Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Monday, 21st September 2009

Developing for the iPhone at the moment is like picking up dimes in front of a bulldozer.

Tim Bray

# 5:30 pm / apple, iphone, sharecropping, tim-bray

Welcome to Django Dose. Launched at DjangoCon, a new Django community site designed to be a successor to TWiD, still with (shorter) podcasts but also featuring more news, articles and screencasts.

# 6:21 pm / community, django, djangocon, djangodose, podcasts, screencasts, twid

There was this clamour in the past to get companies to open source their products. This has stopped, because all the software that got open source sucked. It's just not very interesting to have a closed source program get open sourced. It doesn't help anyone, because the way closed source software is created in a very different way than open source software. The result is a software base that just does not engage people in a way to make it a valid piece of software for further development.

Ian Bicking

# 6:22 pm / closedsource, ian-bicking, open-source

Fabric factory. Promising looking continuous integration server written in Django, which uses Fabric scripts to define actions.

# 6:35 pm / continuous-integration, django, fabric, fabricfactory, python, testing

Years ago, Alex Russell told me that Django ought to be collecting CLAs. I said "yeah, whatever" and ignored him. And thus have spent more than a year gathering CLAs to get DSF's paperwork in order. Sigh.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss

# 6:35 pm / alex-russell, clas, django, jacob-kaplan-moss, legal

django-debug-toolbar. The new panel styling for the Django debug toolbar is really slick—here’s a neatly produced screencast demonstrating it (with Gypsy Jazz accompaniment).

# 6:36 pm / debugging, django, django-debug-toolbar, gypsyjazz, screencasts

homebrew. Exciting alternative to MacPorts for compiling software on OS X—homebrew avoids sudo and defines packages as simple Ruby scripts, shared and distributed using Git.

# 6:51 pm / git, homebrew, macports, osx, ruby

PostBin. Handy debugging tool for webhooks—create a TinyURL-style URL, then see a log of any POST requests made to that address.

# 11:03 pm / http, post, postbin, webhooks

cloud-crowd. New parallel processing worker/job queue system with a strikingly elegant architecture. The central server is an HTTP server that manages job requests, which are farmed out to a number of node HTTP servers which fork off worker processes to do the work. All communication is webhook-style JSON, and the servers are implemented in Sinatra and Thin using a tiny amount of code. The web-based monitoring interface is simply beautiful, using canvas to display graphs showing the system’s overall activity.

# 11:09 pm / canvas, cloudcrowd, http, json, message-queues, ruby, sinatra, thin, webhooks, workers

2009 » September

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