Blogmarks
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minixsv (via) As far as I can tell, this is the only library that can validate XML using pure Python (no C extension required). I’d be extremely happy if someone would write a pure Python library (or one that only depends on ElementTree, which is included in the standard library) for validating XML against a Relax NG Compact syntax schema. Even DTD validation would be better than nothing!
Yahoo! Term Extraction and Contextual Web Search services to be discontinued. The official closure date is August 31st. Term extraction was really useful—thankfully there are a number of decent alternatives such as Zemanta, OpenCalais and topia.termextract.
topia.termextract. Impressive Python term extraction library (similar to the various term extraction web APIs but you can run it on your own hardware), incorporating a Parts-Of-Speech tagging algorithm.
How Different Groups Spend Their Day. Classy interactive infographic from the New York Times.
tr.im is “discontinuing service”. “However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009.Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.”—these statements seem to contradict themselves. Will tr.im URLs in tweets stop working after December 31st or not? Any chance they could hand the domain over to the Internet Archive? At any rate, this is exactly why centralised URL shorteners are a harmful trend.
Richard Jones: Something I’m working on... Python’s with statement appears to provide just enough syntactic sugar to create some really interesting DSL-style APIs—here’s a very promising example for laying out GUI applications.
How to avoid ads in gmail. “After extensive testing I’ve discovered you need 1 catastrophic event or tragedy for every 167 words in the rest of the email.”
Making Image Overlays Easy with GGroundOverlay and GGeoXML (via) Surprisingly, there doesn’t appear to be a good online tool for helping align an overlay image with a Google Map and exporting the result as a KML file. This is the best I could find—Yahoo! used to have a tool called MapMixer but it doesn’t seem to exist any more.
Collection: Search Patterns. Peter Morville’s enormous collection of screenshots of search engine interfaces.
Today’s News and Yahoo!’s Developer Program. “For SearchMonkey and BOSS, we currently do not have anything concrete to tell you” ... “We wanted to let you know that today’s news does not affect these products [YUI, YQL, Pipes]”.
Building Rome in a Day (via) “The first system capable of city-scale reconstruction from unstructured photo collections”—computer vision techniques used to construct 3D models of cities using 10s of thousands of photos from Flickr. Reminiscent of Microsoft PhotoSynth.
Django: Security updates released. A fix for a directory traversal attack in the Django development server (the one with the big “never run this in production” warnings in the documentation). Also reminds that the release of 1.1 means that 0.96, released over two years ago, has reached end of life and will not receive any further bug fixes after the just-released 0.96.4.
Toy Chest: Online or Downloadable Tools for Building Projects (via) “Toy Chest collects online or downloadable software tools/thinking toys that humanities students and others without programming skills (but with basic computer and Internet literacy) can use to create interesting projects”—a fantastic list compiled by the English Department at UCSB.
Django 1.1 release notes (via) Django 1.1 is out! Congratulations everyone who worked on this, it’s a fantastic release. New features include aggregate support in the ORM, proxy models, deferred fields and some really nice admin improvements. Oh, and the testing framework is now up to 10 times thanks to smart use of transactions.
JSONP Memory Leak. Neil Fraser advocates iterating over and deleting every property on a JSONP script DOM node after you removeChild it from the DOM, to protect against memory leaks of “in excess of 15 MB per hour”.
My Sys-Con Nightmare. This is just ridiculous. Don’t speak at or attend Sys-Con conferences (which include AJAXWorld, the Cloud Computing Expo and Ajax in the Cloud), don’t write for or buy their journals (including AJAXWorld Magazine, JDJ and .NET Developer’s Journal), and don’t visit or advertise on any of their sites.
NASA NEBULA Services (via) NASA’s new NEBULA cloud computing platform appears to be built entirely on open source infrastructure, including Python, Django, Fabric, Eucalyptus, RabbitMQ, Trac and Solr.
Fabric, Django, Git, Apache, mod_wsgi, virtualenv and pip deployment. I’m slowly working my way through this stack at the moment—next stop, fabric.
Learning to compile things from source (on Unix/Linux/OSX). I asked on serverfault.com for tips on learning how to solve configure/make/install problems on my own, and got some extremely useful replies.
Why we migrated from MySQL to MongoDB. Includes some useful information on MongoDB’s limitations—for example, running many different collections can waste disk space and repairing large datasets or bulk deleting many rows can block and lock the database for the duration of the operation.
AdSense for Feeds: What’s all the hubbub about PubSubHubbub? “Today we’re happy to announce initial support in FeedBurner for the PubSubHubbub protocol.”
The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real. Anil Dash is excited by the potential for PubSubHubBub and Webhooks to make near-real-time scalable event publishing accessible to regular web developers. So am I.
Install Django, GeoDjango, PostgreSQL and PostGIS on OSX Leopard. This tutorial worked perfectly for me.
MoD sticks with insecure browser. Tom Watson MP used parliamentary written answers to find out that the majority of government departments still require their staff to use IE6, and not all of them have upgrade plans to 7 or 8. Not a single department considered an alternative browser. “Many civil servants use web browsers as a tool of their trade. They’re as important as pens and paper. So to force them to use the most decrepit browser in the world is a rare form of workplace cruelty that should be stopped.”
EtherPad. Outstanding implementation of an online real-time collaborative text editor—basically SubEthaEdit in your browser. I can see myself using this a lot.
xmlwitch. An XML building library for Python that doesn’t suck (I love ElementTree for parsing XML, but I’ve never really liked it for generation). Makes smart use of the with statement.
Webhooks behind the firewall with Reverse HTTP. Hookout is a Ruby / rack adapter that lets you serve a web application from behind a firewall, by binding to a Reverse HTTP proxy running on the internet (such as the free one provided by reversehttp.net). Useful for far more than just webhooks, this means you can easily expose any Ruby web service to the outside world. An implementation of this as a general purpose proxy server would make it useful for applications written in any language.
Django 1.1 release candidate available. If all goes well, the final release will be out next week.
Fancy Fast Food (via) “These photographs show extreme makeovers of actual fast food items purchased at popular fast food restaurants.”
moddims (via) Apache 2 module which exposes ImageMagick as a URL-driven service, allowing you to request an image from a whitelisted host server and resize, thumbnail or alter the quality of it.