I learned some rather important facts about cURL’s multi interface (which makes it possible to perform asynchronous HTTP requests and what Python’s Tornado framework uses under the hood in it’s AsyncHttpClient helper). I was investigating some intermittent issues in an application at work – transient DNS issues were causing the application to become unresponsive. This [...]

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After trying for many years to maintain a personal blog, with many starts and stop, I have given up. I realized I don’t *want* to write personal thoughts on the web. Instead, I’ve been messing around with my own custom tumblelog scripts. I use delicious, Flickr, last.fm, and other services that I want to aggregate [...]

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Data is the most fundamental component of today’s web applications. Scraping and combining data from multiple sources to enhance, re-calculate, and re-display is an everyday occurance. Scraping a list of URLs asynchronously is just about the slowest possible way to do it. Fortunately, PHP 5.2+, via its cURL multi_* functions, gives us a way of [...]

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