April 2007
April 10, 2007
factoryjoe: Design Patterns. Chris Messina’s collection of user interface design pattern screenshots, collated on Flickr.
April 11, 2007
Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid. Wilson Miner introduces a smart, methodical approach to well proportioned Web typography.
JSON and Browser Security. Douglas Crockford suggests using secret tokens to protect JSON content, and avoiding wrapper hacks to protect unauthorised JSON delivery as they may fall foul of undiscovered browser bugs in the future.
Soviet Military Maps History. “I have been researching the history of the Soviet global mapping project and, in particular, the large scale plans of British and Irish towns and cities produced from 1950s to 1990.”
Disabling keyboard controls in the Yahoo! Maps Ajax API. map.disableKeyControls() is the incantation—without it, the map will pan when you use the keyboard to scroll up and down the containing page.
Web Technologies for Opera Web Applications. A one page summary of the various standards and extensions supported by Opera.
April 12, 2007
San Diego, tell me more
You should totally go to Horton Plaza. It’s a shopping mall, but it’s also basically one big architectural joke. Everything is at funny angles, and stairs and ramps never take you where they think you will. I usually have no interest in visiting malls at all but I totally loved it.
[... 64 words]quakr. Uses Flickr machine tags to add tilt/pan/direction information to photos, then displays them in the correct orientation in a 3D Flash viewer. Presented at last night’s Oxford Geek Night.
Quakr 7d Tiltometer. How the Quakr team built their own seven dimensional metadata camera using sellotape, protractors and a ball of string.
Extending a WiFi network with two Macs and a FireWire cable
Last night’s Oxford Geek Night went really well, despite more than the usual flurry of problems. It’s definitely true that the more geeks there are in a room the less likely it is that the projector will work! Thankfully we got everything up and running in time for the talks to start, although it was a pretty close call.
[... 595 words]What the heck is HTML 5? Slides from my five minute HTML 5 talk at Oxford Geek Night 2.
None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise.
— Alex Payne, Twitter
We declined to participate in the XHTML2 Working Group because we think XHTML2 is not an appropriate technology for the web.
— Maciej Stachowiak, Apple
HTML5, XHTML2, and the Future of the Web. Covers similar topics to my talk, but in much more detail.
Quercus: PHP in Java (via) A “fast, open-source, 100% Java implementation of the PHP language”, built to run on top of Resin. Claims to be compatibly with MediaWiki, Drupal, Wordpress, Gallery2 and DocuWiki.
Discourse DB. A collaborative effort to collect the opinions of the world’s journalists and commentators about ongoing political events and issues, powered by Semantic MediaWiki so there’s metadata coming out of its ears.
April 13, 2007
So that was Oxford Geek Night 2. Nat’s writeup, including video of the local news coverage (in which I look like a total dork).
April 14, 2007
Harper’s Magazine (via) The site with the best metadata on the Web just relaunched, with even MORE metadata.
Rails and Scaling with Multiple Databases. Ryan Tomayko explains how his team spreads a high traffic Rails application across five separate PostgreSQL databases by giving each client their own schema—similar to how WordPress MU scales.
The promise [of J2EE] was that of infinite scalability based on tooling, which assumes that designing scalable systems is a general case problem. I now firmly believe that this is flawed reasoning. Frameworks don't solve scalability problems, design solves scalability problems.
In the big picture, Twitter did exactly the right thing. They had a good idea and they buckled down and focused on delivering something as cool as possible as fast as possible, and it's really hard, in early 2007, to beat Rails for that. When all of a sudden there were a few tens of thousands of people using it, then they went to work on the scaling.
— Tim Bray
modwsgi. Apache module (written in C) for hosting Python WSGI applications, no mod_python required. Includes Django integration instructions. Has anyone tried this out?
My "why move away from SGML?" reason is the way that every time I have to explain to someone that their Mozilla bug in invalid because HTML is actually an SGML application [...] I finish up by saying "if you want to see the actual spec that I've been told says that, you can buy a copy for 230 Swiss francs."
April 15, 2007
Fading Out Nofollows? Philipp Lenssen suggests automatically removing the nofollow from links in comments a few days after they have been posted, to allow administrators time to delete spam without penalising legitimate authors.
Most HTML templating languages are written incorrectly. “If you ever find yourself in the position of designing an html template language, please make the default behavior when including variables be to HTML-escape them.” I couldn’t agree more.
April 16, 2007
SoundManager 2. JavaScript sound API, using a bridge to Flash.
Google Reader Theme. Jon Hicks’ beautiful alternative skin for Google Reader, installable as a user stylesheet for various browsers.
April 17, 2007
MyOpenID relaunches. Now with a handsome redesign and support for SSL client certificates as a secure alternative to passwords.
Poll results: 50.4% of respondents maximise windows. Interesting graphs that break down browser window maximisation by operating system.
Fabjectory. 3D printing company that can print out your Second Life avatar or Nintendo Mii.