Mibbit supports WebSocket, some initial numbers.
I just implemented WebSocket into the Mibbit server, and thought I'd get some real numbers on performance. Having recently updated the Mibbi...
Burnout
If you hang around technology companies long enough, you or someone you know may experience “burnout” – a state of emotional exhaustion, doubt and cynicism. Burnout can turn productive emplo…
Too small to fail: How startups can grow in recessions
These two little startups are exploding in sales, even in recession. Here's how they're doing it, and how you can too.
Let's Stop Talking About "Backups"
Is your desktop backed up? Did you backup that server? Are your backups on a different machine? Do you have offsite backups? All good questions, all best practices. But let’s stop talking about “ba…
Massive Twitter Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability
I bet 10 years ago none of us thought that 140 characters would change the landscape of Social Media quite so much. However, with close to 289,000,000 active users sending around 6,000 tweets every second Twitter has proven its critics wrong. Obviously, having gotten over …
Just How Important is the Valley? Let's Look at some Data.
Some of the smartest startup brains I’ve ever met have said that if you want to be in the startup game, you MUST be in the Valley. There are plenty of justifications out there for it, and many/most of them make a fair bit of sense. Recently, Paul Graham posted another great essay on the topic, and said:
Stress and its consequences for software development
For decades we have known that some people are 25 times more productive than most in software engineering jobs. We also know that there are “gelled teams” which are consistently 10 times more productive than most across the whole project lifecycle.
Arbitrary code execution via ldd utility
The `ldd` utility is more vulnerable than you think. It's frequently used by programmers and system administrators to determine the dynamic library dependencies of executables. Sounds pretty innocent, right? Wrong! In this article I am going to show you how to create an executable that runs arbitrary code if it's...
Friendly: NoSQL With MySQL in Ruby
I've been a big proponent of NoSQL for a while. I have played with just about all of the new generation of data stores. We almost got cassandra running in production once, and we've been running mongodb in production for about six months now.
Heroku: Why Instant Deployment Matters (YC W08)
How much better are two steps than three? Does it matter if something takes five minutes instead of twenty? When it comes to software deployment and...
Design Lessons & Advice from Building Large Scale Distributed Systems at Google
Jeff Dean of Google did an excellent keynote talk at LADIS 2009 . Jeff’s talk is up at: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/talks/dean-keynote-ladis2009.pdf and my notes follow:
On "magic", once again (from James Bennet, Django dev)
So it seems Giles Bowkett [is upset](http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/07/do-you-believe-in-magic.html) about use of the word "magic". I'm happy to agree with the general …
Panic’s lost 1982 artwork. Found.
As you probably know, in the late 70’s Panic was writing VAX/VMS automation code for the textile industry. Cotton attenuators, zipper sublimation, loom dynamics, that sort of thing. What you might not know is that, once the early 80’s arrived, Panic got hit hard with two things: unkempt mutton chops, and Pac-Man Fever.
Greybeard Stories: The Black Team
Sometimes the stories can't even be told. But some, after time, can. I'm starting to write them up, and this is one of them.
Don't Bet on Moore Saving Your Ass
Over on the 37signals blog , DHH writes Mr. Moore gets to punt on sharding . His argument is basically that if you continually delay fixing your data storage and retrieval layer, Moore's Law will be there to save our ass--over and over again.