December 2004
Dec. 1, 2004
Ten Most Wanted Design Bugs. My favourite is unexplained greyed-out menu items.
Python 2.4. Woohoo! It’s been released.
Building a Metadata-Based Website. Meta-food for thought.
Optimizing JavaScript for Execution Speed (via) Performance tips from Andy King
HTACCESS Wrappers with PHP (via) Perform magic.
Could it be any uglier? The new AOL/Netscape browser (based on Firefox) looks, well, horrible.
First Look at Firefox-Based Netscape. Interestingly enough, there’s a “display like IE” option.
The virtues of XML-RPC (via) Brent Simmons advocates.
Writing serious Perl: The absolute minimum you need to know. Pleasantly concise introduction to Perl packages and classes.
Dec. 2, 2004
Blogmarks on del.icio.us
I’m horribly ill again: having defeated the mumps I now seem to have come down with some kind of ’flu thing. Lovely. In between whinging about my state of health and watching episodes of Frasier I’ve been playing with del.icio.us as part of my research in to web annotation. The connection between the two isn’t particularly strong but it’s clear that something very exciting is happening over there.
[... 276 words]Dec. 3, 2004
Casting out getters and setters
Python Is Not Java by Phillip J. Eby (via Ned) is the most useful article on programming I’ve read in ages. If you have any interest at all in either language, go and read it. It’s all good, but the part that really struck a nerve for me was this:
[... 221 words]The Homosexual Agenda (via) Leaked at last.
’We will be able to live to 1,000’. Sign me up :)
Dec. 7, 2004
Game Studies (via) “... a crossdisciplinary journal dedicated to games research ...”
Spyware on My Machine? So What? (via) Utterly depressing review of attitudes to spyware.
Dec. 8, 2004
Cartoon Skeletal Systems. Creepy :)
Dec. 9, 2004
Dynamic Java. What happens when leaders from Java, Python, Perl, Parrot, Jython and Groovy get together in one room.
Dec. 10, 2004
Auto complete comes of age. My take on Google Suggest.
Google Suggest (via) Google with auto-complete. XMLHttpRequest magic.
Dec. 13, 2004
Mozilla aims for mobile browser market (via) Minimo project targets phones, PDAs and TV set top boxes.
MT Plus Comment Spam Equals Dead Site (via) I had no idea MT comment spam was such a performance hit.
Dec. 14, 2004
Google Print
I’m probably late to the party on this one, but I just noticed that Google Print results are now included in any Google search that starts with “books on”. I can’t say I like the lousy discoverability of the interface much—a search box at print.google.com would be a welcome addition—but the results are pretty impressive. It’s also a shame that they’re using a nasty obfuscation technique to disable copying and printing (based on serving book pages up as background images), if only because it will fuel yet more questions from newbie web developers asking how to do exactly that. Still, with today’s announcement that Google are to team up with five leading libraries to scan more books this service is going to get a whole lot more important over the next few years.
Dec. 16, 2004
Dec. 23, 2004
Some notes on Wikipedia
I’ve been driving myself crazy with coursework over the past couple of weeks, and since it’s always good to have something to take your mind off things I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time lurking around the beautiful Wikipedia. Here are a few things about Wikipedia you may have missed:
[... 509 words]iTunes Producer Patent. Screenshots of Apple’s iTunes Producer internal application, snarfed from a patent filing.
Web Application Component Toolkit—Template View. A summary of various approaches to HTML templating.
Modifying Stickies. Using Interface Builder to “mod” existing applications!
Linux Clustering with Ruby Queue: Small Is Beautiful. Scripting distributed computing tasks with Ruby.
xmlhttprequest.cpp. The source code for Safari’s XMLHttpRequest implementation; for the curious.
Python Grimoire. How to perform common tasks in Python.