]Which Bay Area startups are going to SXSW 2011?
http://lanyrd.com/ will be there—both myself and Nat.
[... 25 words]Where can I find a text corpus of English language personal email on the web?
The Enron email corpus is pretty useful, though I don’t know how “normal” you would consider it.
[... 38 words]Is Lanyrd meant to be tech-industry specific, or is that just a byproduct of the early adopter demographic?
We want to cover all sorts of conferences (and user groups, and meetups, and conventions... any event where people get together to share their knowledge). We have a good start on technology because that’s where our early adopters are, but we’re starting to pick up in a few other categories as well. Here are some of my favourite examples:
[... 94 words]One interesting quirk of Pinboard is a complete absence of unit tests. I used to be a die-hard believer in testing, but in Pinboard tried a different approach, as an experiment. Instead of writng tests I try to be extremely careful in coding, and keep the code size small so I continue to understand it. I’ve found my defect rate to be pretty comparable to earlier projects that included extensive test suites and fixtures, but I am much more productive on Pinboard.
— Maciej Ceglowski # 11th February 2011, 2:57 am
CSRF: Flash + 307 redirect = Game Over. Here’s the exploit that Django and Rails both just released fixes for. It’s actually a flaw in the Flash player. Flash isn’t meant to be able to make cross-domain HTTP requests with custom HTTP headers unless the crossdomain.xml file on the other domain allows them to, but it turns out a 307 redirect (like a 302, but allows POST data to be forwarded) confuses the Flash player in to not checking the crossdomain.xml on the host it is being redirect to. # 10th February 2011, 10:07 pm
URLs are supposed to represent resources. A web app can be a resource, and there are techniques for managing state within those. Hashbangs might be one of these. But when large web properties are converting all their links to _articles_ and other _bits of text_ (tweets/twits/whatever) into these monstrosities, it’s not innovation. It’s a huge mistake that ought to be regretted now and will certainly be regretted in the future.
— Reed Underwood # 10th February 2011, 4:56 pm
Before events took this bad turn, the contract represented by a link was simple: “Here’s a string, send it off to a server and the server will figure out what it identifies and send you back a representation.” Now it’s along the lines of: “Here’s a string, save the hashbang, send the rest to the server, and rely on being able to run the code the server sends you to use the hashbang to generate the representation.” Do I need to explain why this is less robust and flexible? This is what we call “tight coupling” and I thought that anyone with a Computer Science degree ought to have been taught to avoid it.
— Tim Bray # 10th February 2011, 6 am
What is the “best” programming language to learn if you want to mockup your own ideas but don’t have a technical background?
I knew a very talented UX designer at Yahoo! who did all of his interactive mockups in PowerPoint—including widgets that you click to transition to another “page” in the interface. I’ve heard of people doing the same thing in Keynote, and OmniGraffle Pro also has tools for creating interactive mockups.
[... 111 words]Going Postel. Jeremy points out that one of the many disadvantages of publishing JavaScript dependent content on the Web is that a single typo can render your entire site unusable. # 9th February 2011, 2:18 am
Breaking the Web with hash-bangs. Mike Davies explains why Gawker’s new Ajax fragment-tastic redesign is a web architecture error of colossal proportions. # 9th February 2011, 2:17 am
elasticsearch: Percolator. Another fascinating elasticsearch feature: Percolator lets you register searches with your elasticsearch cluster, then pass in a document and have the matching query IDs returned. It’s an upside down search engine. I’m sure there are some very neat things you could build with this, I just haven’t figured out what they are just yet. # 8th February 2011, 11:16 pm