Irrelephant blog.

Third-party cookies behavior in different browsers

It seems like browsers have different policies regarding how to block third-party cookies. Firefox and Opera block embedded scripts from both writing and reading those cookies while Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer block only writing. In those browsers, if a cookie was set as a first-party (i.e. user explicitly visited the page that sets this cookie), embedded script still has access to it, but it is read-only.

Below is information for those interested in details of my test environment.

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Making Disqus faster

Hello. I am Anton Kovalyov, I work as a software engineer here at Disqus and this blog post is about one project I was working on. It extracts all the static parts out of our embeddable code which makes our widget much faster than it is now. We are still testing this update but you already can try it out. For more details on the project and how to enable it for your website, continue reading.

It has been a little more than two years since Disqus was launched and today we have hundreds of thousands websites and millions of commenters using the service. During this time, we were constantly upgrading our infrastructure to handle this growth. But eventually we arrived at the point in which we had to revisit our initial approach to serving our client-side JavaScript code.

Continue on Disqus blog.

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Another way to restore built-in method in Chrome/Safari

A short follow-up to this post. Apparently, both Chrome and Safari restore built-in method if you try to delete it from the prototype. In other words:

Array.prototype.map = null;
[].map
> null

delete Array.prototype.map
[].map
> function map() { [native code] }

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Media Attachments

About a week ago we pushed my media attachments feature and yesterday we officially announced it. Media Attachments was a feature I wanted to do since my day one at Disqus. I really like when system is smart enough to extract links to images and videos and present them nicely. It is simple, there is no need for additional buttons. If you want to share an image or a video—just put a link inside your comment and press the button.

Media Attachments is also a very flexible feature: we will support more services (photos, videos and others) soon.

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Wired’s Hide and Seek

So I read this article about an attempt of one air force analyst to sell secrets to Iraq and China and there author claims that two puzzles created by Regan (the spy in question) were sent to the National Security Agency, where cryptanalysts spent hundreds of hours without any result. Then, they found some other guy that cracked the first code and apparently it was enciphered with Caesar’s shift.

Now, are they telling me that NSA cryptanalysts failed to break Caesar’s code? Because I can hardly believe in that.

KHUH LV D ZHE SDJH ZKHUH BRX FDQ SODB ZLWK WKLV FLSKHU: FDHVDU VKLIW FLSKHU.

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Brewer’s CAP Theorem

Brewer’s Theorem is pretty neat. It essentially states that you cannot have a clustered system that supports consistency, availability and partition-tolerance at the same time. So, if you want to build a nice clustered system you have to stop partitions from happening, or accept the fact that from time to time affected services will either be unavailable or inconsistent.

Eric Brewer presented this theorem in 2000 and two years later it was proved to be correct by Seth Gilbert and Nancy Lynch of MIT.

I was introduced to this theorem through a pretty good article by Julian Browne: Brewer’s CAP Theorem. Also, there is another interesting article—A CAP Solution (Proving Brewer Wrong)—in which author claims that consistency, availability and partition-tolerance is possible if we loosen the at the same time condition.

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