October 2007
Oct. 1, 2007
Right now Facebook's position on 3rd party developers is amazing and I'm sure they are genuine in their support. However, give Facebook two missed quarters as a public company and they might not have no choice but to squeeze every ounce of revenue out of Facebook. That squeeze might include competing with the current crop of Facebook developers.
Programming Nu (via) Interesting new programming language—Lisp style syntax, Ruby style semantics, built in Objective C bridge so you can access Cocoa APIs directly.
BBC Radio 4—Click On. I was interviewed on today’s programme, about OpenID. The clip is about 7 minutes in to the program, which is available using RealPlayer and the BBC’s Listen Again service.
Questioning Steve Ballmer
This morning I attended a half day briefing at Microsoft UK entitled “The Online Opportunity—What Makes a Successful Web 2.0 Start-Up?”. Despite the buzzword laden title the event was well worth the trip up from Brighton, mainly due to the Q&A with Steve Ballmer (a pretty rare opportunity).
[... 423 words]Oct. 2, 2007
Cronto. I saw a demo of this the other day—it’s a neat anti-phishing scheme that also protects against man in the middle attacks. It works using challenge/response: an image is shown which embeds a signed transaction code; the user then uses an application on their laptop or mobile phone to decode the image and enters the resulting code back in to the online application.
Amazon makes you lie to log off (via) Amazingly, the only way to sign out of Amazon these days is to use the “If you’re not XXX, click here” link—the traditional “sign out” link has quietly vanished.
Oct. 4, 2007
Google Maps, HTML version. Google’s mostly undocumented accessible version of Google Maps. Robin Christopherson demonstrated this yesterday at FOWA.
identity-matcher. Dopplr’s social network importing code (for Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and sites supporting Microformats), implemented as a Rails ActiveRecord plugin.
Oct. 5, 2007
I thought the big draw for Apple hardware was that "It Just Works." By breaking it, you must know you’re giving up the "Just Works" factor, so what’s left? Rounded corners?
YSlow: Bug (fix) in Firebug’s Net Panel. The latest release of the YSlow page analysis plugin (announced at FOWA) also fixes a misleading bug in Firebug’s Net panel.
Client Side Load Balancing for Web 2.0 Applications (via) I recall that early versions of Netscape picked a random server from a hard-coded list each time a user clicked the “What’s New” button, back before server-side scaling techniques were well understood.
Obviously, everyone knows that patration means "the freedom and portability to move from one service provider to another without hinderance or boundaries"
Rails 1.2.4: Maintenance release. “Session fixation attacks are mitigated by removing support for URL-based sessions”—I’ve always hated URL-based sessions; I’d be interested to hear if their removal from Rails causes legitimate problems for anyone.
Multi-Safari. Lets you run multiple versions of Safari on the same Mac. As with the multi-IE hacks, all versions use the same underlying HTTP libraries (which belong to the OS) so the simulation isn’t entirely accurate.
Seeking market share, Microsoft removes WGA anti-piracy check from IE7. Hopefully this will accelerate the rise of IE7 over IE6.
SlideShare Groups: Future Of Web Apps. Some of the presentations from the Future of Web Apps conference.
Oct. 6, 2007
The arc of TF2 is something that's probably familiar to a lot of amateur developers or designers. When we got here the first thing we built was overly complex, very hard core, almost impenetrable to anyone who wasn't familiar with FPSs in general. And as we found as we played it, wasn't more fun because of it.
Roll out your own JavaScript Interfaces. Dustin shows how to build a tiny jQuery-style (chainable) library that contains your own JavaScript convenience functions.
The Storm Worm. Bruce Schneier describes the Storm Worm, a fantastically advanced piece of malware that’s been spreading for nearly a year and is proving almost impossible to combat. Its effects are virtually invisible but infected machines are added to a multi-million machine botnet apparently controlled by anonymous Russian hackers.
The ThinkGeek 8-bit Tie. The April Fool’s Joke that attracted unprecedented customer demand is finally available to purchase for real.
Oxford Geek Night #4. November 28th in the upstairs room at the Jericho Tavern; the first one run without Natalie at the helm.
SOA [...] is the generally held belief that when implementing systems one should expose system functionality for general consumption directly from the network, as well as or instead of burying it behind a user interface.
Oct. 7, 2007
Some Notes on Tim Bray’s Wide Finder Benchmark. Fredrik Lundh demonstrates some Python ninja techniques for parsing log files using multiple cores (and eventually memory mapping).
Oct. 8, 2007
Native DOMContentLoaded is coming to Safari. I filed this bug over two years ago. They’ve just committed the resulting patch to trunk.
The larger question is why on earth, in 2007 and ten years after XML came out, we are still using text files that don't label their encoding?
Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses and Content vs. Context. Fantastic presentation from Ian Rogers, the head of Yahoo! Music, who has spent 8 years watching DRM cripple the online music industry.
Oct. 9, 2007
Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement (via) Went in to effect on the 1st of October. Promises 99.9% uptime over a monthly billing cycle or you get “service credits” towards future S3 payments.
Tabula Fracta. Mozilla hacker Robert O’Callahan offers advice for anyone aiming to create a new rendering engine from scratch. The WHATWG’s work on specifying real-world browser behaviour and error models gets a well deserved mention.
OpenID.net has been redesigned. Love the new look—much cleaner and easier to understand, and it now gives people looking to get themselves an OpenID somewhere to go.
String types in Python 3. bytes are now immutable (just like the bytestrings they are replacing) and a new mutable buffer type has been introduced.