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FastCGI: 30 Years Old and Still the Better Protocol for Reverse Proxies by @agwa
How to avoid getting pwned by request smuggling and untrusted headers.
https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/fastcgi_is_the_better_protocol_for_reverse_proxies
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Prediction: This pageview counter will shoot up next week via @tomscott audience.
Right now it's early on Nebula!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasholm_Park
Video: https://nebula.tv/videos/tomscott-i-finally-got-to-drive-yorkshires-tiny-boats/
#PeasholmPark #TomScott #NavalWarfare #Yorkshire #NebulaTV #WatchNebula #Wikipedia
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Rare 1999 footage of Steve Jobs talking to Apple employees out in Cupertino, the week after launching the iBook.
https://spyglass.org/made-apple-great-again/
via https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/04/21/the-quadrant-was-now-complete/
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WikiApiary is back online after having been down and overloaded for a long time.
Bawolff brought it back and did a ton of full stack performance work to optimise the whole system. Adding HTTP caching, tuning InnoDB, and more!
https://blog.bawolff.net/2026/03/giving-wikiapiary-kick.html
#MediaWiki #WikiApiary #Wikibase #Wikidata #VinylCache #VarnishCache #MariaDB #MySQL #webperf #SRE
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RE: https://fosstodon.org/@codepen/116256265649058801
This is huge! CodePen 2.0 Deploy reminds me of the Glitch platform @glitchdotcom that shut down last year, but... with a proven business model and owner control via domain. Also an alternative to Netlify or GitHub Pages.
I love it!
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Fastmail @fastmail has been operating on bare metal for 25 years. Their planning and (over-)provisioning strategy reminds me of Wikimedia.
Situations where cloud renting is cost effective for medium or large companies are vanishingly rare, and always have been. As with so many big tech patterns, this is a myth held up by VC-backed startups and incentives.
https://www.fastmail.com/blog/why-we-use-our-own-hardware/
#Fastmail #baremetal #sustainability #CloudExit #CloudRepatriation #selfhosted #SelfHosting
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No Piccadilly line yesterday, but... I did get to see the new tube stock in person for the first time. Spotted them running tests at Acton Town.
They seem lighter and quieter. Love the new maquette! The stock is said to enter service later this year.
That same 700 train:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ovtEOSCG0kGeoff Marshall reviewing the new stock on the test track in Germany:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlP9cJOHEEcWikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_2024_StockTfL:
https://tfl.gov.uk/travel-information/improvements-and-projects/piccadilly-line-upgrade -
Jonathan Horst (of Mac Address fame) launches a new solo channel, and the first video is fabulous!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejPqAJ0dHwY
Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/bsprvp/apple_has_transparency_issue
#ThinkingDifferently #JonathanHorst #MacAddress #LiquidGlass
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Residential proxies are a curse. Criminals use them as botnet for DDOS attacks. AI companies pay them to scrape the web for training data in a way that's nigh impossible to block or throttle.
Ipidea operated one of the largest residential proxy networks. Researchers found that Ipidea sold VPN services with "no clear disclosure about turning users' PCs into proxy nodes".
via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipidea
Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/js7tql/google_disrupts_large_residential_proxy
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Stickers packed and ready for FOSDEM!
Message me to meet and take some!
Including:
* fresh roll of QUnit stickers
* classic jQuery stickers
* brand new Devo-hat stickers from jQuery's 20th birthday event
* Wikipedia and MediaWiki logos
* (not pictured) tons more misc webperf/JS/foss/moz stickers collected over the years. -
Optimizing for 75% is fine but the 90%ile is where it gets interesting!
Web Performance Calendar, day 22 with Jordy Scholing:
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Post-mortem on the 14h AWS outage:
"""
The root cause was a latent race condition that resulted in an empty DNS record [..]. [During] this clean-up, [the] first Enactor applied its older plan, overwriting the newer plan. The second Enactor [..] then deleted all IP addresses. The system was inconsistent [..] and ultimately required manual intervention.[..]
"""That's just the root cause. After DNS recovered, the outage wasn't even half-way. Great write up!
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The Making of Fox News:
"""
It's not enough that conservatives like us, it's important that liberals hate us.
"""Excellent documentary by Fern & Hoog. Divisive politics is by design. Not surprising but quite something to see it laid bare.
Reminds me of CGPGrey about how "thought germs" in ad/algo-feeds evolve to maximise anger, divisiveness, and departure from truth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=HDC6q4V1JmRBgm9L
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Huntington's disease treated for first time
"""
It means the decline you would normally expect in one year would take four years after treatment, [..].The first symptoms of Huntington's disease tend to appear in your 30s or 40s and is normally fatal within two decades.
"""Wow, one might then very well merely die "with" it, instead of "from" it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cevz13xkxpro
via @kottke
#medicine #healthcare #HuntingtonsDisease #Huntingtons #kottke
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This "deprecation" was never visible at any level, there's no discovery path for anyone that found or otherwise used these and stuck with it.
But none of that matters: The most recent Debian 12 installer still unavoidably selects US/Pacific for people living there, today.
