Blogmarks
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Nose 0.11 released. My favourite Python testing tool just got some really neat new features, including the ability to parallelize tests across multiple processes (hence CPUs) using the multiprocess module, Xunit XML output for integration with continuous integration tools and a --failed switch to re-run only the last batch of failed tests.
mmalone’s django-caching. Mike Malone shares code used by Pownce to add QuerySet level caching to Django. It’s a smart implementation—a CachingQuerySet class inspects the arguments passed to get(), and if they’re just a straight forward exact PK lookup hits memcache for the object before hitting the database. Signals are used to invalidate the cache.
oauth-signpost. The Qype API uses OAuth to sign client requests with the developer’s API key, so it’s not surprising to see them release a Java OAuth signing library compatible with Google’s Android mobile platform.
ericflo’s django-tokyo-sessions. A Django sessions backend using Tokyo Cabinet, via Tokyo Tyrant and the PyTyrant library. A fast key/value store is a much better solution for sessions than a relational database.
hash_ring 1.2. A Python library for consistent hashing with memcached, using MD5 and the same algorithm as libketama. Exposes an interface that is identical to regular memcache making this a drop-in replacement.
djangopeople.net on GitHub. I’ve released the source code for Django People, the geographical community site developed last year by myself and Natalie Downe (it hasn’t otherwise been touched since April last year, so it needs porting to Django 1.1). If you want a new feature on the site, implement it and I’ll see about merging it in.
Quack Remedies Spread Faster *Because* They Don’t Work. “... because (a) most people eventually get better on their own (and then blame it on the treatment), but (b) people adopt treatments based primarily on what they see other people doing, rather than by looking at scientific evidence. Basically, the longer you stay sick, the more time other people have to imitate you.”
Why I don’t love JavaScript’s Module Pattern. Jonathan Snook points out that the module pattern (where private functionality is hidden in a closure and only public methods are revealed to outside scopes) makes code a lot harder to debug. I use the module pattern for pretty much everything, not because I want to keep stuff private but more to avoid any chance of leaking out in to the global namespace. If I need to debug a value I temporarily assign it as a property on the global window object.
Coupling asynchronous scripts. More from Steve Souders, this time discussing methods to cause externally loaded scripts to execute in the correct order, obeying dependencies. Surprisingly there’s no mention of YUI loader or the Dojo packaging system.
Loading Scripts Without Blocking. Steve Souders is publishing extracts from his new book, “Even Faster Web Sites”. Here’s a systematic study of different JavaScript loading methods, along with a decision tree for picking the most appropriate one for your application.
django-piston. Promising looking Django mini-framework for creating RESTful APIs, from the bitbucket team. Ticks all of Jacob’s boxes, even including built-in pluggable authentication support with HTTP Basic, Digest and OAuth out of the box.
REST worst practices. Jacob Kaplan-Moss’ thoughts on the characteristics of a well designed Django REST API library, from November 2008.
Building a Better JavaScript Profiler with WebKit. Clever hack from Francisco Tolmasky which solves the problem of JavaScript profilers showing ? as the name of any anonymous functions. He patched the WebKit profiler to look for a displayName attribute on a function and show that as the function name instead.
With YQL Execute, the Internet becomes your database. This is nuts (in a good way). Yahoo!’s intriguing universal SQL-style XML/JSONP web service interface now supports JavaScript as a kind of stored procedure language, meaning you can use JavaScript and E4X to screen-scrape web pages, then query the results with YQL.
whine flu, railsmalefail 2009. Danny quotes the smartest take on the CouchDB/pr0n controversy: “It’s about presenting women as ’the other,’ not ’us.’ It would have been just as offensive if all the women shown were domineering mothers in aprons, shaking their fingers and threatening with rolling pins.”
moot wins, Time Inc. loses. The Time.com poll hack was more sophisticated than I first thought... Time implemented reCAPTCHA half way through the voting period, but the 4chan community fought back with a custom interface that crowdsourced the job of voting and let individuals submit up to 30 votes a minute.
Ubuntu brings advanced Screen features to the masses. Ubuntu 9.04’s screen-profiles package adds a taskbar to screen and emulates the gnome panel. You can even add a widget showing the cost of your current EC2 session.
python-sqlparse (via) Python library for re-identing SQL statements. This could make debugging Django’s generated SQL a whole lot easier. You can try the library out using an App Engine hosted application (complete with an API).
A new leaf. George Oates is now heading up the Open Library project at the Internet Archive. Sounds like a perfect match.
Google container data center tour (on YouTube). 45,000 servers in 45 shipping containers, along with some serious looking plumbing.
A Curious Course on Coroutines and Concurrency. David Beazley’s sequel to last year’s mind-expanding “Generator Tricks for System Programmers”, perfect for if you’ve ever puzzled over what exactly you can use Python’s generator-based coroutine support for.
OAuth Security Advisory 2009.1. It’s a show-stopper: an attacker can start an OAuth permission request flow from a consumer site, then trick another user from the same site in to completing that flow and hence authorising the attacker to act on their behalf. A fix to the spec is forthcoming; in the meantime, don’t start an OAuth flow from an untrusted location.
The First Ten Things the New CEO of MySpace Should Do. From the always thought provoking Jason Calacanis.
And Now For Something Entire... Oooh! Shiny! Alex Russell on O3D, the new 3D browser plugin from Google that makes OpenGL accessible to JavaScript (and embeds V8 so performance won’t suck even on slower browsers).
Finding and fixing memory leaks in Python. Using Dozer, a clever piece of WSGI middleware which displays sparklines of Python object counts and allows you to introspect them, using the gc module under the hood.
Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores. Another ringing endorsement for Tokyo Cabinet, this time from Leonard Lin.
Inside the precision hack. How 4chan members subverted a Time.com online poll to reorder the options and spell out their own message. Partly poor application design from Time (the first version used a GET request without input validation), but I challenge anyone to design an anonymous online poll that can’t be fixed using the more sophisticated techniques 4chan eventually deployed based on HTTP proxies.
pubsubhubbub. From Brad Fitzpatrick, a simple but clever way of using web hooks (HTTP callbacks) to inform subscribers that an Atom feed has updated in almost real-time—solving the constant polling problem and making it easier for small sites to offer publish-subscribe APIs. Any Atom feed can delegate subscriber updates to a “hub” server. An example hub server implementation is provided running on App Engine.
peeping into memcached. “Peep uses ptrace to freeze a running memcached server, dump the internal key metadata, and return the server to a running state”—you can then load the resulting data in to MySQL using LOAD LOCAL INFILE and analyse it using standard SQL queries.
Phusion Passenger for nginx. Passenger (aka mod_rails / mod_rack) enables easy deployment of Rails and Ruby apps under Apache... and the latest version adds support for nginx as well. It works as an HTTP proxy and process manager, spawning worker processes and forwarding HTTP requests to them via a request queue. It can also handle Python WSGI applications—anyone tried it out for that yet?