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Archive for the ‘software engineering’ Category

Unicorn Power

Posted by John Adams on March 30th, 2010

Ben Sandofsky and I just put a new post on the Twitter Engineering blog about our transition to Unicorn.
http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/03/unicorn-power.html

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Memcached and MySQL – What good is it?

Posted by John Adams on May 17th, 2009

I posted this in response to a post on GigaOM, but it was such a long comment, I felt that it was worthy as a post on it’s own.

The workloads of social networking sites fall mostly into the ‘read lots, write once’ class (most of the web exists within this paradigm.) Regardless of the database [...]

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Announcing mod_memcache_block

Posted by John Adams on May 7th, 2009

I’m announcing the release of mod_memcache_block, a distributed IP blocking system for Apache, with rate limiting based on HTTP request code.
For many years I’ve had a need for a module like this — A distributed blocking system which could operate across large web serving clusters and register hits in a central store. With rate limiting, [...]

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Twitter in New York magazine

Posted by John Adams on February 9th, 2009

Image by davidwatts1978 via Flickr

Normally I don’t re-post Twitter articles here but this one on the New York magazine was wistful, fair, balanced, and gave a good representation of what it’s like to work here.
The reporter was in the office on the very day the US Airways flight crashed into the Hudson, and he [...]

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Improving Javascript Load Times using Google AJAX API

Posted by John Adams on September 22nd, 2008

If your site uses common AJAX libraries like jQuery, jQuery UI, mootools, prototype, script.aculo.us, or dojo, the first thing that you’ll notice is that these libraries are quite large and impact page load time.
For a browser with a completely empty cache, the browser will load the requested library (and block all other requests during the [...]

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Automated Face Replacement

Posted by John Adams on August 18th, 2008

As someone who takes many photographs of random people in nightclubs and at events, I’m intrigued by the efforts of Columbia University’s team to write software that performs automated face replacement in digital photographs.
The software is able to replace faces within images from a database of candidate images drawn from the Internet and other sources, [...]

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ack!

Posted by John Adams on July 17th, 2008

I’ve been experimenting with a few things this week while trying to wade my way through Twitter’s infrastructure. One tool that’s been of extreme help in digging through source code and an extensive set of configuration files has been ack!
It’s the only piece of software I know of that has ‘–thpppt’ as an option (Install [...]

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CommunityOne

Posted by John Adams on April 11th, 2008

Sun Microsystems is hosting CommunityOne, a free tech conference at The Moscone Center, San Francisco. If you’d like to go for free, please register at http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone and use registration ID number W1082146 !
It’s on May 5th, 2008, only three weeks away!
Some info, follows, courtesy of the Sun site:
Join experts and contributors from dozens of free [...]

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Autocomplete in rails 2.0

Posted by John Adams on March 20th, 2008

There’s been some changes in the way that Rails 2.0 processes forms and form interaction with Ajax. Here’s a quick write-up on how to use auto completion in Rails 2.0 without a database connection.
In my case, I was parsing an Apache configuration file and displaying VirtualHost entries, but you can use this for just about anything [...]

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