November 2009
Nov. 10, 2009
A history of Python packaging. A comprehensive history by Martijn Faassen, who argues that the existing set of tools tools works fine and has been working fine for several years.
Nov. 11, 2009
The Go Programming Language. A brand new systems programming language, designed by Robert Griesemer and Unix/Plan 9 veterans Rob Pike and Ken Thompson and funded by Google. Concurrency is supported by lightweight communicating processes called goroutines. “It feels like a dynamic language but has the speed and safety of a static language.”
Writing good documentation (part 1). Jacob explains some of the philosophy behind Django’s documentation. Topical guides are particularly interesting—many projects skip them (leaving books to fill the gap) but they fill an essential gap between tutorials and low-level reference documentation.
Verified by Visa is training people to get phished. Searching for “Verified by Visa” on Twitter produces an endless stream of complaints. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say anything good about it—and it certainly doesn’t make anything more secure. Presumably there’s some kind of legal liability benefit to it, though I imagine it benefits the card issuers rather than the consumer.
Nov. 12, 2009
Awkward Suggestions (via) The Google search box “suggest” feature returns very different results depending on the quality of your grammar—“how 2” v.s. “how might one” is particularly illuminating.
How to Make a US County Thematic Map Using Free Tools. This is the trick I’ve been using to generate choropleths at the Guardian for the past year: figure out the preferred colours for a set of data in a Python script and then rewrite an SVG file to colour in the areas. I use ElementTree rather than BeautifulSoup but the technique is exactly the same. The best thing about SVG is that our graphics department can export them directly out of Illustrator, with named layers and paths automatically becoming SVG ID attributes. Bonus tip: sometimes you don’t have to rewrite the SVG XML at all, instead you can generate CSS to colour areas by ID selector and inject it in to the top of the file.
A set of geodata, or a map, is libre only if somebody can give you a cake with that map on top, as a present.
Nov. 13, 2009
SPDY: The Web, Only Faster. Alex Russell explains the benefits of Google’s SPDF proposal (a protocol that upgrades HTTP)—including header compression, multiplexing, the ability to send additional resources such as images and stylesheets down without needing the data:uri hack and Comet support built in to the core assumptions of the protocol.
dustin’s gomemcached (via) A memcached server written in Go, an experiment by memcached maintainer Dustin Sallings.
Nov. 14, 2009
How fast do they go? Like everything else, camels aren't what they were. Do not be encouraged by the accounts of the great desert travellers. They were better men than us, and were probably lying anyway, and they were riding camels which were used to going for many days at full pelt over the most hellish land and then charging into artillery fire at the end. The wrecks you get in the modern camel markets of Omdurman and Cairo are degenerate great-great-great-great-grandchildren of them and their forebears would be desperately ashamed of them.
— Travelling with Camels, by Charles Foster
Nov. 15, 2009
We're at a critical juncture in the evolution of software. The web is still here and it is still strong. Anyone can still put any information or applications on a web server without asking for permission, and anyone in the world can still access it just by typing a URL. I don't think I appreciated how important that is until recently. Nobody designs new systems like that anymore, or at least few of them succeed. What an incredible stroke of luck the web was, and what a shame it would be to let that freedom slip away.
Drupal or Django? A Guide for Decision Makers. A surprisingly interesting comparison—the author describes Django as “a framework with CMS-like tendencies” and Drupal as “a CMS with framework-like tendencies”, then explores the benefits of those two different approaches.
Nov. 16, 2009
Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins, and Russian hackers pwn your webapp. Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living. HTML and regex go together like love, marriage, and ritual infanticide.
10 Uses for Blocks in C/Objective-C. Part of the Cocoa for Scientists series, which is by far the best free Objective-C / Cocoa tutorial I’ve seen anywhere.
A New Theory of Awesomeness and Miracles, by James Bridle, concerning Charles Babbage, Heath Robinson, MENACE and MAGE. I didn’t go to Playful ’09, but I really wish I had.
