August 2007
Aug. 17, 2007
A Change of Pace. David Recordon is heading back to Six Apart as Open Platforms Tech Lead, where it looks like he might get to work on social network portability.
Thoughts on the Social Graph. I think social network portability will happen within the next year.
Fixing GC issues on IE 6: New IE download. Microsoft have released Windows Script Host / Script Runtime version 5.7, which apparently cleans up a bunch of IE 6 memory leaks.
Aug. 18, 2007
Changeset 5925. You can now register custom commands for your application with Django’s manage.py script. More sensible than littering your application’s root directory with shell scripts.
The Python docs have been redesigned for 2.6. They’re beautiful. The docs for a module are on a single page now (rather than splitting over multiple pages), they’ve added unobtrusive permalinks to individual sections and the whole thing is built on ReST rather than LaTeX.
Group Membership Protocol Endpoint on LiveJournal. “All LiveJournal users and communities have their friend or member lists exposed via group membership protocol.”
Aug. 19, 2007
Django on the iPhone. Jacob got it working. The next image in his photostream shows the Django admin application querying his phone’s local database of calls.
A study of the Galaxy Song by Eric Idle. More than twenty years later, the science of the Galaxy Song from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life mostly still holds.
OpenID status update from Korea. Sounds like OpenID is making healthy progress there.
Has any customer in the history of DVR technology ever stepped up and said "you know, this DVR thing is terrific, but what I'd really prefer is to lose the ability to skip commercials so that I can satisfy the needs of businesses in every stage of the value chain?"
Aug. 20, 2007
Skype: What happened on August 16. Windows Update caused a massive global reboot, which destabilised Skype’s peer to peer network due to the flood of log-in requests.
BabelDjango. Tools for integrating Christopher Lenz’s Babel i18n framework with Django.
E-Voting Ballots Not Secret; Vendors Don’t See Problem. “You know things are bad when questions about a technical matter like security are answered by a public-relations firm.”
Bust A Name. Smart Ajax powered domain search; you give it some words, it shows you available combinations. It’s still almost impossible to find something that doesn’t suck though.
I've been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system - it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes.
Some thoughts on Mahalo. Rich Skrenta with notes on running a large site that lives and dies by SEO traffic.
BBC Olinda digital radio: Social hardware. Schulze and Webb made a social radio prototype for the BBC; the IPR will be under an attribution license so manufacturers can run with it without asking for permission first.
Aug. 21, 2007
An update on Google Video feedback. Google are now offering a real refund to everyone who bought a video, and are letting people keep the Google Checkout credit as well. Purchased videos will keep working for six months.
XRAY now works in IE. Westciv’s smart CSS debugging bookmarklet now works in IE 6.
H.264 support coming to the Flash player. It looks like this is a response to the higher video quality offered by Silverlight. I wonder if YouTube knew about this when they started transcoding their videos to H.264 for the Apple TV and iPhone.
Django and the iPhone tutorial. How to install SSH, Python and Django on your iPhone and get Django running against the call database. Less complicated than I expected.
In 1997, I chose to suppress a similar finding: users tend to click on banner ads that look like dialog boxes, complete with fake OK and Cancel buttons.
Aug. 22, 2007
Live Query jQuery plugin. Ingenious plugin that lets you register jQuery event bindings to be executed when a new element matching the provided selector is added to the DOM. Performance is kept snappy by only running the check after a jQuery DOM manipulation method has been executed (append, prepend, attr etc); it won’t notice elements added using regular DOM methods.
The Shrinking Python Web Framework World. Python used to suffer from a paradox of choice with regards to Web frameworks; today things are considerably easier for new developers.
The other interesting thing about the 1.0.2 update is that Apple didn't try to prevent the hacks that are out there [...] one would have assumed that Apple would have done something in this release as a sort of "shot across the bow" but they didn't, which bodes well for a future, more open platform.
Satchmo 0.5 Release. Django powered e-commerce application, “the webshop for perfectionists with deadlines”.
Aug. 23, 2007
Brad Neuberg’s Personal Research Agenda. Inspiring; lots of interesting problems to solve. I also liked the idea of moving to Thailand during a tech downturn and hacking on interesting projects while spending $200/month on living costs.
Aug. 24, 2007
Building a JavaScript Library. Slides from John Resig’s Google Tech Talk. Some great tips in here, including: make your APIs orthogonal, look for common patterns, keep things extensible and write the documentation yourself.
jQuery 1.1.4: Faster, More Tests, Ready for 1.2. The backwards compatibility policy for 1.2 is pretty clever: provide a plugin that restores removed functionality (such as XPath selectors).
BCS Oxfordshire: 2007/8 Programme. Need to get these in to Upcoming and tagged for oxfordgeeks.net.