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/09/12/tz/
Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/okz9ir/debian_12_installer_promotes_us_time
#tzdata #timezones #datetime #Postgres #PostgreSQL #RachelByTheBay
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If you're running Debian 12 and Postgres, you're in or around the Americas, and you're planning on upgrading to Debian 13, you might hit a fun little snag [..]
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/09/11/debtz/
#tzdata #timezones #datetime #Postgres #PostgreSQL #RachelByTheBay
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A few big ones on Libera Chat IRC:
#cip
#curl
#ircv3
#jekyll
#jquery
#keepassxc
#macgarden
#mediawiki
#mediawiki-core
#node.js
#phorge
#voxpupuli
#wikimedia-sre
#wikimedia-tech
#wordpress -
Session "Multimedia in WebKit", led by @philn (via @webhackfest @webkit)
Slides: https://github.com/user-attachments/files/20566744/multimedia_webkit_2025.pdf
https://github.com/Igalia/webengineshackfest/issues/58
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GitHub's Legacy Of Terrible Code Review,
by @thcipriani -
Effective code review through natural stacking and meaningful comment messages, by @gerritreview
https://gitenterprise.me/2025/03/10/gerrit-code-review-a-how-to-guide-for-new-users/
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Chromium on Android: How we gained a 2x speed up on Speedometer benchmark
by Eric Seckler.Will dive into build optimizations and their impact on CPU bottlenecks, discuss the relevance of benchmarking end-to-end user journeys, and how they built a novel page load benchmark to allow optimizing across the software/hardware stack.
Live stream:
https://live.fosdem.org/watch/ua2220#fosdem #fosdem2025 #webperf #speedometer #loadline #android #chromium
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Love these from Kent Hendricks' round up:
"""
14. Truckers in Maine received $5 million due to a missing Oxford comma in state law.21. A black bear in Georgia died from a cocaine overdose. It was stuffed, and is now legally allowed to officiate weddings due to a loophole in Kentucky marriage law.
36. Massachusetts law requires fortune tellers be licensed to prohibit "pretended" fortune telling.
"""Source links with back stories at:
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Is that... little Alex Horne?
The whole 7-part series is great. Some real gems in there!
https://www.booooooom.com/2011/10/04/remake-submissions/
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Observations by Scott Heiferman after he sold his dotcom company in 1999 and went to work at McDonald’s:
"""
he looked at my resume and asked about my job as chairman at i-traffic. i said, "it's an internet thing." he said "ok" and then asked me for my waist size.1. most of my mcdonald’s co-workers did their jobs much better than i ever could.
[..]
"""https://web.archive.org/web/20040616091238/http://www.heiferman.com/mcd/
via https://kottke.org/24/08/0045096-scott-heiferman-sold-his-
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False modesty a tautology?
"""
Sally is a skilled musician but does not [know] she is exceptional. She may talk endlessly about her skills [which] may make others feel bad about their lesser ability. If she realized this, she can avoid [that] in the interest of modesty.[So,] we think a modest person thinks less of themself [but], McMullin argues, paradoxically, to be modest, you must [first] realize you surpass others, [to] then act [modest].
"""https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/maybe-its-just-me/201012/the-paradox-modesty
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🐧 High-Diving Penguin Chicks
It's incredible how these young chicks jump from such heights, to start their journey to the southern sea!
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How does Wikimedia approach security and performance?
We're quite selective in our dependencies and often audit the sources ourselves. Progressive enhancement makes for a blazing fast and accessible site, and, I argue, it's also the cheaper choice in the long run!
https://timotijhof.net/posts/2023/wikimedia-balances-security-and-openness/
#mediawiki #Wikipedia #OpenJS #infosec #webperf #foss #floss
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Mike Matas's portfolio includes original iPhone interface elements, and absolutely iconic Mac OS X features.
As @kottke puts it:
"""
You'd be hard pressed to find a better portfolio of digital design work than this one from Mike Matas.
"""via https://kottke.org/quick-links #kottke #design #portfolio #macos #osx #apple
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What if you substituted a bowling ball in various sports?
https://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks/587597297
Short story produced by Sam H. Buchanan (via @kottke).
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FOSDEM talk notes:
dav1d 1.0. 200k LOC handwritten assembly. Don't know any other open or closed project that large. Faster than any compiler. Used by Android, Apple, Windows, Firefox, Chrome. Really really fast.
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"They Rule" (by Josh On) is an interactive visualization of the people on the of directors at the 100 largest companies. The map lets you see explore how companies' boards interconnect and overlap.
It's built on top of Wikidata APIs, with descriptions from Wikipedia. Nicely done! (I do wonder why it queries US data only... the information mapped by the multilingual Wikidata community is worldwide!)
#wikidata #wikipedia #opendata #kottke H/T https://kottke.org
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On 'bear', 'Quincy', 'postretirement', and other euphemisms:
"""
The word 'bear' was derived from a euphemism for the animal… but we no longer know the original name!
"""http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2041313,00.html