talideon.com

I must remember these!

Random quotage! Hurray!

From the maker of the brilliant ‘Helvetica’, it’s a documentary about industrial design.

If you’re a coder, read it.

Two interesting videos. I wonder to what extent this applies over here in Rightpondia, especially in Ireland and the UK and what equivalents there are under Irish and European law, if any.

Looks like an interesting shell. Might give it a try.

“Too many applications don’t deal with important files in a safe way. Along with that, they don’t check error codes properly or do things like blindly rely on fsync() actually sending data to disk (which becomes a problem if you intend your application to be portable). Write to temp file, close, rename is not a safe operation. We’ll discuss why—-along with the various behaviors of different file systems and platforms and all the different ways you can expect your important data to get mangled. More importantly, we’ll talk about how to write code using the POSIX file IO api and get it right-keeping your application portable, fast, and most importantly—-respecting the data that users trust in it.” I’d love if there was a recording of this online.

“We describe our experience building a fault-tolerant data-base using the Paxos consensus algorithm. Despite the existing literature in the field, building such a database proved to be non-trivial. We describe selected algorithmic and engineering problems encountered, and the solutions we found for them. Our measurements indicate that we have built a competitive system.”

High-performance, libre messaging.

A tremendously clever method for doing for secure, cross-domain, browser-based data transfer.