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The Django Book: Version 2.0 (via) Adrian’s working on a new edition of the Django Book updated to cover version 1.0. As with the first edition, it will be available free online in addition to a published Apress paperback. The first three chapters are now available.
Manage Amazon EC2 With New Web-Based AWS Management Console. Finally! I’m amazed it took Amazon so long to do this. Managing EC2 instances from a custom Firefox extension was pretty bizarre. It’s a very nice interface, built on top of YUI. Unfortunately you still have to manage your entire virtual server farm using a single shared Amazon account.
How we use IRC at Last.fm. With IRCCat, an elegant Java IRC bot that accepts Twitter-like messages to a network port (generally sent using netcat) and directs them to a user or channel.
why’s potion. why’s latest project is a small, fast language (JIT to x86/x86-64) which seems to take ideas from Ruby, Lua, Python and who knows where else. Everything is based around objects, closures and mixins, with the delightful inclusion of scoped mixins so you can modify an object only within a certain module (hence avoiding Ruby’s action-at-a-distance problems).
Wetpaint no longer supports OpenID. I missed this, but they turned off their OpenID support in November due to low usage and high maintenance costs.
Gaza OpenStreetMap Update. “We’re looking into purchasing satellite imagery for the north or the entirety of Gaza. There’s actually B/W imagery available from yesterday!”
Weak Password Brings “Happiness” to Twitter Hacker. The full story on the Twitter admin account hack. I bet there are a LOT of web applications out there that don’t track and rate-limit failed password attempts.
The Twitter administrator hack was a dictionary attack. I quoted Blaine earlier suggesting that the recent Twitter mass-hack was due to a Twitter admin password being scooped up by a rogue third party application—this was not the case, as Alex Payne explains in a comment.
Update on the “antipatterns for sale” Twply auction (via) The collected username and password database is NOT included in the auction.
Travel time to major cities: A global map of Accessibility (via) Visualisation developed by the European Commission and the World Bank.
MemcacheDB. A server that speaks the memcache protocol but uses Berkeley DB for reliable persistent storage. Speedy: 20,000 writes/second and 60,000+ reads/second. Includes a full replication mechanism (with custom memcache protocol commands) based on Berkeley DB’s.
Talking about OpenID. “So a relying party walks in to a bar...”
Wikipedia over DNS. Added to my ~/bin/ directory as dns-wikipedia.sh: host -t txt $1.wp.dg.cx
Antipatterns for sale. Twply collected over 800 Twitter usernames and passwords (OAuth can’t arrive soon enough) and was promptly auctioned off on SitePoint to the highest bidder.
OSM 2008: A Year of Edits (via) Stunningly beautiful visualisation of the year in OpenStreetMap.
Researchers Show How to Forge Site Certificates. Use an MD5 collision to create two certificates with the same hash, one for a domain you own and another for amazon.com. Get Equifax CA to sign your domain’s certificate using the outdated “MD5 with RSA” signing method. Copy that signature on to your home-made amazon.com certificate to create a fake certificate for Amazon that will be accepted by any browser.
Oakland crime maps XI: how close, and how bad? Michal Migurski’s experiments with heat maps for Oakland Crimespotting, using OpenStreetMap data as that allows him to position his heat map layer underneath the street labels, keeping them legible.
Represent. Andrei Scheinkman and Derek Willis describe how they built the NYTimes Represent feature using GeoDjango and PostGIS.
Blocks in Objective-C.
Closures are coming soon to Objective-C - interesting syntax, a regular curly brace block preceded by a caret ^{ ... }.
ReferenceError: console is not defined. Since Firebug 1.2 you need to call window.loadFirebugConsole() in order for console.log and friends to work.
Merb gets merged into Rails 3! Huge news. Of particular interest is the new focus on “framework agnosticism”, whereby Rails will aim to play well with people wishing to use alternative ORMs, template mechanisms and so forth. Rails has previously suffered from a reputation for getting in your way if you deviate from its opinions.
How to launch a new product. Jason Calacanis explains how they launched Mahalo Answers, including tips or running your own PR (Jason used to be a reporter so he’s played both sides of that fence).
Using SVG on the Web. I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with SVG recently. Here are some useful tips for including SVG images in HTML and XHTML documents.
Quickchoice—a Speed Dial clone
(via)
Lovely demonstration of the CSS transform property, as supported by modern browsers. The magic is all in the iframe { transform: scale(0.25, 0.25) translate(-1200px, -900px) }
jQuery: Changeset 5990. “Added a new liveQuery/event delegation hybrid method”. Lets you add events that continue to work as new elements are dynamically appended to the DOM, e.g. $(’div p.foo’).live(’click’, fn). Works by adding an event handler to the root document element itself and relying on event bubbling. I have to admit I preferred the earlier proposal of $(’div’).delegate(’p.foo’..), which feels like it should have much better performance—anyone know of a good plugin that supports this?
pygooglechart. I tried a bunch of Python wrappers for Google Charts and liked this one best.
Motorway map of England, Scotland and Wales (via) In the style of Harry Beck’s London Tube map.
jQuery changeset 5985 (via) jQuery trunk has ditched browser sniffing in favour of feature testing, where a small suite of unit-test-like code blocks is used to detect whether a browser supports specific idioms. If the tests fail jQuery still makes assumptions about what the fix is, but it’s not hard to imagine the library eventually using code tests to ensure the fix will work as well.
Represent and GeoDjango. The NYTimes new Represent application is built on GeoDjango.
Represent—NYTimes.com. Superb new application from the NYTimes—a sort of cross between TheyWorkForYou and a news archive search. Enter your address in New York and it tells you your local representatives and shows both their votes and their mentions in the newspaper.