'some portions of the experience, such as the sky, may be replaced by personalised advertising.' Uploading your consciousness in the age of copyright maximalism, as Nelson Minar put it (via Nelson)

A great getting-out-of-Flickr life-raft. self-hosted, PHP app, storing photos in Dropbox, S3, or local disk; UI screenshots look great (via Nelson)

An amazing article, via Nelson Minar -- careful examination of the evolution of chess programs over the past 8 years appears to show clear signs of code/algorithm copying and unauthorised reverse engineering -- by many of the developers. 'Dr Søren Riis of Queen Mary University in London shows how most programs (legally) profited from Fruit, and subsequently much more so from the (illegally) reverse engineered Rybka. Yet it is Vasik Rajlich who was investigated, found guilty of plagiarism, banned for life, stripped of his titles, and vilified in the international press – for a five-year-old alleged tournament rule violation. Ironic.'

wow, very impressive -- as far as I can tell, it really _is_ using GMaps infrastructure to some degree

well-packaged, well-designed, two-factor auth for SSH from Dug Song. free for small-scale use, too, it looks like. awesome! I've signed up (via Nelson)

Python, Nginx, Tornado for COMET stuff, MySQL as a data store, memcached, Thrift, haproxy, AWS, Pylons.  fantastic, very detailed post (via Nelson)

'Notch’s luck was that he came across the idea of doing a first-person fortress building game. His alignment was that the game that he wanted to make was culturally connected to [he PC gamer] tribe. While the game may appear ugly, and its purchase process etc seem naive to many a gaming professional, all of those decisions that Notch made along the road to releasing his game were from the point of view of a particular perspective of what games are, what matters and what were the things that he could trust the tribe to figure out for themselves.'

I never really understood how useful a good metrics infrastructure could be for operational visibility until I joined Amazon.  Here's a good demo of Etsy's metrics system (via Netlson)

'a (python) library and a tool to clusterize similar files using fuzzy hashing techniques. This project is inspired by the well known tool ssdeep.' Via Nelson

MongoDB was set up to write to RAM if possible, omitting immediate writes to disk -- but then the db size exceeded RAM size, the disk was hit, imposing a massive slowdown and creating a huge backlog immediately, bringing the site down (via Nelson)

'as the computers of the high-frequency traders traded contracts back and forth, a “hot potato” effect was created, the report said, as contracts changed hands 27,000 times in 14 seconds, but with eventually only 200 actually being bought or sold.' upshot: horrifically complex distributed feedback loops now directly impact our economies -- great :(

linked by Nelson; will return to this once i've gotten into the game

lots of commercial and open-source-friendly-licensed icon sets, including the old reliable FamFamFam and Pinvoke icons