Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Friday, 14th September 2007

For any song you already own on CD, Apple is asking you to pay three times for it in order to use it as a ringtone on your iPhone: once for the CD you’ve already purchased, again to buy a needless duplicate of the track from the iTunes Store, and a third time to generate the ringtone.

John Gruber

# 8:15 am / apple, iphone, john-gruber, music, ringtones, ripoff

How should JSON strings be represented in Erlang? Erlang’s poor support for strings makes this a surprisingly tricky question.

# 8:17 am / erlang, json, strings, tonygarnockjones

TechShop: Geek Heaven. Like a fitness club for people who make stuff: a ridiculous amount of exciting hardware (including laser etchers, robotic milling machines and a 3D printer) and trainers on hand to show you how to use it all. Sadly it’s in Menlo Park which is a bit of a trek from Brighton.

# 9:55 am / guykawasaki, hardware, menlopark, techshop

html4all. New mailing list / advocacy group focusing on accessibility issues relevant to HTML 5. This is something that the core HTML 5 group have taken a lot of criticism for, although it’s unfair to say that they don’t care about accessibility (they are however challenging a lot of sacred cows).

# 11:35 am / accessibility, html, html4all, html5, whatwg

The longdesc lottery. Mark Pilgrim is now writing for the WHATWG blog. Here he makes the case for replacing the longdesc attribute with a better solution, based on ten years of developer ignorance and misuse. As always with that site, check the comments for a microcosm of the larger debate.

# 11:44 am / accessibility, html, html5, longdesc, mark-pilgrim, whatwg

Zope3 for Djangoers. I prefer “Djangonauts”, personally. Useful overview of Zope 3 for people with Django experience (first of a multi-part series).

# 3:20 pm / django, djangonauts, python, zope, zope3