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  Use of Erlang in WhatsApp

After many years, people are still discussing whether Erlang is a small language. People have all sorts of doubt about it, but with the appearance of WhatsApp, we may change our mind. What is WhatsApp, from its official website: WhatsApp Messenger is a cross-platform mobile messaging app which allows you to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS. The more funny thing is the main developer of WhatsApp Rick Reed worked in Yahoo and SGI before he joined WhatsApp and he didn't have any know...

   Erlang,WhatsApp,Architecture     2013-06-16 03:03:46

  Twitter service down incidents summary

This Thursday, Twitter encountered a global service down incident. This is the second service down incident since last month. Later Twitter updated its website and stated that users might not be able to access Twitter temporarily.Twitter admitted the service down incident and explained that this time's service down was caused by problems of their both data centers.Ok, now lets summarize the service down incidents encountered by Twitter in past few years.in May 2008, Twitter's new engineer team w...

   Twitter,Service down,History     2012-07-28 12:36:39

  Good ways to build communities around a web product

If a product wants to be successful, there are must be a group of loyal users of the product. Though their influence, more and more people get to know and product and start to use the product and again promote the product. The most difficult thing to promote a product after building an excellent product is to find the first bunch of users. For web products, same conditions apply, but the ways to promote the product may be more abundant. Besides the advertisement, there are other ways a web produ...

   Web product,Community,Promotion     2014-03-12 07:37:05

  Replacing small C programs with Haskell

C is the classic go-to tool for small programs that need to be really fast. When scripts.mit.edu needed a small program to be a glorified cat that also added useful HTTP headers to the beginning of its output, there was no question about it: it would be written in C, and it would be fast; the speed of our static content serving depended on it! (The grotty technical details: our webserver is based off of a networked filesystem, and we wanted to avoid giving Apache too many credentials in ca...

   C,Haskell,Small program     2012-01-03 10:51:39

  PHP to get long running process progress dynamically

Frequently in web applications, we may have a request to the back end system which may trigger a long running process such as searching huge amount of data or a long running database process. Then the front end webpage may hang and wait for the process to be finished. During this process, if we can provide the user some information about the progress of the back end process, it may improve user experience. Unfortunately, in web applications, this seems not an easy task because web scripting lang...

   AJAX,PHP,progress,long process,demo     2012-06-04 07:29:37

  The 15 Golden Rules of UI design and flow.

Last night a good friend of mine showed me the latest Need for Speed game on the iphone / ipad. Quite an impressive feat of rendering and a relatively good game to boot. However, the front end, wow, a classic case in UI mis-engineering. Loads of stats, pages and pages of bits and pieces to wade through – a classic case of over stimulating the player with lots of decisions they have no business making – stuff that will significantly change their game play experience but being...

   UI design,Game design,Feature     2012-04-05 12:20:18

  Google open sources its Collaborative IDE

July 9, 2012 news, Google engineer Scott Blum published an article on Google+ which revealed that Google would open source the Collaborative IDE. The project was named "Collide" (collaborative IDE), which is a Web collaborative code editor. Google hopes that Collide can serve as a catalyst for improving the state of web-based IDEs.Caution Collide does not have any proper auth, SSL support, or user account management just yet. Please consider that fact when running instances that expose important...

   Google,Open source,Collide IDE     2012-07-09 10:55:20

  Learn Emacs: Keyboard Macros

An emacs keyboard macro is just a recording of user input into emacs, which means that most anything you can do in emacs can be recorded as a macro. Read that again. Pretty powerful.Here’s how it works. To start recording, typeC-x (and input the commands in your macro. Then typeC-x )to stop recording. Then typeC-x eto apply the macro once, orC-u 0 C-x eto apply the macro until the bell rings or end of buffer is reachedKeep in mind that you must not ring the bell when defining a keyboard m...

   Emac,Macro,Code,Example     2011-11-10 10:45:47

  Run MySQL on Command Line in Windows

Sometimes if we want to run MySQL but we don't have phpMyAdmin installed. What should we do?On Windows we can run MySQL in following steps:Open Console Window->Type "mysqld -u root". This means we start the mysql server with username root. This program will handle all the communications between our console window and the actual data;After starting the server, we need to use a client to connect to the server and communicate with it. the mysql program is right for this. Next in the command cons...

   mysql,console,command line,windows,defau     2011-08-21 04:14:58

  Why Software Is Eating The World

This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I've observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the...

   software,quota,internet world,eat up     2011-08-22 12:06:40

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