Simon Willison's Weblog: blaine-cook

Hot Code Loading in Node.js

2010-01-31T13:57:53+00:00

Blaine Cook’s patch for Node.js that enables Erlang-style hot code loading, so you can switch out your application logic without restarting the server or affecting existing requests. This could make deploying new versions of Node applications trivial. I’d love to see a Node hosting service that allows you to simply upload a script file and have it execute on the Web.

Tags: blaine-cook, deployment, erlang, javascript, nodejs

Quoting Blaine Cook

2009-08-13T13:06:46+00:00

When we get the tools to do distributed Twitter, etc., we get the tools to communicate in stanzas richer than those allowed by our decades-old email clients. Never mind Apple being anti-competitive, social networks are the peak of monopolistic behaviour today.

— Blaine Cook

Tags: apple, blaine-cook, distributedsocialnetworks, facebook, social-networks, twitter

The Twitter administrator hack was a dictionary attack

2009-01-06T23:56:20+00:00

The Twitter administrator hack was a dictionary attack

I quoted Blaine earlier suggesting that the recent Twitter mass-hack was due to a Twitter admin password being scooped up by a rogue third party application—this was not the case, as Alex Payne explains in a comment.

Tags: alex-payne, blaine-cook, security, twitter

Quoting Blaine Cook

2008-08-14T10:01:37+00:00

OAuth came out of my worry that if the Twitter API became popular, we'd be spreading passwords all around the web. OAuth took longer to finish than it took for the Twitter API to become popular, and as a result many Twitter users' passwords are scattered pretty carelessly around the web. This is a terrible situation, and one we as responsible web developers should work to prevent.

— Blaine Cook

Tags: blaine-cook, oauth, passwords, phishing, security, twitter, twitterapi

RubyForge: Starling

2008-01-11T21:47:26+00:00

RubyForge: Starling

“Starling is a light-weight persistent queue server that speaks the MemCache protocol. It was built to drive Twitter’s backend, and is in production across Twitter’s cluster.”

Tags: blaine-cook, memcached, message-queues, messaging, queue, ruby, rubyforge, starling, twitter

SELECT * FROM everything, or why databases are awesome

2007-06-22T00:40:09+00:00

SELECT * FROM everything, or why databases are awesome

I’m beginning to think that for scalable applications the thinner your ORM is the better—if you even use one at all.

Tags: blaine-cook, databases, orm, rails, scaling, sql, twitter

Scaling Twitter

2007-04-23T11:02:11+00:00

Scaling Twitter

Slides from Blaine’s recent talk.

Via Blaine Cook

Tags: blaine-cook, rails, scaling, twitter