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Spawning + Django. The latest version of Spawning (a fast Python web server built on top of the Eventlet non-blocking coroutine networking library) can run Django applications out of the box, using threads and processes to work around the blocking nature of the ORM’s database drivers. Eric Florenzano reports better performance than Apache and mod_wsgi, and is now hosting his site on it.

# 31st July 2008, 10:56 am / comet, django, eric-florenzano, eventlet, python, spawning

DjangoCon & Django 1.0 updates. DjangoCon tickets will be released in two batches of 100. The first set will be available at 12 noon UTC on Thursday July 31st; the second set will be released at 6pm UTC on Friday August 1st.

# 30th July 2008, 10:25 am / django, djangocon, events, python, tickets

OSCON in 37 minutes. 45 OSCON talks summarised by their presenters in just 37 minutes, compiled by Gregg Pollack. I get to rant about OpenID for a minute at 27:22.

# 29th July 2008, 11:59 pm / gregg-pollack, openid, oscon, video

json-head. I’ve deployed another App Engine mini-app, which provides a JSON-P API for running HEAD requests against an arbitrary URL (useful for checking things like Content-Length and Content-Type headers and whether a URL returns 200). App Engine’s urlfetch limitations mean it can only deal with port 80 and 443 requests.

# 29th July 2008, 3:41 pm / google-app-engine, json, jsonhead, jsonp, projects

Extra fields on many-to-many relationships (via) Checked in just over an hour ago, Django now lets you specify a custom “through” table for a ManyToManyField. Great work by Eric Florenzano.

# 29th July 2008, 1:58 pm / django, eric-florenzano, manytomany, python, through

Silicon Roundabout. Matt Biddulph maps the abundance of interesting startups and tech companies that have popped up around Old Street in London.

# 28th July 2008, 1:36 am / london, matt-biddulph, oldstreet, siliconroundabout, startups

The Price of Anonymity: Our Principles? Alex Russell calls for a constructive step towards better gender balance in open source: make it clear that misogynistic, offensive and lewd behaviour will not be tolerated by open source communities and bake that policy in to community codes of conduct.

# 28th July 2008, 12:44 am / alex-russell, community, misogynistic, open-source, women

Amazon S3 Availability Event: July 20, 2008. Don’t let the newspeak put you off; this is an honest and informative description of the bug that took down S3 last Sunday, although it does include the world’s longest way of saying “we turned it off and on again”.

# 27th July 2008, 5:42 pm / amazon, newspeak, s3, uptime

ZeroMQ. Open source message queue optimised for performance: claims 25μsec latency and 2.6 million messages per second.

# 27th July 2008, 4:57 pm / message-queues, messaging, performance, zeromq

How Comet Brings Instant Messaging to meebo. “What started off as a hack appears to be fulfilling one of the most basic needs of the Web, which is live synchronous interaction”—Jian Shen

# 27th July 2008, 11:18 am / comet, javascript, jianshen, meebo

Battery Statistics. Run “ioreg -w0 -l | grep Capacity” on a MacBook or MacBook Pro to find out the DesignCapacity (original) and MaxCapacity (current) of your laptop’s battery.

# 27th July 2008, 11:05 am / battery, capacity, corstencurdt, macbook, macbookpro, power

FLOSS Weekly 34: Django. Randal Schwartz interviewed Jacob Kaplan-Moss at OSCON for the consistently excellent FLOSS Weekly podcast.

# 27th July 2008, 9:47 am / django, flossweekly, jacob-kaplan-moss, open-source, podcasts, python, randalschwartz

Firebug Lite 1.2 (via) Huge upgrade to the IE/Opera/Safari bookmarklet version of Firebug—it now has DOM element inspection, XHR tracking and an interactive console, among other features.

# 27th July 2008, 9:30 am / bookmarklets, debugging, firebug, firebuglite, javascript

Your guilt at work. If ten people sign up for a tenner-a-month ORG membership and send their confirmation code to Danny O’Brien, he’ll put out a special one-off issue of NTK!

