Simon Willison’s Weblog

Parsing file uploads at 500 mb/s with node.js. Handling file uploads is a real sweet spot for Node.js, especially now it has a high performance Buffer API for dealing with binary chunks of data. Felix Geisendörfer has released a new library called “formidable” which makes receiving file uploads (including HTML5 multiple uploads) easy, and uses some clever algorithmic tricks to dramatically speed up the processing of multipart data.

# 2nd June 2010, 3:57 pm / binary, buffers, felixgeisendorfer, files, html5, javascript, node, nodejs, uploads, recovered

Memcached 1.4.0 released. The big new feature is the (optional) binary protocol, which enables other features such as CAS-everywhere and efficient client-side replication. Maintainer Dustin Sallings has also released some useful sounding EC2 instances which automatically assign nearly all of their RAM to memcached on launch and shouldn’t need any further configuration.

# 17th July 2009, 10:26 pm / memcached, dustin-sallings, binary, cas, ec2, ami, caching, performance, scaling

Reading binary files using Ajax. There’s a simple trick for Firefox, and (amazingly) you can get IE to play along using a function written in VBScript.

# 22nd April 2008, 7:02 pm / binary, ajax, ie, firefox, vbscript, javascript, xmlhttprequest

Bit Twiddling Hacks. I’ve never been much of a bit twiddler, but I’ve always felt I should learn.

# 2nd November 2007, 6:49 am / bits, bittwiddling, binary, programming, hacks

Binary marble adding machine. Watch the video.

# 29th June 2007, 12:44 am / video, binary, woodwork, make, marbles