Blogmarks
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The breakneck race to build an application to crowdsource MPs’ expenses. Charles Arthur wrote up a very nice piece on the development effort behind the Guardian’s crowdsourcing expenses app.
Towards a Standard for Django Session Messages. I completely agree that Django’s user.message_set (which I helped design) is unfit for purpose, but I don’t think sessions are the right solution for messages sent to users. A signed cookie containing either the full message or a key referencing the message body on the server is a much more generally useful solution as it avoids the need for a round trip to a persistent store entirely.
Unimpressed by NodeIterator. John Resig, one of the most talented API designers I’ve ever come across, posts some well earned criticism of the document.createNodeIterator DOM traversal API.
Investigate your MP’s expenses. Launched today, this is the project that has been keeping me ultra-busy for the past week—we’re crowdsourcing the analysis of the 700,000+ scanned MP expenses documents released this morning. It’s the Guardian’s first live Django-powered application, and also the first time we’ve hosted something on EC2.
C64 Twitter client. Awesome.
Jython 2.5.0 Final is out! It’s been a long time coming—congratulations to the team.
SWFUpload jQuery Plugin. Nice looking plugin around an invisible Flash shim that provides multiple file uploads and client-side progress indicators.
Opera Unite. Opera’s big announcement: a developer preview (“labs release”) of their new web-server-in-your-browser feature, Unite. Includes an Opera-hosted proxy to help break through your firewall. The web server can be customised using server-side JavaScript running in an Opera Widget.
Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store. Enormously entertaining short story about data visualisation and creepy San Francisco bookshops by Robin Sloan.
Dealing with election results data. Alf Eaton loaded the Guardian’s European election results spreadsheet in to Google’s new Fusion Tables tool.
The GIF Pronunciation Page. It’s jiff. Here’s evidence.
Cryptographic Right Answers. Best practise recommendations for cryptography: “While some people argue that you should never use cryptographic primitives directly and that trying to teach people cryptography just makes them more likely to shoot themselves in their proverbial feet, I come from a proud academic background and am sufficiently optimistic about humankind that I think it’s a good idea to spread some knowledge around.”
Exactly how well did the BNP do where you live? Guardian journalists spent a day and a half calling round different local authorities to get a proper breakdown of the European election results (which are only officially published in aggregate) and published the results as a spreadsheet on the Datablog.
Exclusive: The Future of Facebook Usernames. I have to admit I was planning to just let Facebook get on with it, assuming that the OpenID provider part would show up of its own accord—but maybe I should write a thoughtful and persuasive essay about it after all.
Styling buttons to look like links. Nat has a neat trick for styling submit buttons to look like regular links—so there’s absolutely no excuse for using a “delete” link when you should be using a POST request.
Augmenting photos—with OSM! “You climbed up a mountain and took a photo ... but it’s 2009! Why doesn’t it have all kind of magic over the top of it.”—Marmota matches your landscape photos to height field data, then overlays data from OpenStreetMap mapped to the contours of the photograph.
The Twitpocalypse is Near: Will Your Twitter Client Survive? Twitter tweet IDs will shortly tick over past the maximum signed 32 bit integer, potentially breaking applications. I learnt this lesson when the same thing happened to Flickr photo IDs: never store numeric IDs from external systems as integers, always use strings.
The Straight Choice | The election leaflet project. Nice crowdsourcing app by Richard Pope, Francis Irving and Julian Todd—UK political leaflets are hard to keep tabs on due to the way they are distributed over small geographical areas, so this site encourages you to take photos of leaflets delivered to your home and tag them with postcode, party and key topics.
Installing Django, Solr, Varnish and Supervisord with Buildout. Useful, detailed instructions... but I still think this stuff is Way Too Difficult at the moment. I’m a big fan of the idea of sites that are assembled from multiple smaller web services talking HTTP to each other, but ensuring all the moving parts stay running is massively more painful than just running Apache and MySQL.
walking papers lives. Round trip mapping: print out a map from OpenStreetMap, walk around annotating it with a pen, then scan the result back in (a QR code ensures the area and orientation is recognised) . Specifically targeted at eye-level stuff which can’t be collected using GPS or aerial imagery alone. When I grow up, I want to be Mike Migurski.
Daniel’s Daily Monster (via) Jon Hicks: “Every week day I draw a little monster card to go in my son’s lunchbox.” Geek dads rock.
MongoDB—Capped Collections. Collections with a size limit that automatically expire older entries are interesting—useful for things like a “recent searches on this site” feature.
Mapstraction API Sandbox. Andrew Turner’s new tool for exploring the Mapstraction JavaScript library, which provides a unified code interface to 12 different mapping services
TOSBack | The Terms-Of-Service Tracker. Fantastic idea (and implementation) from the EFF—a site that currently tracks 44 website policy documents and highlights changes to them using a diff engine (from Drupal). A global RSS feed is available—it would be useful if individual feeds for different sites and organisations were also provided.
Knockbrex Castle. I’m off to a Scottish castle with 11 fellow geeks for /dev/fort—offline for six days, back next Saturday.
Perl 6: The MAIN sub (via) "Calling subs and running a typical Unix program from the command line is visually very similar: you can have positional, optional and named arguments." - that's exactly what I was thinking when I came up with optfunc.
PostgreSQL Development Priorities. The top two for 8.4 are “Simple built-in replication” and “Upgrade-in-place”, Josh Berkus is seeking feedback on priorities for future work on 8.5.
optfunc. Command line parsing libraries in Python such as optparse frustrate me because I can never remember how to use them without consulting the manual. optfunc is a new experimental interface to optparse which works by introspecting a function definition (including its arguments and their default values) and using that to construct a command line argument parser. Feedback and suggestions welcome!
TiddlyPocketBook. Paul Downey took Nat’s dinky pocketbooks CSS and combined it with TiddlyWiki to create a single page pocketbook editor.
Announcing Google Maps API v3. Sounds like a complete rewrite, with performance as the key goal. Only a developer preview at the moment, but my favourite feature is that API keys are no longer required.