January 2007
Jan. 7, 2007
More home improvements
I’ve had an offline Christmas, not entirely through choice (broadband at my Dad’s new place in rural France isn’t working yet) but welcome. I did have my laptop with me, and I’m using Bazaar for version control so being offline isn’t a barrier to checking in code. I’ve just rolled out a bunch of new features that I put together over the past few days.
[... 514 words]DjangoID. Django-based OpenID server for hosting your own (or someone else’s) identity.
Groovy 1.0 is done. They finally got to 1.0!
Browser Cache Usage—Exposed! Includes real numbers for browser cache usage on some of Yahoo!’s most popular pages.
OpenID for non-SuperUsers. Sam Ruby explains the key concepts of OpenID that many first-time users tend to miss.
Why don't we have a .bank or .bank.country_code TLD that's regulated by the same people that regulate the banks themselves?
The Dojo Offline Toolkit. The Dojo Offline Toolkit will be a small, cross-platform, generic download that enables web applications to work offline.
Writing a Jokosher extension. I like the way API calls are made through an API object passed to the extension’s startup function.
MoneySavingExpert. Don’t let the cheesy design fool you; this site actually has some really useful (apparently trustworthy) UK personal finance advice.
The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it because you're coming from digg.com and the proprieter of this system is frankly terrified by you people.
ephemeral profiles (cuz losing passwords is common amongst teens). Lost your password? Create a new profile; you had too many friends you didn’t know anyway.
Jan. 8, 2007
Why doesn’t Python have more data format readers in the stdlib? I for one would love to see simplejson included in the standard library, with or without a C implementation.
supervisor2. I haven’t tried this yet, but looks like a decent process monitoring tool. It even has an XML-RPC interface.
rathergood.com toys. Ninja and Viking kittens, a Blode and even a Spongmonkey!
rathergood Plush Toys product demos. The ones that weren’t eventually manufactured include a Rock Otter and a Northern Kitten.
If your average iPod weighs five ounces with packaging, then Apple has moved about 21,875,000 pounds of them, equivalent in weight to 1,325 full-grown male African elephants, 35 times as many as Hannibal's force.
Buggy Saints Row: The Musical. An inspired musical piss-take from Cabel Sasser.
mimeparse.py (via) Parsing mime-types is harder than you might think.
The Second Life Viewer is now open-source (via) I’d heard that the biggest barrier to this was the need to protect the SL economy from malicious disruption. The FAQ is fascinating, and a real tribute to open-source principles.
With this much storage, you can imagine filesystems in which files are never deleted and files are never rewritten. The filesystem never forgets. Such systems could be much more reliable than the systems we use today which are based on the assumption that storage is a constrained resource.
If you are subject to an XSS, the same domain policy already ensures that you're f'd. An XSS attack is the "root" or "ring 0" attack of the web.
Apple’s Next-Generation Themes. Cabel’s spotted an Apple patent with screenshots of their in-house tool for creating resolution independent user interface themes.
Jan. 9, 2007
Guide to the Dabble DB Plugin API (via) This is really nice—Dabble POSTs your plugin script a bunch of CSV values, your script returns CSV for the derived fields. Doesn’t seem to state which flavour of CSV though.
Shelves in Subversion (via) Useful revision control concept that I haven’t seen before.
A Semantic Solution for Presenting NSFW Content. It’s basically a NSFW microformat.
OpenID Questions. I’ve attempted to provide answers in the comments.
IE JScript Performance Recommendations Part 3. Once again, Microsoft’s official advice is to avoid closures entirely rather than learn how to use them safely. Sigh.
macrumorslive.com. The MacRumors ajax keynote coverage gets better every time—now they have live photos in addition to the text updates. Simple but effective.
AirPort Extreme. New today, but didn’t make the keynote. You can plug a USB hard drive in to it and access it over the network.
Jan. 10, 2007
Microsoft Breaks HTML Email Rendering in Outlook 2007. They’ve dropped the IE renderer and replaced it with... Microsoft Word! No CSS background images, no floats, no CSS positioning, no forms. Wow.