Amazon Web Services has just announced the beta release of Amazon ElastiCache, a hosted/managed memcached service. This is an offer similar to Relational Database Service (RDS) in that the management and clustering is handled for you, leaving you with a host/port to point your services at.

ars technica has an interesting article with a brief overview of a study that looks into fanboyism. It outlines why fanboys tend to defend their favorite brands, often with disregard to facts and history. Read the full thing here.

This is a quick tip that will hopefully save someone else a few minutes at least. If you’re using Django 1.3, using pylibmc and want to point at a local unix domain socket for memcached, this is what your CACHES setting will look like:

CACHES = {
        'default': {
                'BACKEND': 'django ...

Following the lead of Chrome, Mozilla is working towards burying version numbers. ghacks sniffed this out in a Bugzilla ticket. See the ghacks article for a brief walkthrough, and check out the Bugzilla ticket for the full run-down.

My perpetual tinker project is a MUD server that may or may not ever see the light of day. In recent adventures, I pursued using Exocet to make my goal of a mostly interruption-less experience for the players a reality. The attempt worked in most cases, but failed horribly in ...

It looks like Fabio is doing an AMA (Ask me Anything) on Reddit, and it is most amusing. I’m not sure if it’s him or the Old Spice PR team, but it’s funny either way. Read it in its full glory.

I’ve noticed that some people coming from Windows or other backgrounds often mis-interpret Linux load averages, or don’t understand them at all. Check out this great rough overview post, Understanding Linux CPU Load. While there is, of course, more to it than the article goes over, this will ...

I recently stumbled across an article on Hacker News about how our urbanisation tendencies translate really well to the world of Minecraft. Urbanisation in Minecraft details the experience of one of four founding members of a Minecraft server as it sees explosive growth, eventually developing sprawl and resource shortages in ...

Today, Google anounced the general availability of its Go programming language on App Engine. It will be interesting to see how this pans out, but this very well may be the kind of endorsement needed to catapult the language out into the semi-mainstream. While still young, this language is looking ...

One of the big philosophical “pillars” I’ve been building my tinker Python MUD on is that cold restarts (restart the process, clients are disconnected) should be exceedingly rare. Code re-loading in Python can be challenging, but Allen Short has nailed it with his Exocet module.

The coolest part for ...