Excuse the bad picture please.

A short while back the book Building Scalable Web Sites came out on Safari. The book is written by Cal Henderson, one of the main people behind Flickr. As I’m currently involved in building a Web application (local.ch) I was interested to learn a few lessons by the Flickr people. Okay, Flickr is not beating any speed records right now, but it’s still an incredibly big application with tons of users and data. Management review: the book is worth a read. Technical short review: the book covers a lot of stuff a bit and nothing extremely well. The book does not completely live up to it’s title as scaling is only part of the book. It seems more to be a list of lessons learned while building Flickr. That’s also the reason for one of the book’s main deficiencies: it’s mostly PHP and MySQL only. But it also includes enough lessons that can be applied in other environments for it to be useful. A short chapter by chapter review follows. ...

At work the templating is done with XSLT. I have the Bitflux freaks to thank for that. Currently I’m writing a really tricky XSLT template (for me), so I was investigating a tool for getting things done quicker. And Marc Liyanage is my hero. He has written an OS X application called TestXSLT to quickly test an XSLT stylesheet against some XML file. It accepts an XML and an XSLT file and gives you the parsed output. You can look at it in text mode, HTML mode (exactly what I need) and even XSL-FO (which I have never used). ...

Gutes Essen, nicht sehr teuer (für Zürich), grosser Nichtraucherteil. Kann ich empfehlen. Adresse: Markt-Gasse 21, Zürich

Die Autos stehen der Zug fährt.

Dazu gibt es ein leckeres Spanferkel

Ouch, Cablecom is down. --- www.heise.de ping statistics --- 89 packets transmitted, 61 packets received, 31% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 16.566/20.503/45.173/5.434 ms It's unusable.

I attended the Webtuesday yesterday, hosted by Jürg Stuker at the namics office in Zürich. The talk was mainly done by Urban Müller of search.ch about their clustering implementation. Statistics, performance, server redundancy, etc. were the topics. Bernhard Seefeld talked about his current solution for Endoxon. And Cédric added a few notes about our solution at local.ch. Silvan and Stefan of Tilllate had a few things to say about their layout as well. All in all it was a very interesting evening with lots of stuff learned. I guess all of us learned a few things. We then moved to El Lokal for a beer and Pizza. We of local.ch had to accept being defeated by tel.search.ch for looking up the number of a Pizza delivery service. But only because we don’t have the mobile interface ready, yet. It’s already being implemented, though and is one of the lacking features I personally care most about. It was once again interesting to meet a few people I had only met online so far, especially Denis De Mesmaeker and Alain Petignat. Next time I’ll talk about Ruby on Rails which I already defended at our table yesterday. We planned/are planning to have that event on June 13 but that date collides with the Swiss victory over France at the Football World Cup. Details are currently being negotiated and will be announced on the Webtuesday Zurich Web site. ...

On the Skype Developer Zone Blog there is an explanation how you can set up a call center with Skype. Apparently different people can log in to the same Skype account and then take calls from there. The only question that remains: can I log in to two accounts at the same time? Because I’d definitely want to be logged in to my personal Skype account at the same time as well. ...

The zh.phpug.ch meeting has been renamed to webtuesday. So we got a general Web tech gathering in Zürich now. We will meet in the namics office on May 16, at 19:30. Urban Müller (search.ch techie) and Jürg Stuker (namics CEO) will talk about load balancing and clustering. Apparently search.ch and local.ch will serve as case studies. See you there!