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Programming

Twitter On Scala 324

machaut writes "Twitter, one of the highest profile Ruby on Rails-backed websites on the Internet, has in the past year started replacing some of their Ruby infrastructure with an emerging language called Scala, developed by Martin Odersky at Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Although they still prefer Ruby on Rails for user-facing web applications, Twitter's developers have started replacing Ruby daemon servers with Scala alternatives, and plan eventually to serve API requests, which comprise the majority of their traffic, with Scala instead of Ruby. This week several articles have appeared that discuss this shift at Twitter. A technical interview with three Twitter developers was published on Artima. One of those developers, Alex Payne, Twitter's API lead, gave a talk on this subject at the Web 2.0 Expo this week, which was covered by Technology Review and The Register."
Microsoft

Microsoft Asks For a Refund From Laid-Off Workers [updated] 424

An anonymous reader writes "The large print giveth, the small print taketh away. Microsoft, which recently laid off 1400 employees, is now claiming that some of those lucky schmoes were inadvertently overpaid on their severance package. A letter from the company, which was subsequently circulated on the internet, states: 'We ask that you repay the overpayment and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience to you.' Microsoft has confirmed the authenticity of the letter, but it's not known what the amounts in question are, or how many of the 1400 were affected." Update: 02/24 14:00 GMT by T : VinylRecords writes "Well, now Microsoft has recanted, saying that the situation has resulted in unfortunate amounts of bad press and public relations. 'This was a mistake on our part,' said a Microsoft spokesman in an e-mailed statement. 'We should have handled this situation in a more thoughtful manner.'"
Bug

Ubuntu's Laptop Killing Bug Fixed 271

jeevesbond writes "Back in October of 2007 we discussed a bug that would dramatically shorten the life of laptops using Ubuntu. Ubuntu users will be glad to know that a fix has finally been released for Ubuntu versions 9.04, 8.10 and 8.04 (LTS). However, as this fix is not yet in the update repositories, anyone wishing to test it should follow these instructions for enabling the 'proposed' repository. Report your results on the original bug report. Happy testing!"

Comment Re:Keywords in Context (Score 1) 82

As I'm working on a really similar app for my college final project i got really interested in this plug in and grabbed it instantly to see what magic was behind this.

fetchSummary: function(doc) { // Extract the Plid

                var plid = pluribo.extractPlid(doc); // Launch XHR to get Summary

                if (plid) {

                        var req = new XMLHttpRequest();

                        req.open('GET', 'http://'+pluribo_server+'/xhr/topic/widget/'+plid+'/', true);

                        req.onreadystatechange = function (aEvt) {

                                if (req.readyState == 4) { // Render the Pluribo Panel (if successful)

                                        if (req.status == 200) { pluribo.renderPanel(doc, req.responseText); } // Otherwise Fail Silently

                                        else { /* alert("Pluribo: error loading summary\n"); */ }

                                }

                        };

                        req.send(null);

                }

But as of the above, theres not much to look at as all the magic happens server side.
So you're right... A simple fx plug in wont do it.
From their page:
"Languages and software

Nearly all of our code is written in Python, a wonderful and elegant language. We use Boto to access AWS from python. Our NLP algorithms get help from NLTK, WordNet, and SciPy. Most of our servers run Ubuntu Linux. Our API is built with Django and Apache Lucene."

Which makes me happy as I'm also using most of this stuff, and so now I know I'm on the right path.
Now if only I could get these guys to share some love...

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