Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Entries in Sep, 2010

Filters: Type: entry × Year: 2010 × Month: Sep × Sorted by date


What is the best conference for Web Designers in Australia to Attend?

I’ve not been, but I’ve always heard great things about Web Directions South. I attended/spoke-at @media in London run by the same team this year and it was excellent.

[... 71 words]

Why are XSS attacks spreading like fire these days?

XSS attacks are common and easy, and crop up all the time. What’s new is that the number of people who are aware of the potential for XSS worms has increased hugely, so when an XSS does crop up in something popular there’s a much higher chance of someone turning it in to a worm (as happened with Twitter the other day).

[... 96 words]

What new tools and technologies you learnt recently are worth it?

Redis: http://simonwillison.net/2009/Oc... and http://simonwillison.net/static/...

[... 144 words]

Will Redis support per-database persistence configuration?

I don’t know if that’s on the roadmap (you’d need to ask antirez on the mailing list or Twitter), but it should be easy enough to run multiple Redis instances with different settings—especially on a multi core machine.

[... 52 words]

Why are tech conferences so expensive to attend?

Large conferences with big name speakers are expensive to organise. They are also priced to what the market will bear.

[... 103 words]

Why do so many Internet sites end with the letter ’r’ (but not ’er’)?  Think about Tumblr, Dopplr, Migratr.  What’s behind this?

We just launched a project called lanyrd, which is a play on lanyard. We partly picked the name because the domain was available, but there’s actually a big advantage to using a made-up word: it’s really easy to search for coverage and feedback on Twitter, Google Blogsearch and the like. The string “lanyrd” is almost exclusively used to discuss our project—had we used a dictionary word, tracking down feedback would have been a lot harder.

[... 105 words]

Who are major competitors to Solr?

ElasticSearch is a really interesting one—it’s the same underlying search library (Lucene) and the same integration model (an HTTP interface) but takes quite a different approach. It hasn’t been around for a long time but it looks very impressive: http://www.elasticsearch.com/

[... 95 words]