July 2008
July 23, 2008
How Dopplr learns. Dopplr uses global and personal trip histories to disambiguate place names, and your friends’ schedules to help disambiguate dates in airline confirmation emails.
window.name Transport. The cleverest use of the window.name messaging hack I’ve seen yet: Dojo now has dojox.io.windowName.send for safe, performant cross-domain messaging.
Quick OAuth Notes. Yesterday’s XMPP Summit resulted in a proposed standard for using OAuth to authenticate XMPP streams.
July 24, 2008
Dojango version 0.3 released. A reusable Django application that provides Dojo, helper functions (dojo.data integration) and tools for switching between Dojo versions.
The Open Web Foundation. Launched today at OSCON, an independent, non-profit organisation dedicated to incubating and protecting new specifications like OAuth and oEmbed. The focus is incubation, licensing, copyright and community.
Silverback has launched! Clearleft’s “guerilla usability” software for OS X Tiger and Leopard—specialist screencasting software optimised for conducting usability tests.
July 25, 2008
Your guilt at work. If ten people sign up for a tenner-a-month ORG membership and send their confirmation code to Danny O’Brien, he’ll put out a special one-off issue of NTK!
July 27, 2008
Firebug Lite 1.2 (via) Huge upgrade to the IE/Opera/Safari bookmarklet version of Firebug—it now has DOM element inspection, XHR tracking and an interactive console, among other features.
FLOSS Weekly 34: Django. Randal Schwartz interviewed Jacob Kaplan-Moss at OSCON for the consistently excellent FLOSS Weekly podcast.
Battery Statistics. Run “ioreg -w0 -l | grep Capacity” on a MacBook or MacBook Pro to find out the DesignCapacity (original) and MaxCapacity (current) of your laptop’s battery.
How Comet Brings Instant Messaging to meebo. “What started off as a hack appears to be fulfilling one of the most basic needs of the Web, which is live synchronous interaction”—Jian Shen
ZeroMQ. Open source message queue optimised for performance: claims 25μsec latency and 2.6 million messages per second.
Amazon S3 Availability Event: July 20, 2008. Don’t let the newspeak put you off; this is an honest and informative description of the bug that took down S3 last Sunday, although it does include the world’s longest way of saying “we turned it off and on again”.
July 28, 2008
The Price of Anonymity: Our Principles? Alex Russell calls for a constructive step towards better gender balance in open source: make it clear that misogynistic, offensive and lewd behaviour will not be tolerated by open source communities and bake that policy in to community codes of conduct.
Silicon Roundabout. Matt Biddulph maps the abundance of interesting startups and tech companies that have popped up around Old Street in London.
The law behind “tell a friend” services. Useful guide based on UK law, updated in July 2008.
July 29, 2008
Extra fields on many-to-many relationships (via) Checked in just over an hour ago, Django now lets you specify a custom “through” table for a ManyToManyField. Great work by Eric Florenzano.
json-head. I’ve deployed another App Engine mini-app, which provides a JSON-P API for running HEAD requests against an arbitrary URL (useful for checking things like Content-Length and Content-Type headers and whether a URL returns 200). App Engine’s urlfetch limitations mean it can only deal with port 80 and 443 requests.
OSCON in 37 minutes. 45 OSCON talks summarised by their presenters in just 37 minutes, compiled by Gregg Pollack. I get to rant about OpenID for a minute at 27:22.
July 30, 2008
DjangoCon & Django 1.0 updates. DjangoCon tickets will be released in two batches of 100. The first set will be available at 12 noon UTC on Thursday July 31st; the second set will be released at 6pm UTC on Friday August 1st.
July 31, 2008
Spawning + Django. The latest version of Spawning (a fast Python web server built on top of the Eventlet non-blocking coroutine networking library) can run Django applications out of the box, using threads and processes to work around the blocking nature of the ORM’s database drivers. Eric Florenzano reports better performance than Apache and mod_wsgi, and is now hosting his site on it.
“Simon Willison’s Weblog” on the redesigned Delicious. The new search feature is extremely impressive; I can see myself coming here before hitting Google for some things. I’m not too keen on the way they’re adding ’www’ to the beginning of my URL when they display it though.
Super User Conditional Page Exception Reporting. The name is almost as long as the code snippet: this serves Django’s debug page to logged in super-users, falling back to the default 500 template for everyone else.
Changeset 8162. “Implemented a secure password reset form that uses a token and prompts user for new password”—also sneaks base36 encoding and decoding in to Django.