Simon Willison’s Weblog

Raising Octopus from Eggs (via) I love that forums like this exist.

# 2:59 pm / bruce-schneier, forums, octopus

Project Voldemort. Yet Another “big, distributed, persistent, fault-tolerant hash table”—this time from LinkedIn, released under the Apache 2.0 license. The approach to consistency is interesting—instead of using distributed transactions, they use versioning and “resolve inconsistencies at read time”. It also uses consistent hashing (as seen in libketama) to select servers. The design document has lots more information.

# 7:45 pm / consistency, hashtable, keyvaluepairs, libketama, linkedin, open-source, scaling, versioning, voldemort

Load Windows ICO files. Apparently PIL has trouble with the most recent versions of the windows .ico format (Vista now embeds PNG images in them)—this clever function deals with the differences and gives back a PIL Image object.

# 9:48 pm / ico, images, pil, png, python, vista, windows