March 2007
March 25, 2007
JPC (via) Pure Java emulation of an x86 PC, running at 10% native speed. No code to download yet, but there’s a neat applet that lets you play Lemmings (and other games) running on FreeDOS.
Python web development and frameworks in 2007. A fair and detailed look at the current main options for web development with Python.
Twitter from TextMate. A TextMate Bundle that lets you send your currently selected text to Twitter.
Free Software Foundation to switch to Django. “FSF is switching from Zope to Django (both Python powered!) for web application development... Lots of new stuff coming soon, including contributions back to the Django community.”
Mozilla Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 Release Notes.
New features include animated PNGs, <link rel="offline-resource"> and the HttpOnly cookie flag which indicates that a cookie should not be accessible to script (borrowed from IE).
March 26, 2007
The Athena Framework. CERN’s ATLAS particle accelerator experiment is scriptable with Python.
Sigourney Weaver To Narrate Planet Earth. The Discovery Channel have replaced Sir David Attenborough’s narration of Planet Earth with Sigourney Weaver. Outrage!
Metaprogramming JavaScript Presentation. Adam McCrea demonstrates some incredibly elegant DSL -style JavaScript based on chaining method calls together.
Death threats against bloggers are NOT “protected speech” (why I cancelled my ETech presentations). Truly sickening behaviour.
March 27, 2007
How to beat Google, part 1. Rick Skrenta with 12 steps to taking on Google in the search engine space, including some great insights in to smart UI design.
mod_python: Expat Causing Apache Crash. We ran in to this problem today.
Applied Web Heresies: ETech 2007. Phil Windley’s notes on Avi Bryant’s ETech tutorial, which shows how ideas from Avi’s Seaside framework can be ported to other languages.
cmemcache. Python extension for libmemcache which provides more than twice the performance of the pure-Python memcached client. Supported by Django development version.
PyPy 1.0. The fascinating Python implemented in Python project reaches 1.0, and now includes a JIT compiler. It’s still not recommended for general use though.
If you don't think you're smart enough to start a startup doing something technically difficult, just write enterprise software. Enterprise software companies aren't technology companies, they're sales companies, and sales depends mostly on effort.
March 28, 2007
Snipperoo now supports OpenID. It’s a really clean implementation, and they’ve given it prominent placement on their homepage.
Oxford Geek Night 2
If you missed the last Oxford Geek Night, you really owe it to yourself to make it to the next one. If you were there then you shouldn’t need any convincing.
[... 180 words]March 29, 2007
DjangoKit. Early preview release of a tool that lets you package a Django application up as a fully contained OS X application. When Leopard ships with PyObjC this kind of thing will be even easier.
Introducing the Yahoo! Mail Web Service. 101 pages of documentation—this thing is huge!
Hack Day 2007—get your diaries out. Yahoo! UK and the BBC are hosting a public hack day on the weekend of June 16th/17th at Alexandra Palace, complete with a concert from a “top secret” band. The US hack day surprise performance was Beck.
Spinn3r Launches Today. An API to the Tailrank blog index, so you can index the blogosphere without having to build your own spider / spam filter.
Stupid computers.....do what I want!
Look for a header called X-Forwarded-For, but be sure to read this first.
[... 26 words]March 30, 2007
From Pixels to Plastic. Awesome talk given by Matt Webb at ETech, on the emerging culture of Generation C, cheap hardware prototyping and physical extensions to the online world.
robotlab juke bots (via) Decommissioned industrial robot arms reprogrammed to act as super precise DJs.
“Obsessed with putting ink on paper” (via) Fascinating essay from the authors of Lilypond describing the challenges involved in writing software to typeset music.
Triplr. Ultra simple GET-based web service for converting RSS / Atom / RDF / Microformats+GRDDL to HTML / ntriples / RDF / RSS / JSON / Turtle. Small pieces, loosely joined.
Geonames machine tags, Triplr.org and JSON, oh my! Dan Catt plays with Geonames and Triplr.
Flickr content filters (via) You can now upload illustrations and screenshots to Flickr without risk of being NIPSAd, provided you label them as such.
March 31, 2007
XSD is more flawed than most technologies that roam the earth. I was on the committee that created it, and that was back when I made my money explaining complicated technologies to people for money, and man, I could hear the cash registers ringing in my ears.
— Don Box
Mailhook. Free e-mail address to HTTP POST bridge—just provide a script URL and you’ll be given a subdomain; any e-mail sent to an address at that host is then posted to your script.