Simon Willison’s Weblog

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August 2007

Aug. 25, 2007

At one point I thought I hated programming because I was just so sick it... It turns out I don't hate programming, I just hate programming in Java.

Russell Beattie

# 1:09 am / java, russell-beattie

Why the Alt Attribute May Be Omitted. “The benefit of requiring the alt attribute to be omitted, rather than simply requiring the empty value, is that it makes a clear distinction between an image that has no alternate text (such as an iconic or graphical representation of the surrounding text) and an image that is a critical part of the content, but for which not alt text is available.”

# 1:11 pm / accessibility, html, html5, whatwg, alt-attribute

A Django Cache Status. Django view to display stats pulled from your memcached server.

# 2:08 pm / memcached, django, fredrik-lundh

Aug. 29, 2007

Google Web Toolkit: Towards a better web. Good overview of why GWT exists, but I take exception to the title: requiring JavaScript to even display something does not make the web “better”.

# 8:21 pm / javascript, google, gwt

The biggest mistake I made in Leonardo was making "foo" and "foo/" mean the same thing.

James Tauber

# 8:52 pm / urls, james-tauber

Aug. 30, 2007

Thoughts on (and pics of) the original Macintosh User Manual. “[I] was struck by how it had to explain a total paradigm shift in interacting with computers”.

# 5:32 am / mac, peter-merholtz, documentation

Long pages work. And thanks to Pay Per Click advertising, splitting an article over multiple pages to get more ad impressions doesn’t make sense any more.

# 12:40 pm / peter-van-dijck, information-architecture, payperclick

Ganeti (via) New from Google (developed in the Zurich office): virtual server management tool designed to “facilitate cluster management”, built on top of Xen.

# 9:51 pm / google, virtualisation, xen, ganeti

XFML (via) Throwing the new home for the XFML specification some Google juice; the domain name got nabbed by a squatter.

# 10:27 pm / xfml, information-architecture, peter-van-dijck, google

Aug. 31, 2007

They promised us jetpacks, too. Ben Hammersley points out that the recent flying car story has done the rounds many times before. I’m sure I remember it from my childhood.

# 10:28 am / flyingcar, ben-hammersley, moller

A meeting must fight to exist. It must defend its existence to its attendees who should constantly be asking "Why are we here?"

Rands

# 5:50 pm / meetings, rands

Python 3.0a1 released. Wow, that was a pretty fast turnaround. Betas are planned for 2008, with a final release scheduled for August.

# 8:36 pm / python3, python

Webistrano. Web based interface for managing Capistrano deployments. Cal recommends having a “deploy to live site” button in his book; this looks like an easy way to build that.

# 11:05 pm / webistrano, deployment, calhenderson, capistrano

2007 » August

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