February 2007
Feb. 1, 2007
nose. Really nice Python unit testing tool—run ’nosetests somedir’ and it finds and executes every unittest (and test_like function) it can find in that directory tree.
At some point in the past rolling out an application to 300,000 people was the pinnacle of engineering excellence. Today it means you passed your second round of funding and can move out of your parents garage.
Jeff Croft: Geocoding My Life. Really smart weblog integration of the Flickr API, using the Geocoder.us reverse geocoder along with hand entered locations to create a browseable archive of photos by location.
iConcertCal (via) “iConcertCal is a free iTunes plug-in that monitors your music library and generates a personalized calendar of upcoming concerts in your city.”
Microsoft confirms Vista Speech Recognition remote execution flaw. “I have verified that I can create a sound file that can wake Vista speech recognition, open Windows Explorer, delete the documents folder, and then empty the trash.”
Feb. 2, 2007
Linux Genuine Advantage. As with all the best parodies, this one ships with source code.
Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.
Digg to drop their global “top users” list. It’s fascinating how big an effect a simple feature like a top users list can have on the social behaviour of a site.
Feb. 4, 2007
skipdb (via) Small, fast BerkeleyDB style database using skip lists, by the creator of the Io programming language.
Why you should be using disambiguated URLs
Good URLs are important. The best URLs are readable, reliable and hackable.
[... 553 words]www. is deprecated. I wouldn’t go as far to say avoid www—just as long as you pick one and redirect the other.
Identifrac (via) Beautiful twist on identicons: use the IP address / other input data as the seed for a fractal.
Adam Vandenberg on disambiguated URLs. He was fighting for cache-friendly URLs at Encarta Online way back in 1998.
IronPython URLs. Mark Rees’ and Seo Sanghyeon’s collection of interesting URLs posted to the IronPython mailing list.
MySpace superworm creator sentenced to probation, community service (via) samy is still my hero.
If you found a hole in software that millions of people use, and is very high profile, you can sell that to the highest bidder for perhaps one or two million dollars.
Linus Torvalds: Super Kernel Sunday! Linux kernel version 2.6.20 is out, and includes virtualization thanks to KVM.
As ICD head analyst Walter Dickweed put it: "Releasing a new kernel on Superbowl Sunday means that the important 'pasty white nerd' constituency finally has something to do while the rest of the country sits comatose in front of their 65" plasma screens".
Feb. 5, 2007
A brief update with some numbers for hardware load-balanced mongrels. 4000 requests/second on 48 mongrels behind a hardware load balancer.
This site may harm your computer. Tom Dyson’s personal weblog was flagged by Google as hosting malicious software, without any clue as to what the problem was. Sure looks like a false positive to me.
SMTP Service Extension for Yadis Discovery. Could potentially let you use your e-mail address as an OpenID, although personally I wouldn’t always want to hand my address over to third-party sites.
The window.onload problem (still). Peter Michaux offers the most comprehensive overview of this important topic to date.
Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us. Absolutely worth watching—don’t be put off by the title.
Feb. 6, 2007
There's an unfortunate side-effect to altogether eliminating the sub-domain name from your site URLs [...] Every cookie you may want to set for that site will automatically "bleed" down to all sub-domain-based websites you might want to add later.
Running the DRM Gauntlet. DRM war stories from the Songbird team. Windows Media and QuickTime both block debuggers in different ways.
Live DOM Viewer (via) Neat tool from Hixie that provides an insight in to what browsers are actually thinking.
Em Calculator. Tool for working out CSS relative em values, useful for creating completely resizable layouts.
Feb. 7, 2007
Microsoft & OpenID. HUGE news. Microsoft are officially supporting OpenID, through integration with CardSpace.
CardSpace & OpenID: Working together. A more detailed explanation of what the Microsoft OpenID collaboration actually means.
Thoughts on Music. Steve Jobs comes out against DRM, lays the blame squarely on the big four music companies.