Blogmarks
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Simple Update Protocol: Update. Already implemented by more than five services, each of which now have near-real-time updates in to the FriendFeed syndication engine.
Amazon SimpleDB—Now With Select. So now all three of Yahoo!, Amazon and Google have invented their own SQL-like languages (YQL, SimpleDB and GQL)—though it looks like Yahoo!’s is the only one that attempts to provide joins.
Integrating Facebook Connect with Django in 15 minutes. Django authentication middleware that calls the Facebook REST API using a cookie set by Facebook Connect and checks if that person is your Facebook friend. Despite most of the magic happening on the server you still need Facebook’s JavaScript to set that cookie in the first place.
Microsoft: Big Security Hole in All IE Versions. Looks like a 0-day that’s being actively exploited.
Adobe: Akamai Download Manager FAQ. Tip for Adobe: if the bizarre, buggy custom Java applet you force people to use to download your software requires an FAQ this long, maybe you should provide a “just do it the way everyone else does” option.
husk.org. a flickr machine tag browser (via) Flickr recently added API methods for exploring the machine tags used by the community. Paul Mison has built a neat OS X Finder style interface for exploring them, using JSONP and jQuery.
Now You Can Sign Into Friend Connect Sites With Your Twitter ID. Great. Now even Google is asking me for my Twitter password. Slow clap. How’s that Twitter OAuth beta coming along?
How to install lxml python module on mac os 10.5 (leopard). Instructions that work! Finally, I can find out what all the fuss is about.
A Few Corrections To “On Packaging”. From Ian Bicking.
How Tarsnap uses Amazon Web Services (via) Useful case study, including some thoughts on SimpleDB.
On packaging. James Bennett discusses the problems with setuptools (and ruby gems), and recommends Ian Bicking’s pip as a setuptools replacement.
Showers and UI design. UI issues aside, why is it so hard to build a shower where the settings for freezing cold and scaldingly hot are more than a couple of millimeters apart?
ZooBorns. Best blog idea ever: news and photos of baby animals born in zoos around the world. Nicely categorised as well.
Scaling memcached at Facebook. Fascinating techie details on how Facebook forked memcache to use UDP and increase performance from 50,000 requests a second to 200,000. Now running on 800 servers with 28 TB of memory, and their code is on GitHub. (They may scale like crazy, but they can’t put their blog entry title in the title element?)
ETags And Modification Times In Django. Part of Malcolm’s series of tutorials on implementing advanced HTTP concepts in Django.
Yahoo! Query Language Console. Neat developer tool for playing around with YQL.
YQL—converting the web to JSON with mock SQL. YQL just got a whole lot more interesting to me—I had no idea they were exposing an HTML and RSS scraping tool over a JSONP API in addition to all of the Yahoo! web service methods.
Freebase Sets (via) Give it some topics and it will tell you what they have in common and show further topics matching the same rules. Kind of like the old Google Labs sets tool but this one shows its workings.
Extending jQuery’s selector capabilities. I already knew this was possible, but the examples James Padolsey provides are eye-opening—I especially like his clever :data selector extension which lets you write CSS selectors that query against jQuery’s custom “data” DOM element storage in a manner similar to CSS2 attribute selectors.
Facebook’s new signup process. It looks like they’ve dropped the “enter your password twice” pattern. Is this really a good idea? I suppose if people mis-type it they can always use forgotten password to set a new one.
lxml: an underappreciated web scraping library. I just wish I could get the wretched thing to install on OS X Leopard without resorting to MacPorts.
Spock Proxy. A MySQL Proxy fork (no Lua) that concentrates solely on sharding, by parsing incoming SQL statements and redirecting them across multiple databases. There are some limitations on the SQL that can be handled (no nested queries, joins across a maximum of two tables) but generally it looks pretty impressive.
Visual Event. External code loading bookmarklet that visualises the JavaScript events hooked up to the current page, and lets you view the source code of the event handling function for each one. Only works for events added by jQuery, YUI or MooTools since those libraries maintain a cache of event handlers that they add, to work around the standard DOM’s omission of handler introspection.
Conern over London parks vote. London is allocating 4 million pounds to improve parks around the city based on the results of an internet vote. Tom Steinberg: “Anyone in my team could knock up a script to vote with plausible looking data thousands of times, in about 30 minutes.”
BBC Programmes iPhone webapp experiment. More clever BBC hackery from Duncan Robertson, a really classy iPhone web app for viewing the BBC’s TV schedules, built against the BBC Programmes API with source code available.
Ubuntu and Debian AMIs for Amazon EC2. Exactly what it says on the tin.
Noncontiguous area cartograms. a.k.a. really funky data visualisation maps. Includes lots of examples, plus ActionScript 3 source code.
ptth (Reverse HTTP) implementation in a browser using Long Poll COMET. Donovan Preston experiments with the cleverly named idea of ptth, where servers send HTTP requests to clients.
Kapow SMS Gateway. Looks like a solid provider for sending and receiving SMS messages, with APIs provided over both e-mail and HTTP in both directions.
OurDelta Builds for MySQL (via) A community supported “alternative distro” of MySQL, incorporating new features from Google and other sources by maintaining a clean set of patches against the MySQL source tree (which I guess is why it’s not considered a fork). I recognise some of the patches from the excellent “High Performance MySQL, 2nd Edition”.