December 2008
13 posts
Javascript Status Message Display →
In a little wiki I’ve been playing with I’ve been trying out little ideas that I’ve had but haven’t had a place to actually implement them. One is how notification messages work. I’m sure other…
Dec 17th
Race →
The U.S. Census defines five races, and an “other” category. When the human genome was first fully mapped in 2000, Bill Clinton, Craig Venter, and Francis Collins took the stage and…
Dec 16th
The Promise of System Configuration →
Google Tech Talks November 5, 2008 ABSTRACT In 1993 cfengine was one of the first open source configuration management systems for Unix … www.youtube.com
Dec 16th
Now You Can Sign Into Friend Connect Sites With... →
Now You Can Sign Into Friend Connect Sites With Your Twitter ID. Great. Now even Google is asking me for my Twitter password. Slow clap. How’s that Twitter OAuth beta coming along?
Dec 15th
It's a good time to be a kid →
The Economist review on Don Tapscott’s new book, “Grown Up Digital,” reminded me of how lucky kids growing up in the “net generation” are today. Based on a huge survey of kids growing up today,…
Dec 15th
Scaling memcached at Facebook →
Scaling memcached at Facebook. Fascinating techie details on how Facebook forked memcache to use UDP and increase performance from 50,000 requests a second to 200,000. Now running on 800 servers…
Dec 13th
Spock Proxy →
Spock Proxy. A MySQL Proxy fork (no Lua) that concentrates solely on sharding, by parsing incoming SQL statements and redirecting them across multiple databases. There are some limitations on the…
Dec 11th
lxml: an underappreciated web scraping library →
When people think about web scraping in Python, they usually think BeautifulSoup. That’s okay, but I would encourage you to also consider lxml. First, people think BeautifulSoup is better at…
Dec 11th
Ubuntu and Debian AMIs for Amazon EC2 →
Ubuntu and Debian AMIs for Amazon EC2. Exactly what it says on the tin.
Dec 10th
A quote from Christopher Lenz →
I don’t think that Python 3.0 is a bad thing. But that it’s displayed so prominently on the Python web site, without any kind of warning that it’s not going to work with 99% of the Python code out…
Dec 8th
Friends →
Dec 5th
Large Scale Cluster Computing Course at the... →
Yesterday I did a quick roundup of IR courses that were offered. Today, I’d like to highlight the UW course on large-scale cluster computation that is being offered again this fall. CSE 490H:…
Dec 4th
Internet explorer mystery #1376 →
Internet explorer mystery #1376. IE executes function definitions inside an “if (0)” block. That frightens me.
Dec 3rd