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Django 1.0 alpha 2 release notes (via) The last preview release before the 1.0 beta. Big new features are GeoDjango, pluggable file storage (which went in earlier today) and Jython compatibility. The beta is scheduled for August 14th.
End of Life for PHP 4. Apparently 8/8/8 marks the end of the line for PHP 4—no new releases, no support, not even security patches.
South. A brand new light-weight Django migrations tool from Andrew Godwin. On first glance, this is spookily similar to the system we’ve been putting together at GCap.
This Week in HTML 5—Episode 1.
It looks like the most controversial aspect of the HTML 5 spec has been addressed - now, instead of omitting the alt attribute for user generated content that has no relevant information available, sites are advised to provide an indication of the kind of image expected surrounded by braces, for example alt="{uploaded photo}".
Why “variables” in CSS are harmful. Bert Bos thinks constants or macros in CSS will make it harder to learn. I personally think that the problem with CSS isn’t the learning curve, it’s how difficult it is to maintain later—and I see macros as a great way of reducing that maintainability burden.
GeoDjango Documentation. Merged to Django trunk a few hours ago. The tutorial isn’t there yet, but the rest of the docs are worth exploring.
Facelift Image Replacement. Like sIFR but with JavaScript and a PHP text rendering component. I question the need for the JavaScript if you’re already generating the images on the server, but the actual generation script is nicely done—it makes smart use of ImageMagick and caches the generated images.
simple-thrift-queue (via) Phillip Pearson’s surprisingly concise in-memory message queue written in Python using Facebook’s Thrift library (which is similar to Protocol Buffers, but was open sourced much earlier on). Handles 4,000 requests per second on a laptop.
PDFMiner. Useful looking PDF parsing library in Python—can produce an XML representation of the text and style information in a PDF document.
“THIS IS NOT MLM!!!”—An Appreciation. Merlin Mann explains his fascination with the “cash gifting” pyramid scams that keep cropping up on YouTube.
knol: content w/out context, collaboration, capital, or coruscation. danah boyd: “A system that is driven by individualism quickly becomes a tool for self-promoters”
YouTube: Large Hadron Rap. The first time I saw this I thought it was incredibly dorky. By the third watch I realised I was actually learning things.
The quality of (US) journalism. Just wow.
Silicon Swings and Silicon Roundabouts. Matt Locke’s advice for anyone hoping to build a “Tech Hub” for startups, based on personal experience gained running a media centre in Yorkshire in the 90s.
Beginner’s Guide to Discovery. Extremely approachable introduction by Eran Hammer-Lahav.
Large Hadron Collider nearly ready—The Big Picture. Stunningly beautiful set of photographs of the LHC. I love Big Science.
Changeset 8162. “Implemented a secure password reset form that uses a token and prompts user for new password”—also sneaks base36 encoding and decoding in to Django.
Super User Conditional Page Exception Reporting. The name is almost as long as the code snippet: this serves Django’s debug page to logged in super-users, falling back to the default 500 template for everyone else.
“Simon Willison’s Weblog” on the redesigned Delicious. The new search feature is extremely impressive; I can see myself coming here before hitting Google for some things. I’m not too keen on the way they’re adding ’www’ to the beginning of my URL when they display it though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The law behind “tell a friend” services. Useful guide based on UK law, updated in July 2008.
Silicon Roundabout. Matt Biddulph maps the abundance of interesting startups and tech companies that have popped up around Old Street in London.
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.
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”.
ZeroMQ. Open source message queue optimised for performance: claims 25μsec latency and 2.6 million messages per second.
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