mohangk.org/blog

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 work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.” Try telling that to marketing!

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 to escape the law.” It’s great how Wong Chun Wai lumps street demonstrations with crime and corruption. This from `the peoples paper`.

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 further claims to legitimacy by the Pas-led Perak government. … A 3-0 sweep would be the perfect tonic for Najib who is likely to be the first Prime Minister to not enjoy a honeymoon period as he enters office….Similarly, the stakes are just as high for PR, and Anwar’s continued claims that all races are now united against BN will certainly be put to the test.” Malaysia, where proxy democracy is the order of the day.

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 Python, C+, PHP, Java, Ruby and Javascript (using the V8 engine).

Stores data in BSON -binary JSON – that besides being a binary serialisation of JSON also has extension for types such dates and binary data.

Supports db replication. Pretty funky auto sharding planned, although not completed.  No transactions. No server side joins so you either embed your objects together or you create  references between them . Supports advanced querying capabilities as well as server side excution of code for searching and processing on the client.

Looks real promising.

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 web sites.” Looks awesome. Documentation looks really good as well.

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