Tom Insam

A herejustnow iPhone app. I’m having to learn Objective-C to do this, which I can just about put up with. CoreLocation turns out to be quite easy to use, too. Now all I need is the ability to install the thing on a Real iPhone.



A guide to writing iPhone applications in Python. Seems to apply to the jailbreak SDK rather than the real one (though this isn’t very clear) and is undated (I hate it when people don’t put dates on things) so I have no idea if it’s still relevant. But nevertheless.

A chat with TumblrBot

A chat with TumblrBot. Not that I’m finding it very clever. Ideally it would understand image urls and post image entries. Pity.

On scaling


The key feature of "scalability" that most people care about is actually the ability of a system to efficiently convert money to increased capacity

Almost any small web service could have $10,000 thrown at it and get faster. A new server. More memory! A better load balancer. But you won't see ten times the benefit if you throw $100,000 at it. What would you get? Lots more memory? You'll just bottleneck somewhere else. Ten more servers? Your database won't take the increased load. Maybe it's the salary of another developer. But that won't get you a x10 speedup either.