June 2007
June 11, 2007
@media 2007 writeup from AlastairC. Good notes on a bunch of sessions, including mine.
The logo is still evolving, say designers. The Olympics logo is designed to be “hackable”—which is actually a great idea, but lawyers advised against unveiling that concept at the same time as the abstract shapes.
Doing Local Right
“Doing Local Right” was the title of my talk at this year’s @media Europe. Patrick had asked me if I could put together a case study, and I jumped at the chance to share some of the work of my former colleagues at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas. I had the privilege of working at the newspaper for a year in late 2003-2004.
[... 735 words]Mac OS X Leopard: Multicore. “... NSOperation, a breakthrough new API that optimizes applications for the world of multicore processing.”
Mac OS X Leopard: UNIX. Leopard ships with DTrace, and it’s been hooked in to Java, Ruby, Python and Perl.
Safari 3 Public Beta. Safari for Windows. Unfortunately this kills the best excuse corporate Web developers had for getting Macs (“we need to run all our supported browsers on one machine”).
June 12, 2007
Enabling the debug menu on Safari for Windows. “Turn off site-specific hacks” is one of the menu options.
Safari for Windows, 0day exploit in 2 hours (via) Once again, down to handling of alternative URL protocol schemes.
A JavaScript Module Pattern. I’ve been using this pattern for a few months—it works really well, though I tend to keep my own code in my own namespace rather than adding it to YAHOO.
June 13, 2007
The Facebook Platform wiki (via) Not very well promoted yet.
iLike: Holy cow... 6mm users and growing 300k/day! (via) Facebook platform offers a viral distribution mechanism for free. Downside: you have to double your capacity every few days.
June 14, 2007
Let’s All Evolve Past This: The Barriers Women Face in Tech Communities. The most enlightening contribution I’ve seen on this topic in ages.
Safari Beta 3.0.1 for Windows. A nice fast turnaround on fixes for security flaws in the beta.
June 16, 2007
[...] Silverlight has full access to the browser DOM and you can make calls from Javascript into silverlight code and from Silverlight into Javascript. This means that you can already write the presentation layer of a client side web app in Javascript and implement your business logic in IronPython.
Making the “24-hour newsroom” work (via) More on the Lawrence Journal-World, this time from the point of view of the reporters in the newsroom.
About Mezzoblue. Dave Shea’s blog archive is really classy, in particular the way bundles of posts around a single photo share a colour scheme derived from the image.
HTML5 differences from HTML4. Useful guide, collated by Anne van Kesteren.
How to travel by train from London to Vilnius. Nat and I are thinking about doing this for EuroPython. Could be a bit of an adventure.
June 18, 2007
I can’t believe it’s all over! Hack Day London rocked.
June 19, 2007
FireEagle. Location broker API, launched at Hack Day London. I worked on an early version of this before leaving Yahoo! back in January—great to see it out.
What I did at Hack Day. John McKerrell made a tool for updating your FireEagle location through a DNS query, useful for sneaking around for-pay WiFi nodes.
Washington Post and Facebook. Deryck Hodge on hacking against Facebook API using Django.
Python 3000 Status Update. Doesn’t look like we’ll get multiline lambdas, but the other stuff looks great. I’m not looking forward to years of Python 2 and Python 3 co-existing and splitting the community though (ala PHP 4 and 5).
June 20, 2007
VeriSign OpenID 1.1 Non-Assertion Covenant (via) VeriSign join Sun Microsystems in providing patent protection for OpenID.
June 21, 2007
Crowd 1.1.0 Release Notes. Atlassian software are now offering a commercial OpenID provider, with the ability to hook in to an existing LDAP directory and some smart whitelist / blacklist options.
Django-fr. Community site for French language Django developers. They’ve already made a promising start on translating the documentation.
Implementing Silverlight in 21 Days. Absolutely incredible feat of software engineering by Miguel de Icaza and the Moonlight team.
The Sarcastic Gamer: MS Surface. “Your next computer will be a big-ass table.”
Yet another one more thing... a new Web Inspector! I installed the latest nightly but I couldn’t find the inspector (or work out how to turn on the debug menu). Anyone know what I’m doing wrong?
RESTify DayTrader. Killer REST case study from Joe Gregorio.