I’m reading about origins of The Manhattan Project right now. It’s a little shocking how easy it is to make an atomic bomb. Extremely difficult to make the fuel, yes, but the actual weapon? You just put these two chunks of rock together, quickly.
Making a military-grade version took an elite team of scientists and engineers, of course, and that process ultimately resulted in the overengineered world-shattering monstrousity that is the H-bomb.
But the early feasability reports are chilling in their simplicity.
Caught this nice tip from the makers of Forumwarz, re: preventing users or bots from flooding you with form submissions:
“Memcached allows you to set an expiry for any key you set. So, instead of using the timestamp column in the database [to prevent multiple requests within a timeframe], you can simply set a key in memcached with an expiry of your cool down period. Then, when you are about to insert, check to see if the key exists in memcached. If it does, don’t insert. If it doesn’t, insert your row and then add the key there.”
Nice to remember when scaling makes it worth adding memcached to your infrastructure (memcached requires some sort of vlan for secure deployment, otherwise _anyone_ can write to your caches).
You could also use Amazon’s SimpleDB or (for small sites) a session key. The point is to prevent flooders from tying up your database at all, if possible.
Maybe you call it a pound sign (US) or a hash (UK) or a sharp (music), but the real name of the
# symbol on your phone is the
octothorpe. Octo, because it has eight legs and thorpe because… well,
no one really knows why. I prefer the “eight-fronted field” explanation, personally, because it also explains the name
Orangethorpe.
A public safety message: Do you know how to casually record audio on your cell phone or mp3 player?
Last year, a Bronx teenager took down a corrupt detective by surreptitiously recording his interrogation on an mp3 player.
Recently, a Colombian immigrant caught an USCIS agent demanding sex in exchange for a green card. She recorded the 16 minute conversation on her cell phone.
Please take a few moments to see if you can—quietly—record several minutes of audio on your phone or portable music player. Evidence may some day be your best defense against abuse of power.
Jeff Atwood advises globally-aware developers to make sure their applications work well for Turkish users. Because Turkish date and number formats differ significantly from American and British (and because Unicode support is a must), he says localizing to “tr” is a good test of your overall localization strategy.
There is also the infamous lowercase i problem.
Right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew seem to pose a much bigger challenge. Besides, Hebrew localization involves date conversion to/from a different calendar, as do other locales.
As many of the comments to Atwood’s article point out, there is a staggering amount of diversity in terms of sorting, stemming, and formatting various values. Relatively speaking, Turkish localization should be a snap.
