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  HTTP Streaming and Internet Explorer

In early 2006, Alex Russell posted about a neat hack that the Google Talk team in Gmail use to support Comet in Internet Explorer, a trick which works as far back as IE 5.01. What great news! A reliable way to stream Comet messages to Microsoft’s browsers. If only it were that easy. I have not been alone in the following findings: after connecting the htmlfile ActiveX object as a streaming Comet transport to my Comet server, everything works perfectly for a few messages, but then abruptly...

   IE,Streaming,JavaScript,htmlfile,ActiveX     2011-09-05 04:05:23

  40+ Techniques to enhance your php code

1. Do not use relative paths , instead define a ROOT path Its quite common to see such lines : 1require_once('../../lib/some_class.php'); This approach has many drawbacks : It first searches for directories specified in the include paths of php , then looks from the current directory. So many directories are checked. When a script is included by another script in a different directory , its base directory changes to that of the including script. Another issue , is that when a script is being ru...

   PHP,Quirk,Trick,Efficiency,Techniques     2012-04-10 13:06:55

  Why email is crucial to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. These three companies rule webmail withGmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, the three largest email services on the Internet.What might escape a lot of people, though, is just how important email services are for the online presence of those companies (yes, even for Google). To give you an idea, let’s look at some rather interesting website traffic numbers.Webmail share of site trafficAlexa can give you an estimate of how many peop...

   Gmail,Yahoo,Hotmail,Important,Email,Stat     2011-05-27 12:44:05

  The future of IT will be reduced to three kinds of jobs

Takeaway: The IT profession and the IT job market are in the midst of seismic changes that are going to shift the focus to three types of jobs. There’s a general anxiety that has settled over much of the IT profession in recent years. It’s a stark contrast to the situation just over a decade ago. At the end of the 1990s, IT pros were the belles of the ball. The IT labor shortage regularly made headlines and IT pros were able to command excellent salar...

   IT,Potential,Consultant,Developer,Projec     2011-07-27 08:46:59

  Fear of Ignorance

This past week, I was interviewing a candidate for a VP role along with two of our engineering leads. Everyone in the room excluding myself was classically “technical” – they could write code, had experience solving hard software problems and a background in computer science. I wrote my last line of PHP in 2004, and it had to be rewritten by a real programmer within 6 months.During the interview, we had the following exchange (due to an imperfect memory, I’ll ...

   Leader,Team,Technical,Leadership,Ignorence     2011-11-21 10:03:03

  Parallel Javascript

Lately the ideas for a parallel, shared memory JavaScript have begun to take shape. I’ve been discussing with various JavaScript luminaries and it seems like a design is starting to emerge. This post serves as a documentation of the basic ideas; I’m sure the details will change as we go along. User Model The model is that a JavaScript worker (the “parent”) may spawn a number of child tasks (the “children”). The parent is suspended while the children exe...

   Parallel JavaScript,API,Spawn,Parent,Task     2012-01-11 12:02:00

  Automate Everything

Performing manual, repetitive tasks enrages me. I used to think this was a corollary of being a programmer, but I’ve come to suspect (or hope) that this behaviour is inherent in being human. But being able to hack together scripts simply makes it much easier to go from a state of rage to a basic solution in a very small amount of time. As a side point, this is one of the reasons that teaching the basics of programming in schools is so important. It’s hard to think of any j...

   Automate,Email,Repeative     2012-02-07 06:21:19

  When to use STDERR instead of STDOUT

Every process is initialized with three open file descriptors, stdin, stdout, and stderr. stdin is an abstraction for accepting input (from the keyboard or from pipes) and stdout is an abstraction for giving output (to a file, to a pipe, to a console). That's a very simplified explanation but true nonetheless. Those three file descriptors are collectively called 'The Standard Streams'. Where does stderr come from? It's fairly straightforward to understand why stdin and stdout exist, however ...

   UNIX,STDERR,STDOUT,Difference     2012-01-14 12:07:43

  Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For September 16, 2011

Between love and madness lies HighScalability:Google now 10x better: MapReduce sorts 1 petabyte of data using 8000 computers in 33 minutes; 1 Billion on Social Networks;Tumblr at 10 Billion Posts; Twitter at 100 Million Users; Testing at Google Scale: 1800 builds, 120 million test suites, 60 million tests run daily.From the Dash Memo on Google's Plan: Go is a very promising systems-programming language in the vein of C++. We fully hope and expect that Go become...

   Scalability,Go,Google,MapReduce,Muppet,M     2011-09-20 11:22:36

  Method chaining and lazy evaluation in Ruby

Method chaining has been all the rage lately and every database wrapper or aything else that’s uses queries seems to be doing it. But, how does it work? To figure that out, we’ll write a library that can chain method calls to build up a MongoDB query in this article. Let’s get started! Oh, and don’t worry if you haven’t used MongoDB before, I’m just using it as an example to query on. If you’re using this guide to build a querying library...

   Ruby,Method chaining,Lazy evaluation,Implementation     2011-11-29 08:51:17

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