November 2003
Nov. 23, 2003
Python Natural Language Toolkit (via) Yet another reason Python at University is a great idea
Numerical Python. Some day I really ought to get this installed and figure it out
UserModeLinux—Educational Technology Wiki (via) Includes a list of cheap UML hosts—$15/month for a virtual dedicated server
Rekall press release (via) Open source alternative to Access
Jonathan Caves: Adventures in Visual C (via) Who’d have thought Microsoft would have all the best in-house bloggers?
Nov. 24, 2003
System Failure and Recovery Practice (via) rm -rf / in a sandbox
Blogmarks
This entry was going to be another list of links, together with a note about how much I really needed to set up a separate link blog. Then I realised that it would make more sense just to set one up so that’s exactly what I’ve done. I still need to implement the archive but it’s getting dark so I’m posting this and heading home.
[... 211 words]Snarls of defiance. Great rant about commercial programming and boring suit friendly technology
User Interface Design for Web Applications. I haven’t read it yet, but I liked the title
Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards (via) Slashdot is a great learning exercise for practising CSS
Visualizing Complexity. I need to get over my irrational fear of diagrams
Microsoft Inductive User Interface Guidelines (via) Lessons learnt from web applications?
Open Source Everywhere (via) Software is just the beginning
Why ALA’s “JavaScript Image Replacement” Sucks. Some useful Javascript tips amongst the vitriol
Clive Soley MP (via) Another blogging MP—this one’s Labour MP for Ealing Acton & Shepherds Bush
Amazon.com: Number Ones (via) More Amazon recommendation humour
Stream of Consciousness (via) An interpretation of the creative process. With a cute cat.
Slashdot trolling phenomena. Natalie Portman, naked and petrified with hot grits
Nov. 25, 2003
How Regexes Work (via) They’re just simplified syntax for constructing a state machine
Collaborative Redesign
Out with the orange, in with the green. As with my last redesign, only the CSS changed. A fun deviation with this one was that it was a collaboration between myself and Natalie over nearly 5,000 miles, using edit styles and AIM to pass each other snippets of CSS and instantly try them out.
[... 123 words]PostgreSQL 7.4
Last week’s release of PostgreSQL 7.4 made a great open source project even better—it even managed to impress hard-core MySQL advocate Jeremy Zawodny. The detailed release notes show that most of the improvements were with regards to performance, but the thing that really caught my eye was tsearch2, the new full text indexing suite. A bit of digging brought up the CVS tree for the new module, which in turn lead me to this tutorial style overview of its capabilities.
[... 132 words]Colour tools. A roundup of tools that help create colour schemes.
Unix “find” command mini-tutorial. The most useful thing I’ve learnt all week
XHTML and Accessibility in ASP.NET Whidbey (via) A definite improvement, but __VIEWSTATE still gives me the willies
Nov. 26, 2003
Creating an SVG Wiki (via) If only the Mozilla SVG project would produce the goods
Feed you
Wow, that’s what I call feedback! It’s a shame pretty much everyone hates the new design but I like it so it stays. I’ve taken a few tips though and tweaked the link colours a bit, as well as making a few other small changes such as a darker green for the header and a 1em margin around the page.
[... 129 words]Discovering Berkeley DB
I’m working on a project at the moment which involves exporting a whole bunch of data out of an existing system. The system is written in Perl and uses Berkeley DB files for most of its storage.
[... 339 words]Python Bindings for BerkeleyDB 3.x. More Berkeley DB goodness
DB_File. Perl5 access to Berkeley DB
cleaning up html snippets. Another way of fixing dubious HTML with Python