March 2007
March 9, 2007
Ajax3d Demo. Really impressive Virus clone, using the canvas element.
pg8000 (via) A pure-Python interface to PostgreSQL, using the PostgreSQL network protocol directly. Doesn’t (yet) support DB-API 2.0, but that’s promised in a future release.
March 10, 2007
OpenID Server Integrated with CAS. Case Western Reserve University now provides an OpenID for every network account holder.
Google Seattle conference on scalability. Google are hosting a conference on scalability in Seattle on June 23rd. They’ve just put out the CfP.
Ficlets (via) AOL’s first application to launch on Rails, and their first application to accept OpenIDs as well as AOL screen names.
March 11, 2007
Meet the one wheel balancing scooter. Home made one wheeled motorised scooter that looks like a skateboard and self-balances like a Segway.
March 12, 2007
XSS. Sanitising HTML is an extremely hard problem. The sanitize helper that ships with Rails is completely broken; Jacques Distler provides a better alternative.
Balancing One-Wheeled Scooter. Technical details of the scooter I linked to earlier.
opensource @ Joost. Joost is built on top of Mozilla, Redland, SQLite and a bunch of other bits and pieces of Open Source infrastructure.
wii.js (via) A JavaScript library that lets you detect the Wii browser, and provides easy hooks for reacting to keys pressed on the Wiimote.
Google Video: How do I enter transcripts? Neat feature of Google Video I hadn’t seen before: you can upload timestamped transcripts of your videos. Anyone seen a video that uses these?
You vs. the Real World. The lengths programming libraries go to to be liberal in what they accept.
My Future of Web Apps talk as a slidecast
The team at Carson Systems have a pretty quick turnaround on their podcasts; they’ve had full recordings of every speaker up for a few days now. I spent a bunch of time over the weekend splicing the recording of my talk together with my slides, and the result is now available at The Future of OpenID (a slidecast).
[... 177 words]March 13, 2007
The Figures Behind The Top Web Apps. DropSend.com makes $100,000 profit a year, before tax. Ryan’s slides also have cost-to-build data for Freshbooks, Maya’s Mom, Mobissimo and Wesabe.
SXSW: Web App Autopsy. Conversion rates and revenue per customer for RegOnline, FeedBurner, Wufoo, and Blinksale.
WaSP Street Team. A new Web Standards Project initiative to encourage the promotion of Web standards in local communities. Your help needed!
Improve your forms using HTML5! (via) Anne Van Kesteren demonstrates the Web Forms 2 support in Opera 9—new form attributes include autofocus, required and type=email.
pg8000 v1.02. The pure Python PostgreSQL library now supports DB-API 2.0 (and SSL too). That didn’t take long!
March 14, 2007
What is OpenID Good For? Dare Obasanjo provides some smart responses to Tim Bray’s criticisms of OpenID, including a good angle on the phishing problem.
March 16, 2007
Chris Shiflett: My Amazon Anniversary. Chris Shiflett discloses an unfixed CSRF vulnerability in Amazon’s 1-Click feature that lets an attacker add items to your shopping basket—after reporting the vulnerability to Amazon a year ago!
The best reason to always build out APIs for your product is that it makes it easier for the rest of the world to extend your product or service rather than start competitors.
March 18, 2007
OmniTI_OpenID. OmniTI’s PHP OpenID 1.1 consumer library. Much less full featured than the JanRain library, but it’s good to have more than one.
Primality regex. A regular expression that can identify prime numbers. Unsurprisingly, this one comes from the Perl community.
March 19, 2007
Algorithm Education in Python (via) A paper describing the usage of Python in Algorithm courses at UC Irvine. I found Python invaluable when I was at university and would have loved to see it become part of the official curriculum.
Viddler.com. Online video sharing site with annotation tools, including the ability to link to a point in a video, tag specific moments and even attach time-specific comments. Reminds me of the BBC’s audio annotation project.
On the BBC Annotatable Audio project... Tom’s write-up of the work done on audio annotation by the BBC Radio and Music Interactive R&D team.
Highrise. The new online contact manager from 37signals—exactly the tool I need for managing my freelancing, and it even accepts OpenID.
Highrise Forum: Using the undocumented API. Add .xml to the end of many URLs in Highrise to get an XML representation of that page.
March 20, 2007
Two visions. It looks like Mark Pilgrim is going to be joining Hixie at Google.
Flash vs. Ajax: It’s time to expand your toolbox. Dan Webb offers his smart, pragmatic take on the Flash vs. Ajax permathread.