Sunday, 11th April 2010
What’s wrong with extending the DOM. Detailed explanation of the problems that crop up from extending built-in DOM objects using JavaScript, from Prototype developer kangax. Prototype 2.0 will be dropping this technique entirely—will MooTools follow suit? # 10:03 pm
jQuery UI: Trying to manipulate the position of a draggable mid-drag doesn’t seem to work. This has bitten me on two separate projects now—it’s the only problem I’ve had with jQuery UI’s draggables, which have otherwise been fantastic. # 9:59 pm
Of Building Blocks, Rosetta Stones and Geographic Identifiers. Yahoo! GeoPlanet is now mapped to identifiers from other gazetteers such as GeoNames, FIPS and IATA—and those identifiers are available via the GeoPlanet API. # 9:53 pm
twitter’s gizzard (via) Intriguing new open source project from Twitter. Gizzard is a sharding framework which provides a network service for partitioning data across arbitrary backend datastores, managing its own forwarding table to map key ranges to partitions and adding support for tree-based replication. # 9:39 pm
WildlifeNearYou talk at £5 app, and being Wired (not Tired)
Two quick updates about WildlifeNearYou. First up, I gave a talk about the site at £5 app, my favourite Brighton evening event which celebrates side projects and the joy of Making Stuff. I talked about the site’s genesis on a fort, crowdsourcing photo ratings, how we use Freebase and DBpedia and how integrating with Flickr’s machine tags gave us a powerful location API for free. Here’s the video of the talk, courtesy of Ian Oszvald:
[... 171 words]RFC5785: Defining Well-Known Uniform Resource Identifiers (via) Sounds like a very good idea to me: defining a common prefix of /.well-known/ for well-known URLs (common metadata like robots.txt) and establishing a registry for all such files. OAuth, OpenID and other decentralised identity systems can all benefit from this. # 7:32 pm
This is an outrage. Phil Gyford’s reaction to the reaction to the Digital Economy Bill. Ends on a positive note hoping that the online furor will result in more technology-minded people paying more attention to the UK political process. # 7:25 pm
Introduction to Surlex. A neat drop-in alternative for Django’s regular expression based URL parsing, providing simpler syntax for common path patterns. # 7:23 pm
“... the interchange format needed to be able to support future Flash Player features, which would not necessarily map to SVG features. As such, the decision was made to go with a new interchange format, FXG, instead of having a non-standard implementation of SVG. FXG does borrow from SVG whenever possible.”
— FXG 1.0 Specification # 6:58 pm
Flash CS5 will export to HTML5 Canvas. This looks pretty awesome—Illustrator CS5 and Flash CS5 can export to a new “FXG” format, and Adobe are providing a JavaScript library to load that format via Ajax and render the contents (including Flash animations) in a canvas element. Could be great for displaying newspaper infographics on the iPad. # 6:33 pm
Copyright is hard. Dan Catt spots Adam Liversage (Director of Communications for the BPI, and hence right in the middle of the DEBill) suggesting his wife violate copyright on Twitter. # 2:26 pm