Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Thursday, 28th January 2010

Dojo: Still Twice As Fast When It Matters Most. Alex Russell shows how Dojo out-performs jQuery on the TaskSpeed benchmark, which attempts to represent common tasks in real-world applications and has had code that have been optimised by the development teams behind each of the libraries. # 10:40 pm

Why the iPad may be just what we need for Digital Inclusion. Chris Thorpe: “It may not be a Jesus phone, a Moses tablet or something that lives up to hype and hyperbole, but if it does something for the digital inclusion agenda it might live up to Steve Jobs saying it’s the most important thing he’s ever done.” # 9:03 pm

Introducing docent. Paul Mison’s clever little Flickr app for viewing galleries that have been added by your contacts. It runs in Python on App Engine and makes extensive use of the Task Queue API. # 8:35 pm

Why I Believe Printers Were Sent From Hell To Make Us Miserable (via) I just don’t get it. How has no one managed to produce a printer that doesn’t suck yet? # 6:56 pm

Reexamining Python 3 Text I/O. Python 3.1’s IO performance is a huge improvement over 3.0, but still considerably slower than 2.6. It turns out it’s all to do with Python 3’s unicode support: When you read a file in to a string, you’re asking Python to decode the bytes in to UTF-8 (the new default encoding) at the same time. If you open the file in binary mode Python 3 will read raw bytes in to a bytestring instead, avoiding the conversion overhead and performing only 4% slower than the equivalent code in Python 2.6.4. # 1:28 pm

If Apple is really successful, it’s likely that other companies will be more emboldened to forsake openness as well. The catch is that customers won’t accept the sudden closing of a previously open platform, that’s one of the reasons Palladium failed. But Apple has shown that users will accept most anything in an entirely new platform as long as it offers users the experience they want.

Rafe Colburn # 9:54 am

2010 » January

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