Blogmarks
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This is an outrage. Phil Gyford’s reaction to the reaction to the Digital Economy Bill. Ends on a positive note hoping that the online furor will result in more technology-minded people paying more attention to the UK political process.
Introduction to Surlex. A neat drop-in alternative for Django’s regular expression based URL parsing, providing simpler syntax for common path patterns.
Flash CS5 will export to HTML5 Canvas. This looks pretty awesome—Illustrator CS5 and Flash CS5 can export to a new “FXG” format, and Adobe are providing a JavaScript library to load that format via Ajax and render the contents (including Flash animations) in a canvas element. Could be great for displaying newspaper infographics on the iPad.
Copyright is hard. Dan Catt spots Adam Liversage (Director of Communications for the BPI, and hence right in the middle of the DEBill) suggesting his wife violate copyright on Twitter.
GitHub: Announcing SVN Support. The best kind of April Fool’s joke: one that works. It’s read-only, but that’s good enough to support referencing GitHub repositories from SVN externals.
Plugging the CSS History Leak (via) Firefox is fixing the nefarious CSS visited link colour history leak flaw, which currently affects all browsers and allows a malicious site to determine if you have visited a specific site by checking getComputedStyle against a link to that page. It’s an obtrusive but necessary fix—visited link styles will be restricted to colour and border styles (no background images and hence no more checkbox effects since the image request could leak information) and those colours will not be reported via getComputedStyle. I hope other browser vendors follow suit.
Redis weekly update #3—Pub/Sub and more. Redis is now a publish/subscribe server—and it ended up only taking 150 lines of C code since Redis internals were already based on that paradigm.
A Turing Machine. Someone finally built a real turing machine—and it’s beautiful. All calculations are carried out on a tape, which has 1s and 0s written on it by a robotic dry-erase marker. Hypnotic.
Preview: Freebase Gridworks (via) If my experience with government datasets has taught me anything, it’s that most datasets are collected by human beings (probably using Excel) and human beings are inconsistent. The first step in any data related project inevitably involves cleaning up the data. The Freebase team must run up against this all the time, and it looks like they’re tackling the problem head-on. Freebase Gridworks is just a screencast preview at the moment but an open source release is promised “within a month”—and the tool looks absolutely fantastic. DabbleDB-style data refactoring of spreadsheet data, running on your desktop but with the UI served in a browser. Full undo, a JavaScript-based expression language, powerful faceting and the ability to “reconcile” data against Freebase types (matching up country names, for example). I can’t wait to get my hands on this.
Random Guardian (via) A random page from today’s Guardian, built by Daniel Vydra.
The Onion Uses Django, And Why It Matters To Us. The Onion ported their main site from PHP and Drupal to Django in three months with a team of four developers, including a full migration of their archived content. Their developers answer questions about the switch in this thread on the Django sub-reddit.
Video on the Web—Dive Into HTML5. Everything a web developer needs to know about video containers, video codecs, adio containers, audio codecs, h.264, theora, vorbis, licensing, encoding, batch encoding and the html5 video element.
Side-Channel Leaks in Web Applications. Interesting new security research. SSL web connections encrypt the content but an attacker can still see the size of the HTTP requests going back and forward—which can be enough to extract significant pieces of information, especially in applications that make a lot of Ajax requests.
Fun with TextMate and PDB. TextMate bookmarks (against lines in a file) are stored as OS X extended attributes, which can be accessed from Python using the xattr module. Here’s a clever piece of code that uses bookmarks to set breakpoints in the command-line pdb debugger.
Using Django as a Pass Through Image Proxy (via) Neat idea for running development environments against data copied from a live production site—a static file serving handler which uses a local cache but copies in user-uploaded files from the production site the first time they are requested.
Fear and Loathing in Farmville. “At multiple times during the conference, [Daniel] James expressed his serious ethical qualms over the path social gaming was laying for the industry. So many of the methods for making money are thinly-veiled scams that simply exploit psychological flaws in the human brain.”
Placehold.it. Useful dynamic image generator for layout mockups—just drop an image in to a page pointing at http://placehold.it/300x200. Takes optional arguments for text, colour and format as well.
webhook-relay. Another of my experiments with Node.js: webhook-relay is a self-contained queue and webhook request sending agent. Your application can POST to it specifying a webhook alert to be sent off, and webhook-relay will place that request in an in-memory queue and send it on its own time, avoiding the need for your main application server to block until the outgoing request has been processed.
Twitter, reformatted. I wrote a Yahoo! Pipe to clean up Twitter’s RSS feeds—removing the username prefix and filtering out items that begin with “@” or “RT”..
jsbeautifier.org. Simple online tool for unpacking and beautifying JavaScript.
The Web Server Benchmarking We Need. Ian Bicking asks for a WSGI benchmark which emphasises error handling over raw performance—can the server keep serving requests if some of them are CPU bound, I/O bound, wedged or cause a segfault?
Internet Explorer Platform Preview Guide for Developers (via) Lots of SVG and CSS3 stuff, no mention of canvas here either though.
grant XXX on * ? (via) PostgreSQL doesn’t have a way to say “this user is allowed to select/update/etc on all tables in database X”. That kind of sucks. UPDATE: This is fixed in PostgreSQL 9, see the comments.
An Early Look At IE9 for Developers (via) Surprisingly, no mention of SVG or canvas and only a note in passing about HTML 5.
VMware: the new Redis home. Redis creator Salvatore Sanfilippo is joining VMWare to work on Redis full time. Sounds like a good match.
Automated deployments with Fabric—tips and tricks. “If it’s not in a Fabric fabfile, it’s not deployable”—I’m slowly applying this philosophy to my personal projects.
Why Google MapMaker is not Open. Non-commercial use only, strict attribution requirements and you aren’t allowed to use the data for services that might compete with Google. This is why I’m disappointed every time I see Google encouraging people to contribute to Map Make, especially in the developing world—if those people contributed to OpenStreetMap instead they would be building something far more valuable for their community.
“Tis Pity We Called Her A Whore” And Other Ineffectual Digital Apologies. A useful reminder that URLs can be libellous.
Installing PIL on Mac OS X Snow Leopard for use in Google App Engine. PIL installation instructions that actually work... the ’export CC=“gcc -arch i386”’ incantation in particular. Make sure you run setup.py install using the Python version that the App Engine dev tools are using (I ran “sudo /usr/bin/python2.6 setup.py install”).
flashblockdetector. Mark Pilgrim’s JavaScript library for detecting if the user has a Flash blocker enabled, such as FlashBlock for Firefox and Chrome or ClickToFlash for Safari. One good use of this would be to inform users that they need to opt-in to Flash for unobtrusive Flash enhancements (such as invisible audio players) to work on that page.