Sunday, 7th June 2009
Installing Django, Solr, Varnish and Supervisord with Buildout. Useful, detailed instructions... but I still think this stuff is Way Too Difficult at the moment. I’m a big fan of the idea of sites that are assembled from multiple smaller web services talking HTTP to each other, but ensuring all the moving parts stay running is massively more painful than just running Apache and MySQL. # 1:54 pm
walking papers lives. Round trip mapping: print out a map from OpenStreetMap, walk around annotating it with a pen, then scan the result back in (a QR code ensures the area and orientation is recognised) . Specifically targeted at eye-level stuff which can’t be collected using GPS or aerial imagery alone. When I grow up, I want to be Mike Migurski. # 1:47 pm
Daniel’s Daily Monster (via) Jon Hicks: “Every week day I draw a little monster card to go in my son’s lunchbox.” Geek dads rock. # 1:30 pm
MongoDB—Capped Collections. Collections with a size limit that automatically expire older entries are interesting—useful for things like a “recent searches on this site” feature. # 12:50 pm
Mapstraction API Sandbox. Andrew Turner’s new tool for exploring the Mapstraction JavaScript library, which provides a unified code interface to 12 different mapping services # 11:41 am
Let’s try to imagine what a Google Silverlight would have been. It would have been a fully open source product from Google, with a very liberal open source license (BSD or Apache). It would have all the technical specifications published openly. They would pledge to have the Silverlight VM interoperate with Javascript and HTML5. And a company like Zoho would have a ton of developers working on Google Silverlight based applications by now—as opposed to having exactly ZERO developers working on Microsoft Silverlight.
— Sridhar Vembu # 11:32 am
TOSBack | The Terms-Of-Service Tracker. Fantastic idea (and implementation) from the EFF—a site that currently tracks 44 website policy documents and highlights changes to them using a diff engine (from Drupal). A global RSS feed is available—it would be useful if individual feeds for different sites and organisations were also provided. # 10:49 am