How Grandmas May Give Kids an Evolutionary Edge. Absolutely fascinating: XY v.s. XX chromosomes mean that paternal grandmothers have a 50% chance of sharing an X with their son’s daughters, but a 0% chance of sharing an X with their son’s sons. A study on survival rates of 43,000 children found a corresponding correlation with the proximity to a paternal or maternal grandmother. Men: Dad’s Mum is out to get you!
Algae and Light Help Injured Mice Walk Again. Optogenetics is a rapidly growing field which uses viruses to implant genes from plants in to neurons and enable them to be controlled by blue and yellow light. In the lab it’s made mice run in circles without causing any apparent long-term damage, and the technology has the potential to provide a read/write interface to the human brain itself.
Nov. 17, 2009
Going evented with Node.js. Comprehensive Node.js tutorial—from basic principles to installation and writing a simple Twitter search command-line client application.
node.js at JSConf.eu (PDF). node.js creator Ryan Dahl’s presentation at this year’s JSConf.eu. The principle philosophy is that I/O in web applications should be asynchronous—for everything. No blocking for database calls, no blocking for filesystem access. JavaScript is a mainstream programming language with a culture of callback APIs (thanks to the DOM) and is hence ideally suited to building asynchronous frameworks.
Re-mapping the future for Ordnance Survey—making public data public. “The Prime Minister and Communities Secretary John Denham will today announce that the public will have more access to Ordnance Survey maps from next year, as part of a Government drive to open up data to improve transparency.”
About 80 per cent of public sector data mentions a place. Making Ordnance Survey data more freely available will encourage more effective exploitation of public data by businesses, individuals and community organisations.
— Stephen Timms, Minister for Digital Britain
Nov. 18, 2009
Me and Belle de Jour—’Could it be Brooke?’ (via) Lovely piece of internet detective work and UK blogging history. Darren from LinkMachineGo figured out Belle de Jour’s identity right back in the start, based on his knowledge of the early UK blogging scene. Not only did he keep the secret, but he set up a clever honeypot in the form of an innocuous page containing terms that tied her identities together. When the page started getting hits from an Associated Newspapers (Daily Mail) IP address a few weeks ago he tipped Belle off via Twitter.
Deep Tracing of Internet Explorer. dynaTrace Ajax looks like an awesome tool. For once, Internet Explorer has a development tool that other browsers can be jealous of.
It's clear that, even those who are privileged by access and wealth and the ability to amplify their own voices have anticipated that we'll all be disenfranchised by the private companies that own and control our networks of communication. And yet, most of our effort and ambition in the technology industry are not going towards building for the open web.
Debugging in Python. The missing manual for Python’s powerful pdb debugger.
Announcing Kong: A server description and deployment testing tool. An ultra simple website monitoring tool written in Django which makes it easy to manage a list of Twill scripts for testing different sites. It was developed at the Lawrence Journal-World—Eric showed me a demo if this a year or so ago and I’ve been hoping they would open source it.
Nov. 19, 2009
The OS Opportunity. John Gruber repeats his argument that PC makers should create their own OSes, and points out that compatibility concerns are less important than they’ve ever been because “the Web provides us with a core set of software and APIs that work everywhere”.
Simple CouchDB multi-master clustering via Nginx. An impressive combination. CouchDB can be easily set up in a multi-master configuration, where writes to one master are replicated to the other and vice versa. This makes setting up a reliable CouchDB cluster is as simple as putting two such servers behind a single nginx proxy.
Authority, historically, gets bestowed on the gatekeepers of information, such as Britannica, universities, newspapers, etc. Everything that can be digitized will be digitized, and will then be available over the internet, which is disruptive, not only to business models, but to authority.
Chromium OS User Experience. The 2 minute UI concept video is probably the best way to understand the ideas behind Google’s Chrome OS.