Gall’s law “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to … Continue reading →

Do what you got to do, Najib “The people are also fed up with the seeming lack of authority – from poor policing to fight crime and blatant corruption to demonstrations which disrupt the city – and yet many seem … Continue reading →

By-elections a touchstone for PR and BN? “Pas have kept to their end of the bargain, betting all their chips on Perak. While Nizar is the best possible candidate for a win in Bukit Gantang, a defeat will silence any … Continue reading →

HTTP Caching FAQ – MDC An old but well written FAQ covering the prickly issue of how Firefox determines when a doc expires as well how it does a conditional GET.

Guido on writing main() functions Something to keep in mind the next time I write a main()

MongoDB, another competitor for the schemaless database space. This is from 10gen who provides a hosted version of the database. DB engine licensed under the AGPL – so no webservice loopholes.  Has some pretty interesting performance metrics.There are drivers for … Continue reading →

Key Differences between HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 “The HTTP/1.1 specification is almost three times as long as RFC1945, reflecting an increase in complexity, clarity, and specificity.” This is paper is really worth the read

Scrapy.org. an open source web scraping framework in Python “Scrapy is a high level scraping and web crawling framework for writing spiders to crawl and parse web pages for all kinds of purposes, from information retrieval to monitoring or testing … Continue reading →

Google Code FAQ – On the Wire: Network Capture Tools for API Developers Great concise guide on debugging HTTP at the wire level. A necessity for anyone trying to check on their HTTP authorsation, caching, compression or API calls headers