October 2007
Oct. 16, 2007
Yet when you look at the projects in the UK, these projects are failing. The more they fail, the more it drives [the UK government] down this weird behaviour of only selecting the biggest people - even though they've failed two or three times before.
Oct. 17, 2007
Roy Orbison in Cling-film, the novel. If you missed the original internet meme you might be a bit baffled by this one, but I picked up a copy of the novel today and it completely lives up to the standard set by the short stories.
Findings From the Web Design Survey (via) 32,831 people responded to A List Apart’s survey, and the conclusions have been packaged up in an elegant PDF. You can also download the (anonymized) raw data and run your own analysis.
SVG and text/html. Anne van Kesteren discusses the need for SVG and MathML to be embeddable in HTML 5, not just XHTML.
Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers' hands in February.
Global Hackers Create a New Online Crime Economy (via) Fascinating, detailed look at the evolution of the hacker service economy. Of particular interest: a web application that sells access to hacked machines to identity thieves on a timeshare basis.
Gozi Trojan. The full security paper on the Gozi trojan: how it was discovered, how it was traced and details of the “customer interface for on-line purchases of stolen data” at the other end (which, incidentally, was ridden with security holes).
Oct. 18, 2007
Http-https transitions and relative URLs. Finally, a reason to use those weird protocol-relative URLs (//example.com/path and the like).
Infowar: strike early, strike often. “The study found that the American participants’ belief in the truth of an initial news report was not affected by knowledge of its subsequent retraction. In contrast, knowing about a retraction was likely to significantly reduce belief in the initial report for Germans and Australians.”
Historically, Internet companies have rarely encrypted passwords to aid customer service.
Radiohead Album Available for Free, But Fileshared Anyway. “Why are some people getting In Rainbows from P2P rather than the band’s site? Probably because they find P2P easier to use.”
MyOpenID adds Information Card Support. First client SSL certificates, now Information Cards. MyOpenID is certainly taking browser-based phishing solutions seriously.
Oct. 19, 2007
CouchDB first impressions. Jacob’s been poking at CouchDB. Inserting data is slow, but everything else looks pretty slick considering how recently the JSON / JavaScript views functionality was added.
jQuery Logging (via) Brilliant four line jQuery plugin that lets you insert Firebug console.log() calls directly in to chains.
Oct. 20, 2007
New on Dopplr: The Past (with Pictures). Dopplr’s trip pages automatically display your Flickr/Facebook photos that were taken during the duration of the trip—simple and smart integration of third party sites.
WebKit Does HTML5 Client-side Database Storage. SQLite strikes again. The WebKit team have included a neat update to their Web Inspector that lets you browse and modify your client-side databases.
OPSI asks users to contribute to new web channel. The Office of Public Sector Information now has an online forum for people interested in reusing UK government information for commercial benefit, based on a recommendation in the “Power of Information” report by Tom Steinberg and Ed Mayo.
Django may be built for the Web, but CouchDB is built of the Web. I've never seen software that so completely embraces the philosophies behind HTTP. CouchDB makes Django look old-school in the same way that Django makes ASP look outdated.
Oct. 22, 2007
ASP.NET MVC Framework. This looks pretty good. It includes clean URL support that’s very similar to how Django does things (with a nice alternative syntax for developers who don’t like regular expressions).
If It Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must Be Enterprise Software. Interesting discussion about why enterprise software tends to completely suck from an end-user point of view.
OpenStreetMap on the iPhone! Via an ingenious hack. The Google Maps iPhone client caches downloaded tiles using SQLite—to display your own custom tiles, you just need to dump them straight in to the “cache”.
EventScripts 2.0, now with Python. EventScripts is a plugin that lets you write scripts to customise dedicated servers for Valve’s Source engine games (Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 and the like). Version 2.0 adds support for Python 2.5 as an embedded scripting language.
Oct. 23, 2007
In rainbows. Dopplr generates a unique colour for each city using an MD5 hash. The colours are then used in subtle but intelligent ways throughout the design—right down to the favicon.
Oct. 24, 2007
Upgrading to Prototype 1.6: real world examples. I still don’t find Prototype as intuitive as jQuery, but the API improvements between 1.5 and 1.6 are very impressive.
Using the extra() QuerySet modifier in Django for WeGoEat. You can use select() on a QuerySet to obtain extra values using subqueries.
A school in the UK is using RFID chips in school uniforms to track attendance. So now it's easy to cut class; just ask someone to carry your shirt around the building while you're elsewhere.
Virtual Machine Creator (via) Web based tool for creating blank VMware compatible virtual machine images; uses QEMU under the hood.
Oct. 25, 2007
Site-specific browsers and GreaseKit. New site-specific browser tool which lets you include a bunch of Greasemonkey scripts. For me, the killer feature of site-specific browsers is still cookie isolation (to minimise the impact of XSS and CSRF holes) but none of the current batch of tools advertise this as a feature, and most seem to want to share the system-wide cookie jar.
CouchDB “Joins”. Different approaches to indexing a blog post and its associated comments in the non-relational CouchDB.