August 10, 2008
Phusion Passenger 2.0.3 released
Passenger is quickly becoming my preferred Rails hosting technology
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A transit agency in New England has filed a federal lawsuit to stop three Massachusetts Institute of Technology undergraduates from publicly presenting research at Defcon demonstrating gaping security holes in two of the agency’s electronic payment systems.
The Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) also named MIT in the 17-page complaint, which seeks unspecified monetary damages for violation of the computer fraud and abuse act, negligent supervision and other causes of action. It also requests a temporary order preventing the students from “publicly stating or indicating that the security or integrity” of the MBTA’s systems has been compromised.
Scalable Web Architectures: Common Patterns and Approaches
Another great presentation by Flickr’s Cal Henderson on scaling.
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The one liner was of more interest to me than the Wikipedia being saturated.
DMCA does not apply to U.S. Government:
“According to a recent court ruling, we are all subject to the provisions of the DMCA, but the government is not…”
[California] State Supreme Court rejects noncompete clauses:
Californians have the right to move from one company to another or start their own business and can’t be prohibited by their employer from working for a competitor in their next job, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
In a unanimous decision, the justices said state law since 1872 has forbidden what are called noncompete clauses that restrict management employees’ options after they leave a company.
Apple Reviews NetShare; Permanent Ban Likely
Nullriver’s short-lived iPhone application NetShare, which turns your iPhone into a wireless modem for your laptop, might not be returning to the App Store after all.
Earlier in the week, Nullriver received a response from Apple saying the removal of NetShare was a mistake that required “technical review.” It turns out that was a blanket term, because in a phone interview today Nullriver’s CEO Adam Dan said Apple was reviewing user contracts with providers, including AT&T.
Though Apple is continuing to make Nullriver sit and wait, we’ve already received confirmation from AT&T spokesperson Brad Mays that tethering with iPhone is not allowed. He cited a clause in AT&T’s Terms and Conditions…
AT&T reiterates that they’ve never gotten it, don’t get it now and most likely will never get it.
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Traffic jams are not, by and large, caused by flaws in road design but by flaws in human nature. While this is bad news for drivers — there’s not much to be done about human nature — it is good news for readers of Tom Vanderbilt’s new book. “Traffic” is not a dry examination of highway engineering; it’s a surprising, enlightening look at the psychology of human beings behind the steering wheels.
Already in my Amazon shopping cart.
Jeremy Zawodny: “Two weeks into my new job at craigslist…”
In two weeks, I’ve only had one experience that I would come close to classifying as a “meeting.” There really aren’t conference rooms (yay!) but it did involve a whiteboard. However, unlike meetings I’m used to, it involved only the most essential people, had a clearly defined goal, and was very useful to me.
Location, keeping it real on the streets, yo!
Documents an alternative means of geotagging on Flickr. God, I love Flickr.
Clever method of near duplicate detection
Martin Theobald, Jonathan Siddharth, and Andreas Paepcke from Stanford University have a cute idea in their SIGIR 2008 paper, “SpotSigs: Robust and Efficient Near Duplicate Detection in Large Web Collections”. They focus near duplicate detection on the important parts of a web pages by using the next few words after a stop word as a signature
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Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. In case you want to create your own specific chart or image crop-n-rotate widget, you can simply achieve it with this library
A Bunch of Great Strategies for Using Memcached and MySQL Better Together
PURE: Unobtrusive Rendering Engine
PURE is an Open Source JavaScript Template Engine for HTML. Truly unobtrusive, it leaves your HTML untouched.
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So nice!
Last.HQ: Quality Control
Interesting and nice nerd eye-candy but the potential for corporate silliness seems very high.
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Specifically we needed two features to scale our mysql database: application-level sharding and master/slave replication. Sharding is the process of splitting a dataset across many independent databases. This often happens based on geographical region (e.g. craigslist) or user account (e.g. flickr). Replication provides a near-real-time copy of a database which can be used for fault tolerance and to reduce load on the master node. Combined, you get a scalable database solution which does not require huge hardware to scale to huge volumes. DataFabric extends ActiveRecord’s standard connection handling to provide these two features.