Nicholas Piël

It has been some time now since the last posts, but I’ve been very busy with this new thing I am working on; about a year ago I started working on a new web-service named SiteSupport.
SiteSupport will solve the problems many website owners currently face:

It is impossible to view the stuff users do on your [...]

ZeroMQ is a messaging library, which allows you to design a complex communication system without much effort. It has been wrestling with how to effectively describe itself in the recent years. In the beginning it was introduced as ‘messaging middleware’ later they moved to ‘TCP on steroids’ and right now it is a ‘new layer [...]

It has been a while since the Socket Benchmark of Asynchronous server. That benchmark looked specifically at the raw socket performance of various frameworks, which was being benchmarked by doing a regular HTTP request against the TCP server. The server itself was dumb and did not actually understand the headers being send to [...]

There has already been written a lot on the C10K problem and it is known that the only viable option to handle LOTS of concurrent connections is to handle them asynchronously. This also shows that for massively concurrent problems, such as lots of parallel comet connections, the GIL in Python is a non-issue as we [...]

For my Msc thesis I have developed a system build in Python which does person recognition and have shown that it is possible to obtain a better recognition rate with this system than by using Google’s Picasa. I have put the source code online and will hereby announce that I will try my best to [...]

Now that the dust has somewhat settled after climategate, the consensus seems to be that it has been overblown. If you look at the timeline of events this isn’t surprising. Between the public appearance of the report and the first damning articles on the 20th there was less then a single day.  It is not that [...]

Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a method  to improve the performance of your website. Some of the reasons for using a CDN are:

Placing content geographically close to the end user and thus lowering latency and increasing bandwidth.
Increasing the amount of parallel downloads at the client by distributing over different domains
Offload the burden on [...]

Yes, “Hello world!” , the first default post on a Wordpress blog. After much consideration i decided to simply use the best piece of software there is for blogging purposes. Yeah, i know it is PHP code and not Python and trust me, i tried really hard to use some Python alternative and even started [...]