mjs

Sure, but this approach is going to be much more complicated and less predictable than the "switch the docroot to a completely different directory" model. (e.g. you need to distinguish between asset and non-asset directories, and make a decision about how long to keep "old" assets around.) With some effort these problems can be solved, I'm just pointing out that even with a completely static site, and perfectly atomic docroot switching, you can still end up with clients in an inconsistent state.

This system ensures the server is always in a consistent state, but client race conditions are still possible if the "old" index.html references an asset that isn't available after the deployment has occurred. Is there any good way of dealing with this? (I just ignore it...)

1. Graph is a bit suspicious--why does the adoption rate sometimes go down? (Some quite large drops as well.) 2. Any equivalent graphs for other versions? 3. Adoption rate pretty flat since about two weeks after the iOS 6 release. 4. What percentage of devices can be upgraded to iOS 6? (Probably 95%+, since the 3GS is supported--?)

I think I'd almost prefer to read the questions and answers Google Translated from Russian!

From the Varnish documentation, addressing an assumption of the Varnish source code that unique inputs will produce a unique SHA-1 hash: "The risk of collision is very small however, and I can all but promise you, that you will be fully offset in fame and money for any inconvenience a collision might cause, because you will be the first person to find a SHA256 collision."

https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/varnish_does_no...

"A complicating factor for an Open Source effort is that Spanner includes the use of GPS and Atomic clock hardware." (!)

Can anyone explain why such an accurate clock is helpful? I can see that it's needed if you create a document on the East Coast at about the same time as you create a document on the West Coast, and you absolutely need to know which was created first, but for most applications can't you just go with whatever time the system that got the insert thinks it is??

It seems like the solution is to special case sensitive headers like "Cookie", so that the compressed version doesn't leak information. But isn't every byte equally worthy of protection? What if there's sensitive information in the body?

(I get that the format of the Cookie header is probably much more structured/predictable than usernames or account details that might appear in the body, but surely a good cryptosystem would be 100% resistent to these sorts of side-channel attacks, without any need to guess which headers need to be handled more carefully.)

Leica do a monochrome camera too http://en.leica-camera.com/photography/m_system/m_monochrom/ with a similar filter (only necessary to capture colour images) removed. Must be an incredibly small market for these, though...

So whilst the malware will infect machines more or less indiscriminately, the payload itself can only be successfully decrypted (and therefore activated and executed), on machines that have a specific set of programs installed?

"Rootbeer was created using Test Driven Development and testing is essentially important in Rootbeer"

I'm not sure what the "essentially" means here, but this is the first "big" program I'm aware of that name-checks TDD, and a counter-example to my theory that programs where much of the programmer effort goes into algorithms and data structures are not suited to TDD.

Was the TDD approach "pure"? (Only one feature implemented at a time, with absolutely no design thought given to what language features might need to be implemented in the future.)

The UI for curl is awful (--request to change the method??) and wget's is only slightly better, but they do have the advantage of ubiquity, and it's often useful to email/Skype complete curl or wget command lines about the place to explain how to use an API, or demonstrate problems.

(e.g. Stripe and others document their API in terms of curl commands: https://stripe.com/docs/api.)

I do wish the curl UI was better, but I can't see it being trivially replaced. (It's a similar issue with git: bad UI, but every git question and answer is described in terms of the CLI, so even if you prefer a GUI client, say, you still need to be able to formulate your problem in CLI terms for anyone on stackoverflow to understand you.)

PHP frameworks are pretty decent, and widely liked (if not loved). Though for some reason this doesn't apply to PHP applications: plenty of people dislike Drupal, or WordPress, or Magento. I'm not sure if there's an equivalent situation across languages--does Ruby or Python have loved frameworks and libraries, but unloved (though widely-used) applications?

I also like how he's decided he's figured out the most difficult bits of how to animate people and animals, but needs help with a few minor details, like a "Diagram of how evreything works."

