December 2003
Dec. 16, 2003
Just in time instantiation (via) Python trick for proxying object instantiation
Joel on Eric
Joel Spolsky’s latest essay reviews Eric Raymond’s The Art of Unix Programming (a book I really want to pick up) and uses it as background for a discussion of the cultural differences between Windows and Unix programmers. As always, it’s an insightful piece.
[... 197 words]PECL :: Package :: tidy (via) Tidy for PHP; repairs busted HTML and lets you traverse the DOM as well
More CSS trickery
Stu Nicholls dropped me a line earlier to pimp his new CSS demo site, www.s7u.co.uk. He’s got some really nice tricks and the site warrants serious exploration. There’s a good take on the classic 3 column layout with header and footer problem, a bunch of neat menus and a bunch of fun demos that defy categorisation.
Getting open source into public libraries. OpenOffice.org now available in most Scottish libraries
Napster: The Cat is Cool. Amazingly, it doesn’t completely suck!
RELAX NG now an ISO standard
Via James Robertson, RELAX NG (altogether too many caps) has been published by ISO as an International Standard. RELAX NG compact syntax is will hopefully join it soon.
[... 149 words]Avoid Santa Claus approach to content management: December 15, 2003 issue of New Thinking by Gerry McGovern (via) “A portal is a website that costs you four times more.”
Apples and pears. How to get two types of apple from one tree
About Google Print (BETA) (via) Google’s take on “search inside the book”
Dec. 17, 2003
Innapropriate Abstractions. Anders Hejlsberg + Bill Venners + Bruce Eckel = fascinating conversation
Winamp 5. Winamp 2 + Winamp 3 + Winamp 5
BitTorrent and RSS. Maybe RSS can scale after all
Color scheme. Awesome colour scheme helper tool from pixy
Microsoft Security FAQ (via) Point your less technical friends here
CSS, Accesibility and Standards Links (via) Great selection of links, nicely formatted
Q+A—Edward Tufte (via) “There are many true statements about complex topics that are too long to fit on a PowerPoint slide.”
Blaster and the great blackout (via) Bruce Schneier writes for Salon.com
2004 Digital Edge Awards Finalists. We’re up for 5 different awards!
Web Page Development: Best Practices (via) Sound advice too
PostScript control structures. PostScript is a full on stack-based programming language
404 ERROR—Ultrashock.com (via) Usability error starring Jakob Nielsen
Google Search: programming language. Python, then Perl, then Java
Dec. 18, 2003
Turn On Search. Tim Bray’s open source search engine call to arms
Freshmeat’s XML-RPC interface. API documentation
Google gets digital toilets (via) Imagine what they’ll be buying after the IPO
The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed (via) Shirky compares file sharing to prohibition
Dec. 19, 2003
Restoration Software (via) Digitally restoring films with Macs
“Not for use until guilty verdict” (via) The impartial BBC
Open Mosix
I can’t remember how I stumbled across it, but Open Mosix looks like a really interesting project. It’s a Linux kernel extension that makes creating a Linux cluster is as simple as installing a kernel module on a number of machines and supplying each one with a shared config file.
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