July 2007
July 14, 2007
Pibb Sign in page. Nice demonstration of an easier OpenID sign in page—lets you sign in with an AIM screenname or LiveJournal username instead (which uses OpenID under the hood).
YouTube Scalability Talk. Kyle Cordes’ notes on a Google Tech Talk on scaling YouTube by Cuong Do.
July 15, 2007
A great two years. The first public release of Django was tagged in Subversion two years ago today.
Lithuania 2007 set on a Map. Nat has painstakingly geotagged 285 photos from our trip to Lithuania.
July 16, 2007
lwqueue. Lightweight cross-language message queue system, written in Perl with client libraries in Perl, Python and Ruby.
Die, Marker Felt, Die! How to replace Marker Felt in the iPhone notes application with Helvetica, via some hackery with jailbreak, MacFUSE and iphonedisk. By the time they arrive in the UK it looks like they’ll have been hacked wide open.
About Us (The Open Library). I’m a complete sucker for massively ambitious “make the world a better place” projects. Let’s hope this one has legs.
July 17, 2007
Python Tuples are Not Just Constant Lists. “The index in a tuple has an implied semantic”.
Low Pro Behaviours 101. A neatly packaged method of enhancing an existing DOM element with pre-packaged behaviours.
ThingDB. Another extensible key/value pair data store, constructed for the Open Library based on Aaron Swartz’s Infogami technology.
Understanding Engineers: Feasibility. Charles Miller provides smart definitions of what programmers mean when they say “impossible”, “trivial”, “unfeasible”, “non-trivial”, “hard” and “very hard”.
Never use a warning when you mean undo. The abundance of “undo” is one of my favourite things about Gmail. I wonder if there’s anything Django could do to make implementing undo functionality easier...
Made in China. Bunnie Huang’s fascinating series on manufacturing in China, based on his experience with Chumby.
Just what web server should be sitting in front of my Rails application? Includes some interesting notes about Varnish, PHK’s high performance, highly configurable front-end caching server (essentially a much more modern version of Squid).
A look back: Bram Cohen vs Linus Torvalds. Makes the case that Git has proved Linus Torvald correct on every point of his infamous debate with Bram Cohen back in 2005.
Conflicting Absolute Positions. Neat technique, although it uses CSS expressions for IE compatibility so it may break down in IE 5 and 6 when JavaScript is disabled.
How Top Bloggers Earn Money. Interesting numbers on BoingBoing, I can has Cheezburger, TechCrunch and more.
July 18, 2007
19 Eponymous Laws Of Software Development. I normally loathe anything that’s bundled up as a numbered list, but this one is actually really useful.
Does the idea of redefining the role of the Internet browser appeal to you? Do the terms HTTP, RSS, Microformats, and OpenID, excite you? If so, then this just might be the opportunity for you.
CSRF Redirector. Smart tool for testing CSRF vulnerabilities, by Chris Shiflett.
A Recipe for OpenID-Enabling Your Site. Detailed guide to setting your site up as an OpenID consumer from Plaxo, who just launched their OpenID implementation. It basically describes the design I’m using for the next release of django-openid.
July 19, 2007
Every mashup attempts to expand until it can do social networking. Those that can't are replaced by those that can.
Logic in Templates. I don’t think it would hurt Django to have a bit more support for conditional logic in templates, but I wouldn’t go as far as supporting the ability to call Python functions directly.
Wikispaces OpenID Support. You can create new accounts there, but they haven’t hooked up association with existing accounts yet (that’s coming soon).
MOO Stickers. Launched today (party this evening). 90 stickers in a book for a fiver seems very reasonable indeed.
Personal names around the world. I’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable about firstname/lastname fields in forms. Now I know why.
Seasoning Templates. “Designing a template language is a lot like seasoning a dish; there’s a whole range of tastes out there.”
July 20, 2007
E-Trade financial tried using a RSA fob as a second factor of authentication, but as of their 11/07/06 financial report their fraud losses continue to increase. That said, they considered this program a success because users indicated they feel safer and are more likely to provide assets.
Friends, Followers, and Notifications. Twitter drops the confusing distinction between “friend” and “follow”—now it’s just “follow”. The less sites that demand I reduce friendship to a binary decision the better.
Announcing Babel. Impressive new Python i18n / l10n package, with improved message extraction and a huge amount of bundled locale data.