Saturday, 22nd March 2008
Monkeypatching is Destroying Ruby (via) Deliberately provocative title, but makes a well considered case for restrained use of monkey patching in Ruby. Cultural norms around monkey patching seem to me to be one of the core differences between the Ruby and Python communities.
The Perl community has a long-standing love/hate-affair with making changes that impose "spooky action at a distance". They call it "black magic" and it is generally considered it a last resort. Black Magic that makes GLOBAL changes to things like inheritance is often characterised as being "Octarine" (see disk world novels), because it tends to work ok when there's only one person doing it, but start to mix a few together and KABOOM!
Idea: A new typography term (via) keming. noun. The result of improper kerning.
wikinear.com, OAuth and Fire Eagle
I’m pleased to announce wikinear.com. It’s a simple site that does just one thing: show you a list of the five Wikipedia pages that are geographically closest to your current location. It’s designed (or not-designed) to be used mainly from mobile phones.
[... 1,190 words]views.py for wikinear.com (via) I’ve published the views.py file from wikinear.com as an example of simple Fire Eagle integration with a Django application.
PownceFS. Not a joke: it’s a Fuse filesystem (written in Python, using OAuth for authentication) which exposes a directory for each of your friends on Pownce containing the files that they have uploaded.
fireeagle_api.py. Steve Marshall’s Fire Eagle python binding on GitHub.