Blogmarks
Filters: Sorted by date
Minimal. James Bennett follows Ryan Tomayko’s example and experiments with the minimalist school of blog design.
Spicing Up Embedded JavaScript. John Resig collects the various ways in which a JavaScript interpreter can be hosted by Python, PHP, Perl, Ruby and Java. There are full JS implementations in PHP, Perl and Java; Ruby and Python both have modules that use an embedded SpiderMonkey.
Trebuchets, Geohashes, and Richmond, VA. I love how Randall Munroe lives his life in the spirit of XKCD.
DebugFooter middleware with Pygments sql syntax highlighting. Andreas Marr has enhanced my Django DebugFooter middleware with proper syntax highlighting for the logged SQL.
Censoring the Internet at Paraguay. The state owned telecommunication company DNS hijacked the opposition party’s domain to point at a porn site during the election back in April. Maybe we don’t want a django.py vanity domain after all...
RFC: Django 1.0 roadmap and timeline. Jacob’s proposed target is “early September” for the final 1.0 release.
Saturday Mornings: Going Live! Some 1980s/1990s British nostalgia. I pinched a video of the theme tune from here for my talk on Comet at Brighton SkillSwap.
the tls report (via) Clever service that analyses a web server’s SSL implementation and grades it based on things like the protocols, certificates, ciphers and key lengths it supports. Includes public reports on the top and bottom 20 sites.
Shortcutting render_to_response. I tend to use a simple wrapper function, but the other options described here are worth exploring. This is why I’m so keen on Django’s “take a request object, return a response object” philosophy—it makes it trivial to extend the framework in the direction you want.
Reputation patterns in the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library (via) Pragmatic advice from Yahoo! on encouraging community participation.
Is It OK to Require JavaScript? Not if you can avoid doing so. Unobtrusive JavaScript really isn’t hard if you design it in from the start, and since stackoverflow is a community forum / questions and answers site I have trouble imagining a feature that can’t be made to work without JavaScript.
Ordnance Survey OpenSpace Demo (via) Niall Kennedy threw a demo up on his site—the map seems to load a lot faster than Google Maps and the level of detail once you zoom down to street level is really impressive.
The X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. News to me, but both Google and Yahoo! have supported it since last year. You can add per-page robots exclusion rules in HTTP headers instead of using meta tags, and Google’s version supports unavailable_after which is handy for content with a known limited shelf-life.
OS OpenSpace from Ordnance Survey (via) Ordinance Survey now provide a free JavaScript mapping API for “non-commercial purposes” by “private individuals”. The maps look incredibly detailed, although I can’t find any live API demos on the site (the documentation is illustrated with screenshots).
Updated jQuery Bookmarklet. Nicer than my own “Inject jQuery” bookmarklet because it drops in a temporary message confirming that jQuery has been imported (or telling you that jQuery was already present).
Geohash for spatial index and search. Nice, clear explanation of what a Geohash is. It’s a way of encoding a lat/lon position as a short string, with the useful property that similar co-ordinates with more or less significant figures share a common prefix in their geohash.
An interview with 280 North on Objective-J and Cappuccino. Fantastic comment thread with involvement from the guys who created Objective-J. Just like Objective-C, Objective-J is a preprocessor that runs against regular JavaScript source files so you can use JavaScript and Objective-J idioms interchangeably.
280slides and Objective-J. 280 slides uses an Objective-C clone written in 13KB of JavaScript. I have to admit I’m completely baffled as to why you would want to use Objective C instead of JavaScript, but evidently it worked fantastically well for them.
LHCountdown.com. 30 days until they turn on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Petition to Save Bletchley Park (via) On the 10 Downing Street petition site so unlike most online petitions this one might actually achieve something (though you must be a British resident to sign).
Could Zeppelins soon grace our skies again? The new Zeppelin NT can travel at 125 mph, the same speed as a high speed train—and could cross the Atlantic in 43 hours. This is the same model Airship Ventures (the Californian startup) are using.
Velocity: A Distributed In-Memory Cache from Microsoft. I’d been wondering what Microsoft ecosystem developers were using in the absence of memcached. Is Velocity the first Windows platform implementation of this idea?
The Machine That Changed the World: The Paperback Computer. This third episode (the second has also been published) is awesome—Sketchpad (the first GUI), NLS, Xerox PARC, the Homebrew Computer Club, Apple and the Macintosh, Lotus 123, Microsoft, and Virtual Reality presented as the “future” of computing. Worth investing an hour to watch it.
Elliotte Rusty Harold: Why XHTML. “XHTML makes life harder for document authors in exchange for making life easier for document consumers.”—since there are a lot more document authors than there are tools for consuming, this seems like an argument AGAINST XHTML to me.
Yahoo! Address Book API Delivered. At last, now there’s no excuse to ask your users for their Yahoo! username and password just so you can scrape their address book.
Google Finance Comet. Google Finance now shows live stock quotes, updated by Comet.
The Machine That Changed the World: Great Brains. I’ve been really enjoying Andy Baio’s series of out-of-print documentaries on technology and the internet, so a few weeks ago I got in touch with him to tip him off about the existence of “The Dream Machine”, a series on the history of computers from 1992 that had a huge effect on my then 11-year-old self. Thanks to Twitter, Jesse Legg and Andy’s awesome foraging skills he’s dug up the US version (same series, different name) and is posting it online. I really can’t recommend it enough!
Bird taught to fly by a MAN. ... but the Sun have video.
The orphaned baby heron that had to be taught how to fly. Hooray for “Dude” the Heron. The Mail on Sunday have the best photos...
SquirrelFish. WebKit’s JavaScript engine was no slouch, but that hasn’t stopped them from replacing it with a brand new “register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention”. It runs 1.6x faster and has the Best Logo Ever.