Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Friday, 5th December 2003

Simpler content managment

Perls of wisdom in a sea of site mismanagement, via the ever-excellent Column Two:

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New PHP community site

Via The Farm, Chris Shiflett is calling for assistance in setting up a new PHP community site to run along similar lines to use Perl. Chris has already secured an offer of hosting and support from O’Reilly and is now seeking offers of help from potential contributers. PHP has long needed a site of this kind (PHP Builder has lost a lot of momentum since being sold by Tim Perdue) so this could be a worth while project to get involved with if you have the time.

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Bounty Hunting

Via Jeremy Hylton, Mark Shuttleworth (super-rich geek and space tourist) is offering $100,000 worth of bounties in 2004 to developers willing to help out with a number of Open Source projects, most of which are to be developed in Python. A comparison can be made here with Mitch Kapor, another geek-done-well who funds open source development through his sponsorship of the Open Source Applications Foundation.

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Antilog. Interactive querying of HTTP log files, via Python

# 4:21 am

Simon Willison done different. An attractive redesign suggestion

# 4:26 am

The Fabled “Five Eights” of J2EE Availability (via) J2EE complexity leads to poor stability

# 10 pm

Silly JavaScript Security. “Sorry, you do not have permission to press this key,”

# 10:42 pm / javascript, security

How not to use OOP

Via Hans Nowak, Understanding Object Oriented Programming, or how to turn 19 lines of easily maintained code in to an OO monstrosity spanning 7 class files. This is not the way to make code more maintainable. For comparison, here’s how I would implement a solution to the same problem in Python, assuming the availability of an equivalent function to Java’s System.getProperty("os.name") (os.name is similar but inappropriate for this example):

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Ulli’s Roy Orbison in Cling-film site. Marvellous, particularly the bits about the terrapin

# 11:55 pm