robmil

But yeah, it just got a bit painful after a while.

For wider reading on the region, I thoroughly enjoyed Oliver Bollough's "Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus", a nice blend of travelogue and history from the journalist who was Reuters' correspondent in the caucasus throughout the late 90s and early 2000s.

You can track and checkout a remote branch in just one command:

    git checkout -t origin/foo

    git checkout foo
    git rebase master

And thanks: I've been nursing some of their damson vodka over Christmas and it's excellent stuff!

[1]: http://www.crazyegg.com/

  git checkout -t origin/branch-name

Push and track a branch at the same time:

  git push -u origin foo

  git merge --no-ff foo

  git status -sb

  --abbrev-commit

  --color-words

  --decorate

"Most marketing in the technology world is in the form of lies, to be impolite, even when the data is accurate. A device is revolutionary and will transform the world, and your old way of working will be replaced, and so forth. That is rarely, if ever, true, even with truly revolutionary hardware."

The headlines' noun-heavy wording also helped spawn the concept of "crash blossoms" — syntactically ambiguous headlines that had amusing alternate readings: http://www.crashblossoms.com/

Not sure if/why Requests is any better, but it certainly seems to have better documentation which is reason enough to use it I suppose!

How do you mitigate the fact that it will take an awful lot of time, though? Just by appealing to the idea that it will save time in the future?

This is the biggest hurdle to overcome, in my experience. A custom data format is typically essential (most location databases arrive as CSVs or XML, which are useless for real-time querying), but imports can take forever.

It's sometimes, counterintuitively, been more worthwhile to concentrate on the performance of importing than of querying; the out-of-the-box query performance you get with (no)SQL often isn't terrible, but your import script usually starts out pretty awful.

Peter Westwood gave a talk on WP.com's infrastructure in London in January; I've tried to find slides online but I can't, which is a shame because he went into quite a bit of detail about their nginx/HyperDB/memcached/mogileFS setup.