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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.
Reverse HTTP Demo (via) This is a bit of a brain teaser—a web server running in JavaScript in your browser which uses long polling comet to respond to incoming HTTP requests channelled through a “Reverse HTTP” proxy.
Early Day Motion to support Bletchley Park Museum. Time to fire up WriteToThem.com and drop your MP a friendly note of encouragement.
The Anatomy Of The Twitter Attack. Long-winded explanation of the recent Twitter break-in, but you can scroll to the bottom for a numbered list summary. The attacker first broke in to a Twitter employee’s personal Gmail account by “recovering” it against an expired Hotmail account (which the attacker could hence register themselves). They gained access to more passwords by searching for e-mails from badly implemented sites that send you your password in the clear.
Memcached 1.4.0 released. The big new feature is the (optional) binary protocol, which enables other features such as CAS-everywhere and efficient client-side replication. Maintainer Dustin Sallings has also released some useful sounding EC2 instances which automatically assign nearly all of their RAM to memcached on launch and shouldn’t need any further configuration.
Farewell to Mashup Editor. It’s not just Microsoft Popfly that’s shutting down—Google Mashup Editor will be gone in four weeks time (this was announced in January). You get to keep your code, but I don’t know enough about Mashup Editor to know if the code is usable once the system has shut down.
Where was the ’editorial viewpoint’ at the News Innovation unconference? Martin Belam points out that a problem with unconferences when applied to audiences outside the technology world is that techies who know how the system operates will inadvertently take over the event, skewing the conversation towards technical topics. Not an insurmountable problem, but one that organisers should probably take in to account.
Popfly Shutting Down. Yet another reminder that building stuff on a closed-source platform (especially a hosted service) is risky business, even from a vendor as large as Microsoft. This certainly won’t help them make the case for Azure.
Announcing Alice and Wonderland. Continuing the RabbitMQ “stuff to do with rabbits” naming convention, Alice is a RESTful interface to RabbitMQ which exposes information about vhosts/queues/users/exchanges/etc as JSON. Wonderland is a web UI for RabbitMQ implemented as a pure Ajax application which calls Alice.
TurboGears on Sourceforge. Sourceforge recently relaunched, powered by TurboGears 2 and MongoDB. Mark Ramm has the details.
Why an OAuth iframe is a Great Idea. Because users should a) learn to be phished and b) not even be given the option to avoid being phished if they know what they’re doing? No, no and thrice no. If you want to improve the experience, use a popup window so the user can still see the site they are signing in to in the background.
NaCl: Networking and Cryptography library. A new high level cryptography library. “NaCl advances the state of the art by improving security, by improving usability and by improving speed.” Ambitious claims, but DJB is one of the core maintainers.
Nmap 5.00 Release Notes. Released today, “the most important Nmap release since 1997”. New features include Ncat, a powerful netcat alternative, Ndiff, a utility for comparing scan results so you can spot changes to your network, and a new Nmap Scripting Engine using Lua.