From the FAQ http://www.akamai.com/html/io/io_faq.html: the data comes from a sample of 600 million requests (out of two trillion (?)) to mostly US sites who are Akamai customers.

"This approach should be reversed if you're shipping a library for use by third parties"

I'm coming to believe more and more strongly that there should be a difference in the way writing library code, and writing code that uses libraries, is approached. (This applies to the use of design patterns, abstractions, and various other "best practices.")

In many cases, there's a big difference in both programmer quality and the amount of time spent on each line of code between library code and application code. And worse, most of the time, when programmers come across good code, it's library code, not application code. This leads programmers to think that library code--with its multiple abstractions and design pattern complexity--is the right way to do things, and so then then apply this approach, quite inappropriately, to their application code.

I don't understand this. In particular I don't understand the sense in which it is "purely functional". Surely a package manager needs to mutate the state of a system, which seems to be an inherently non-functional operation--? If I have a system S1, and then I do S2 = install(S1, "firefox"), does S1 still exist?

This bit is also interesting: "Runtime dependencies are found by scanning binaries for the hash parts of Nix store paths (such as r8vvq9kq…). This sounds risky, but it works extremely well."

The HEAD version is a bit different (less clear?), although the intent is more or less the same:

"describe changes in imperative mood, e.g. "make xyzzy do frotz" instead of "[This patch] makes xyzzy do frotz" or "[I] changed xyzzy to do frotz", as if you are giving orders to the codebase to change its behaviour."

http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=blob;f=Documentation/...

It's instructive to read Linus's commits to his hobby project "subsurface":

https://github.com/torvalds/subsurface/commits/master

Even if I can't code like Linus, I can at least try to write commit messages like his…

During the original piece, host Ira Glass gives the impression that they were originally sceptical, saying that they "actually spent a few weeks checking everything that he says in his show." So I guess they need to check a bit harder next time...

Full quote: "When I saw Mike Daisey perform this story on stage, when I left the theater I had a lot of questions. I mean, he's not a reporter, and I wondered, did he get it right? And so we've actually spent a few weeks checking everything that he says in his show."

From http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/t... or http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.thi...

Interesting. Is there an Apache FAQ or similar that explains this in more detail? (The Apache License FAQ http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html doesn't cover it.)

There's an "IT Security" stackexchange?! WTF?! How many almost identical communities does stackexchange need?

The list of trusted partners is interesting to see what happens if you spoof mobile phone numbers. They've already said that it's involved in payment in some way...

Oh, I didn't realise much of Riak was in C, and the website now mentions Erlang a whole lot less than I remember. Still, in the technology stack http://basho.com/technology/technology-stack/ Riak Core seems to be all Erlang. Bitcask is possibly C--is that what you're referring to?

I wonder if Riak will ever get to this point.

So there are now three Perl runtimes/compilers/interpreters--Rakudo (+ Parrot VM), Niecza (CLR), Perlito (?)--none of which yet implements the full Perl 6 spec? (Which itself is not yet complete, although "2011 was a rather quiet year in terms of spec changes.")

Anything specific? I haven't noticed noticed anything very much amiss with Sublime. (It's as native feeling as Chrome, say, or indeed TextMate.)

Interesting, another use of a SQL-like language as the query language for a data store that's definitely not an SQL database. (YQL is another example.) I really don't understand why ORMs always seem to want to create their an object-based query language--SQL is just fine for querying.

Ah, looks like this is the library Subbu Allamaraju refers to at http://www.subbu.org/blog/2011/11/apis-are-a-pain--the aim of ql.io is to alleviate the challenges of "aggregation, parallelization, and orchestration of forks and joins." (i.e. in practice, "consistent RESTful APIs don’t matter as much as we think," nice though they may be.)

I tried the "request assistance" button in Apple's Covent Garden store a month or two ago, and it didn't work. No-one came, and when I asked a real person about this, he said they were aware someone needed help, but the system isn't able to tell them exactly where the person was. But maybe they've fixed it now...

Is there a ticket to follow to track this regression?