Freezing cold, no internet, boring: it’s a French web 2.0 conference! : hilarious account of Loic Le Meur’s latest car-crash of a conference, LeWeb ’08
(tags: rant leweb loiclemeur paulcarr leweb08 web2.0 conferences paris guardian web funny)Rent or Own: Amazon EC2 vs. Colocation Comparison for Hadoop Clusters : Rapleaf do the computations on using EC2 vs “grow your own”. waaay cheaper to do the latter for their use-case. also interesting to see lots of Hadoop fans in the comments
(tags: ec2 rapleaf hadoop clustering colo hosting server-farms scalability)Richard Clayton on the IWF/Wikipedia fiasco : ‘The bottom line is that these blocking systems are fragile, easy to evade (even unintentionally), and little more than a fig leaf to save the IWF’s blushes in being so ineffective at getting child abuse image websites removed in a timely manner.’ +1
(tags: iwf richard-clayton filtering wikipedia isps uk blocklists)lxml: an underappreciated web scraping library : contains a 20-line Python script to diff two HTML pages. nice!
(tags: python scraping web http xml css lxml beautiful-soup html)