January 2004
Jan. 17, 2004
Goatse.cx taken offline. I used to use it to scare people out of my room at Uni when I wanted to geek in solitude
Jan. 19, 2004
Yahoo! Research Labs (via) I wonder where they got this idea from...
Anil Dash: Microsoft *nix. What if Microsoft shipped “Linux for Windows”?
Jan. 20, 2004
Graphics from the command line (via) Tutorial for ImageMagick’s command line tools
64 bit immediates in Python. Low level language geekery
New Technorati Infrastructure beta test! (via) It certainly feels faster
non-consensual http user tracking using caches. Interesting security issue involving HTTP caching headers
Jan. 21, 2004
Moveable Type now kills PageRank on comment links
This is pretty cool: Moveable Type 2.661 is out and includes a whole bunch of comment spam fighting features, including one inspired by my own anti-spam measure of disabling PageRank on links from comments by sending them through a redirect. This is great news for me as the redirect acts as a deterrent, and deterrents are only worthwhile if people know about them in the first place. With the most popular blogging system (at least amongst comment spammers) now featuring the same deterrent hopefully SEO spammers will start to get the message.
Beware of Strangers. Neat anti-comment spam idea: watch out for IP addresses that have never visted your site before
Netcat 1.10 Readme. Ultra useful command-line networking tool
Jan. 22, 2004
Defending web applications against dictionary attacks
Over at Reflective Surface, Ronaldo M. Ferraz discusses the usability of an authentication system that locks down an account for a certain period of time after three failed login attempts. Ronaldo sees this as a trade off between usability and security, but I see it more as an added security issue in that it allows malicious third parties to lock other user’s accounts armed only with their username.
[... 398 words]NAA Digital Edge Winners Announced. We won best entertainment site for Lawrence.com :)
When Word-to-XML conversion gets nasty. “it is impossible to automatically convert unstructured sources into structured formats”
integrating javascript into stylesheets (via) It’s a shame this trick doesn’t appear to work in user stylesheets
Bring Me Your Regexs! I Will Create HTML To Break Them! “Parsing HTML is a solved problem. Use a library.”
CSS Hacks—HTML-only Filters Summary. Hiding CSS using HTML filters
10 reasons why RSS is not ready for prime time. The title says it all
Primate Photo Gallery. Pictures of monkeys. I like monkeys.
Jan. 23, 2004
Simple tricks for more usable forms
My second article for SitePoint has been published: Simple tricks for more usable forms. It examines a whole bunch of CSS and Javascript tricks for improving the usability of web based forms without impairing their accessibility to clients that don’t support those technologies. The article has already had some useful feedback on the forums, including the valuable observation that auto-selecting the contents of a form field when it receives the focus can have a negative effect on the usability of Unix browsers, where mouse buttons are frequently used for coping and pasting.
My Yahoo! RSS Beta Launched. The “adaptive polling cycle” on the crawler sounds like fun
MySQL tips. Rob Hudson’s tips on MySQL paging and vertical result sets
Countries I have visited (via) I really want to visit South America some time
What are the differences between a vocabulary, a taxonomy, a thesaurus, an ontology, and a meta-model? IA definitions++
pythonmac.org (via) Mac OS X Python Resources
Python, Readline, and Mac OS X. Includes an awesome Panther one-liner to install readline support
Edward Tufte: Ask E.T. forum. Great forum for information design
Simple thread pools. Writing threaded Python apps using workers and queues
An Introduction to the Twisted Networking Framework [Jan. 15, 2004] (via) Yet Another Twisted Article
Jan. 26, 2004
cool-2b-real hacked? “Stranger ownZ you”
Ned Batchelder: handyxml. Yet another XML object wrapper for Python, this time with full DOM method support included