January 2011
Jan. 13, 2011
US iPhone Data for International Visitors: A Guide. AT&T will swear blind that their pay-as-you-go data plan doesn’t work with iPhones or other smart phones. Here’s how to prove them wrong.
Introducing the FluidDB Explorer. Every good API deserves a dedicated API browser.
Hello from Gondor. “Effortless production Django hosting” from the Eldarion team.
The First Few Weeks—ep.io. Another take on managed Python Django/WSGI hosting, from Andrew Godwin and Ben Firshman.
The Virtues of Monitoring. Fantastic guide to the various levels of monitoring required for a modern web application.
What is the best way to find about the upcoming startup events in India?
There are quite a few events of interest to entrepreneurs showing up on Lanyrd: http://lanyrd.com/places/india/—you can also subscribe to our Atom feed for that page to hear about future events.
[... 53 words]Display your events on your own website with Lanyrd Badges. We’ve launched badges for Lanyrd—JavaScript that lets you embed a top bar or a content “splat” showing events you plan to attend, talks you’ve given in the past and other various combinations. I’m quite pleased with the implementation—the badges are configured using classes on a link to your Lanyrd profile, and the badges themselves are served through a combination of Amazon CloudFront for the initial script and a Varnish cache for the badge data itself to keep things nice and snappy.
Jan. 14, 2011
The science of the hashtag. Interesting analysis of how the #lessambitiousmovies hash tag took off thanks to retweets from a couple of key users with very creative followers.
What boardgame is the best to play for a scheming rat bastard?
Junta is a lot of fun: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardga...
[... 120 words]Jan. 16, 2011
Is there any fairly easy way to travel internationally without taking a corporate airline, cruise, bus etc?
Apparently there is—I haven’t tried it myself, but it’s not impossible to hitch hike on someone’s yacht. It helps if you know how to sail, but if you know how to cook that can get you on board as well.
[... 82 words]Public Speaking: Where is a good place to get started as a speaker?
Start small. There are plenty of small local events around that accept (and even encourage) first-time speakers. The single most valuable thing you can do to improve as a speaker is to get as much experience as possible.
[... 244 words]Is there an online calendar for all the Ruby / Rails conferences to be held in 2011?
Have you tried both our Ruby and our Rails topic pages?
[... 66 words]What is the best way to debug a Django app?
The Django Debug Toolbar is essential: http://robhudson.github.com/djan...
[... 95 words]What are some recommendations for good social media and/or digital marketing conferences to attend in 2011?
Our list of social media conferences on Lanyrd currently shows 46 upcoming events: http://lanyrd.com/topics/social-...
[... 62 words]Jan. 17, 2011
What conferences should a programmer working in the industry follow?
If I had to pick just one programming-related conference a year, it would probably be OSCON. The maintainers of pretty much every piece of software I use on a daily basis go there.
[... 49 words]Jan. 19, 2011
Why do so many web developers hate Microsoft?
It’s because by far the least enjoyable part of web development is dealing with bugs in IE.
[... 31 words]Jan. 20, 2011
Simon Willison: What are new interesting technologies in your radar as of January 2011?
I’ve been head down building Lanyrd for the past 4 months, so not much time to check out new stuff. I’m still very excited by Node.js and Redis, but I was excited about those last year. ElasticSearch looks very interesting (we’re currently using Solr but I’d contemplate a switch). I’m looking forward to giving CoffeeScript another go now that it’s matured a bit. Other than those I’m too busy learning operations software (syslog-ng is next on my list) to play with much other new stuff.
[... 105 words]What are some other conferences/expos similar to BlogWorld and Internet Retailer?
SOBCon Chicago has four speakers this year who spoke at BlogWorld last year: http://www.sobevent.com/chicago-... / http://lanyrd.com/2011/sobcon-ch...
[... 35 words]How do you find conferences that interest you?
We had this exact same problem, which is why we created http://lanyrd.com/—it’s a wiki-style conference listing site (currently listing over 1,000 upcoming events) which lets you sign in with Twitter and uses the people you follow on Twitter to suggest events you might want to go to.
[... 144 words]Jan. 21, 2011
Is there a way of tracking shortened URLs with Twitter streaming API?
Think about it like this: the whole point of the Twitter streaming API is to get you the tweets as soon after they are posted as possible. If the API were to provide access to the lengthened URLs, it would have to delay emitting a Tweet on to the stream until a resolver had gone through each shortened URL in the tweet and checked to find what it redirects to. This would mean that the speed with which the streaming API could deal out tweets would be dependent on the speed of the third party servers that serve up the redirects. I doubt Twitter would ever want to implement this.
[... 159 words]What programming conferences are in Romania in 2011?
How To Web looked like an excellent conference last year. They haven’t announced dates for 2011 yet but I’d keep an eye on their Twitter account:
[... 79 words]Jan. 22, 2011
What are some great stories about Steve Jobs?
The stories on folklore.org are fantastic—here’s their collection about Steve Jobs: http://www.folklore.org/ProjectV...
[... 30 words]How does FriendFeed work, and what programming languages are used?
It was written in Python, using the Tornado asynchronous web server (which the FriendFeed team developed themselves). They used their own schemaless NoSQL-style store based on keeping serialized objects in MySQL.
[... 51 words]Are Silicon Valley entrepreneurs taking less risk than 8-9 yrs ago?
I’d guess internet startups today are taking advantage of the fact that there’s a LOT more knowledge now of what works online and what doesn’t. 9 years ago people were still figuring out what the internet is useful for. Today it’s easier to figure out a product that people are likely to want, based on nearly 20 years of experience of how people use the Web.
[... 83 words]Jan. 23, 2011
Why would someone browse the web with JavaScript disabled?
Security conscious users (who understand the implications of XSS and CSRF attacks) sometimes disable JavaScript completely, or use a tool like the NoScript extension to disable it for all sites and only re-enable it on a small whitelist of sites that they trust.
[... 67 words]Why exactly isn’t TextMate available for other platforms like Ubuntu?
Because it was written in Objective-C using the Cocoa framework, which is only available on OS X. Porting it would not be at all easy.
[... 41 words]Jan. 24, 2011
The Inside Story of How Facebook Responded to Tunisian Hacks (via) “By January 5, it was clear that an entire country’s worth of passwords were in the process of being stolen right in the midst of the greatest political upheaval in two decades.”—which is why you shouldn’t serve your login form over HTTP even though it POSTs over HTTPS.
National politics of snoopiness vs corporate ethic of not being evil aren’t directly compatible, and the solution here only works because (let’s face it) Tunisia is not a rising economic force. If you’re selling ads in China, you don’t get to pretend that the Great Firewall of China is a security issue.
The code injected to steal passwords in Tunisia. Here’s the JavaScript that (presumably) the Tunisian government were injecting in to login pages that were served over HTTP.