John Adams’ views on emerging technologies, software engineering, and various hacks
Today we’re going to teach you how to deal with having too many computers. Moving media around is a living hell because iPhoto and iTunes assume that you only ever possess one library. Sure, you can play music and movies purchased in the store on multiple machines, but what about your own library? How do [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I’m releasing my apache module which has been extremely helpful to me in performance tracking, and large site analysis.
mod_telemetry keeps track of all URLs on your site and how long it takes your server to deliver each request. It reports these by using a status handler (like Apache’s /server-status) to display real-time status information about [...]
Around here at the PornJob, we do a fair amount of research into building very large, very scalable systems to deliver lots of media content to thousands of users. We’re always trying to solve the same problem, over and over, though:
How do we store hundreds of thousands of movies in a redundant, distributed fashion across [...]
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 [...]
This evening at the second Google Campfire, they released their Amazon EC2/S3 killer, Google AppEngine. Based in Python (2.5.2 required), It’s a developer tool that gives access to Google’s computing infrastructure and BigTable, the distributed database that Google runs on.
From their blog, it features:
Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
Persistent storage (powered by [...]
At yesterday’s SFBETA meetup, I had the chance to play with PicLens, a dynamic system for displaying images in your browser, all pulled from the APIs of various web sites.
It works as an adjunct to your existing browser, installing as a plugin (written in C++, or so the developer tells me.)
If you connect to a [...]
Over at Chris Shiflett’s blog (he’s the author of Essential PHP Security) he’s got a nice writeup on foiling cross-site scripting attacks on web sites.
While this is an older article ( from 2004 ), it still addresses many dangerous issues that developers continue to create in production code.
One of our developers here recently wrote a [...]