# 25th July 2008, 1:11 am / danny-obrien, ntk, openrightsgroup, org

Silverback has launched! Clearleft’s “guerilla usability” software for OS X Tiger and Leopard—specialist screencasting software optimised for conducting usability tests.

# 24th July 2008, 6:14 pm / clearleft, screencasting, silverback, usability

The Open Web Foundation. Launched today at OSCON, an independent, non-profit organisation dedicated to incubating and protecting new specifications like OAuth and oEmbed. The focus is incubation, licensing, copyright and community.

# 24th July 2008, 5:40 pm / copyright, oauth, oembed, openweb, openwebfoundation, oscon, oscon08

Dojango version 0.3 released. A reusable Django application that provides Dojo, helper functions (dojo.data integration) and tools for switching between Dojo versions.

# 24th July 2008, 12:47 am / django, dojango, dojo, javascript, python

Quick OAuth Notes. Yesterday’s XMPP Summit resulted in a proposed standard for using OAuth to authenticate XMPP streams.

# 23rd July 2008, 6:14 pm / oauth, xmpp

window.name Transport. The cleverest use of the window.name messaging hack I’ve seen yet: Dojo now has dojox.io.windowName.send for safe, performant cross-domain messaging.

# 23rd July 2008, 4:25 pm / crossdomain, dojo, javascript, windowname

How Dopplr learns. Dopplr uses global and personal trip histories to disambiguate place names, and your friends’ schedules to help disambiguate dates in airline confirmation emails.

# 23rd July 2008, 4:17 pm / dates, dopplr, machine-learning

Drizzle, Clouds, “What If?”. Exciting news in the world of MySQL: Drizzle is a new project to produce a massively stripped down version of the database server—InnoDB/UTF8 only, no permissions, views, stored procedures or triggers, simplified field types, optimised for the common subset of functionality used by web apps. MySQL’s Firefox?

# 23rd July 2008, 12:30 am / databases, drizzle, innodb, mysql, utf8

Email Address to URL Transformation (EAUT) specification now available! Allows OpenID users to login using their E-mail address, which is converted in to an OpenID URL based on rules specified in an XRDS document attached to the root domain. Seems like a good idea to me.

# 22nd July 2008, 7:30 pm / eaut, email, openid, urls, xrds

Python BoF and Django Drinkup (via) At OSCON? Come along to the Jax Bar tonight (Tuesday 22nd) from 7pm to 10pm to hang out with fellow Pythoneers and Djangonaughts.

# 22nd July 2008, 6:48 pm / bof, django, oscon, python, social

Replacing Django’s Template Language With Jinja2. Part of Will Larson’s series on taking advantage of Django’s loose coupling.

# 22nd July 2008, 5:18 pm / django, jinja, loosecoupling, python, will-larson

ComicVine.com. Also powered by Django, Whiskey Media’s comic book encyclopedia and community. 43,000 characters and 94,000 issues and counting.

# 22nd July 2008, 7:12 am / comics, django, whiskeymedia

GiantBomb.com. Launched today, powered by Django—a combination of (mostly ex-Gamespot) quality editorial content and a massive structured wiki of every computer game ever released. This is going to be a lot of fun—all of the crazy detailed content that Wikipedia tends to reject.

# 22nd July 2008, 7:09 am / django, games, giantbomb, wiki, wikipedia

Django 1.0 alpha release notes. The big features are newforms-admin, unicode everywhere, the queryset-refactor ORM improvements and auto-escaping in templates.

# 22nd July 2008, 6:04 am / alpha, autoescaping, django, django-admin, newformsadmin, orm, python, querysetrefactor, unicode

Django 1.0 alpha released! Not meant for production use, but a pretty solid preview of what’s coming in 1.0 proper. The beta is scheduled for August 5th.

# 22nd July 2008, 6:01 am / alpha, django, python

What the Heck is the Open Web? Brad Neuberg is seeking a two sentence definition. Bonus points for answering the following: “If Adobe were to open source Flex/Flash, or Microsoft Silverlight, would that be the Open Web? If so, why? If not, why not?”

# 22nd July 2008, 1:33 am / brad-neuberg, flash, flex, open-source, openweb, silverlight

Years

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