A couple of years ago, one sweltering hot afternoon in Toronto I was visiting a friend, a long time internet entrepreneur named Richard.

Richard and I got to talking about our businesses and at one point he asked me how much I was charging for the product on my website. I gave him the figure, it was $4.95. He started laughing. "Double it!".

Over the past year and a bit I've been trying to really 'grok' the functional way of programming computers. I've been doing it the 'other' (imperative) way for over 30 years and I figured it's time for a change, not because I expect to become suddenly super productive but simply to keep life interesting. I also hope that it will change my perspective on programming. Think of this piece as an intermediary report, a postcard from a nice village in functional programming land.

Google has been around for a little over a decade now, and facebook a little over 6 years (tx jackowayed). Both of these companies have steady growth and seem to find a permanent spot in the lives of the people using them. I think it's fair to say that plenty of people can't imagine going through their (work) day without using a google product, either search, gmail, maps, news or youtube. Facebook has become the most successful social networking site ever.

The start-up from hell. True story.

That 'true story' is mandatory here, some of the stuff that you are about to read will sound so outrageous that you might think that this is a work of fiction. That, sadly, is not the case.

To protect the guilty I've changed some of the names, they arguably do not warrant such protection but I don't feel like fending off lawsuits.

A couple of years ago, when I was still firmly in the 'advertising is not a revenue model' camp I had a pretty heated discussion about what you could achieve with income sources like adsense.

I always was of the opinion that advertising should be treated like the icing on top of the cake, and that it never should be your primary source of income.

Web servers do their work by advancing a connection through several states.

The first thing that happens is that a new connection is 'accepted' from a client that wishes to connect to the server.

Then the server will be a delay until the client sends the request followed by the server reading the request from the client. Requests may span more than one read, so you may have to wait for a bit before the next part of the request becomes available, this is repeated until the request is complete.

Introduction

If you're reading this blog with some regularity and you're not a technology person, specifically a systems level programmer with a working knowledge of C and what goes on in the guts of webservers this may not be for you. If you're curious or you are part of that category by all means read on.

Apologies about the formatting of this post, I'm doing al this on a tiny little screen, I'll try to fix it.

I've been involved with the web pretty much since trumpet winsock was the way to connect your PC to the net and mosaic was the way to browse this new things called 'web pages'.

It didn't take long before someone asked me if I could make some software using a technology called CGI to process the data typed in to a form by a user.

Since then a lot has changed. CSS, javascript, java, javascript, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby and a whole pile of other technologies were still in the future at that point.

I'm no fan of Julian Assange, I think the way wikileaks has in recent times converted their ultra clean reputation in to a part of the propaganda machine was less than elegant and will hurt wikileaks in the long run.

BUT...

The concerted effort that is taking place to label wikileaks a threat to security, to suggest that wikileaks (and by extension Assange) have blood on their hands because of the leaking of documents that contain the names of Afghan informers is absolutely dishonest and you shouldn't fall for it.

I have something of a reputation for fixing obscure bugs. At some point in time you could probably call this a weird kind of hobby, the idea was that if you *really* had tried everything and you still didn't find your problem, that I would take a wager for a dinner, either I find and fix the bug and you buy me dinner or I buy you dinner. It was a fun thing to do.

Now, of course, simply the perspective of a clueless newbie that takes a fresh look at a problem will often times flush out a problem with relatively little effort (those were the easy ones).