May 2007
May 26, 2007
The Oxford Guide free WiFi plotted on Google Maps. The guide offers a geocoded Atom feed which can be directly plotted on a Google Map.
Wi-Fi Wants To Kill Your Children. Ben Goldacre tears the ridiculous Panorama WiFi episode to pieces.
Now if WS-* technologies wants to own the niche of one proprietary platform technology talking to another in a homogeneous, closed environment...who cares? Good riddance I say. Just keep that shit off the Web.
May 27, 2007
The Truth About Wireless Devices. “After eating babies, the WiFi Routers will grow to enormous size and attack our cities.”
Levenshtein. Python C extension for Levenshtein distance and other advanced diff functions.
The Data Bill of Rights (via) John Battelle’s inherently sensible “draft of what rights we, as consumers, might demand from companies making hay off the data we create as we trip across the web”.
Feedwhip. Create an RSS feed or e-mail alert for changes made to any Web page.
Reducing HTTP requests using make. Nice simple recipe for concatenating JavaScript in to one file using make—doesn’t do anything for cache-busting though.
The movie that time forgot (via) The tragically unmade “Zeppelin vs Pterodactyls”.
May 28, 2007
PDF Shrink. $35 OS X app that crunches down the size of PDF files—useful if you often embed photos in your presentations.
Google Image Search does faces (via) The undocumented imgtype=face parameter. Kind of creepy.
May 29, 2007
oxfordgeeks.net
Nat and I had a bit of a mini-hackday this bank holiday Monday. Nat’s been doing a great job summoning local geeks out of the woodwork with Oxford Geek Nights event, but it’s still pretty hard to find other interesting events in the Oxfordshire area. It’s not that there aren’t any, it’s just that the geek community in Oxford is currently pretty fragmented.
[... 295 words]Emiller’s Balls-Out Guide to Nginx Module Development. Extremely detailed guide to extending the nginx Web server using C.
typogrify (via) “Typogrify is a collection of Django template filters that to help prettify your web typography by preventing ugly quotes and widows and providing CSS hooks to style some special cases.”
XSSed. Cross-site scripting resource and vulnerabilities archive, including reported (unpatched) holes ordered by PageRank.
Top XSS exploits by PageRank. Yahoo!, MSN, Google, YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook all feature.
Announcing FOWA Expo—London October 2007. I’m chairing the development track.
Outcry over TV kidney competition. Reality television is now a parody of itself.
May 30, 2007
If you write a spec, write a validator alongside. How much pain could have been spared with early versions of RSS if we'd had a common, agreed upon validator. In short, it's the test suite that ultimately decides the spec.
— Joe Heck
Howto: Google Maps Street View outside US. Add “&gl=us” at the end of the URL to avoid the evil geo IP restriction and play with Google’s latest toy.
The Google Maps Street View team? They’re posing outside the Googleplex so I’m guessing this is the team that built it.
Problems with XHTML content type.
The first question you should be asking is why you need XHTML—if you don’t have a specific reason (the need for XML parsers to be able to consume your pages) you’re much better off with HTML 4.01 for now, and HTML 5 in probably a year or so.
[... 245 words]’tie’ considered harmful (via) Rich Skrenta on the disadvantages of abstractions like Perl’s tie, which lets you create hash data structures that aren’t actually hashes. Operator overloading (as seen in Python) suffers the same problems.
May 31, 2007
RSS Bling goes Offline with Google Gears. Google Gears is Google’s new offline JavaScript framework. Dion Almaer (a Google employee) has a nice example of code using Google Gears on Ajaxian.
Dojo Offline on Google Gears. “The great news is that the Dojo crew were in the loop wrt this project, and Brad has ported Dojo Offline to use Google Gears as the base platform.”
Apollo will include Google Gears technology. Looks like Google really worked on the partnerships for this one.
Review Board. VMWare release a slick looking Django-powered code review system, with hooks in to Subversion and Perforce.
Cross Domain Frame Communication with Fragment Identifiers. Google are using this crazy iframe/fragment trick for their new Mapplets API.