Blogmarks
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App Engine Fan: Efficient Global Counters. Implementing efficient counters in Google App Engine, using shards and/or memcached.
Facebook Open Platform. Facebook have open-sourced (under a modified MPL, does it still fit the OSI definition?) the code for the Facebook Platform, including their implementations of FBML, FQL and FBJS. This is no small release; the tarball weighs in at 40MB and includes libfbml, which depends on Firefox 2.0.0.4 for its HTML parser!
Scaring people with fullScreen. Unsurprisingly, you can work around the “Press Esc to exit full screen mode” message in Flash by distracting the user with lots of similar looking visual noise. This opens up opportunities for cunning phishing attacks that simulate the chrome of the entire operating system. EDIT: Comments point out that text entry via the keyboard is still disabled, limiting the damage somewhat.
MagLev recap. Avi Bryant reports on the RailsConf demo of MagLev, a new closed-source Ruby implementation built with Gemstone (Smalltalk) technology that packs some impressive features (transaction based concurrency across multiple VMs) and exciting benchmarks (6-100x faster than the standard Ruby interpreter).
Video speech matching on TheyWorkForYou.com. Launched this morning at BarCamp London by Matthew Somerville—TheyWorkForYou now has video from BBC Parliament but they need your help matching it exactly to their transcripts from Hansard. Neat example of a game that helps process large amounts of data.
I’ve (probably) been using Google App Engine for a week longer than you have. My snappily titled App Engine introduction, presented at BarCamp London 4.
Python + Hadoop = Flying Circus Elephant. Last.fm have released Dumbo, a Python module that lets you easily write Hadoop map/reduce tasks using Python and generators.
Obscure bugs revisited: IE, HTTPS and plugins. Filed for future reference: IE breaks mysteriously if you serve it up plugin content (e.g. Flash) over HTTPS with a no-cache header—it deletes the file from cache before the plugin software gets a chance to open it.
Twitter, or Architecture Will Not Save You. Kellan is not an armchair architect. He also doesn’t mention Rails once. Well worth reading.
Google Gears renamed “Gears”. “We want to make it clear that Gears isn’t just a Google thing. We see Gears as a way for everyone to get involved with upgrading the web platform.” Support for Firefox 3 and Safari is being added and Opera are integrating Gears with both their desktop and mobile browsers.
Google Earth in a browser (sort of), Scriptable, a quick peek and poke. Dan Catt on Google’s new browser plugin version of Google Earth... which conveniently exposes a JavaScript API to the browser in the form of the “ge” object, which can then be poked at interactively using Firebug.
Using Memcache with Google App Engine. Brad Fitzpatrick’s 20% time project.
OpenID phishing demo (via) A demonstration of the OpenID man-in-the-middle phishing attack. idproxy.net OpenIDs are immune to this particular variant due to the landing page not asking for your password (the phishing site could still provide their own redesigned landing page and hope users don’t notice though).
Google AJAX Libraries API (via) Google are hosting copies of jQuery, Prototype, mooTools and Dojo on their CDN, with a promise to permanently host different versions and an optional JavaScript API to dynamically load the most recent version of a library. I wish they’d stop capitalising Ajax though.
Tracking Christmas Cheer with Google Charts. Brian Suda’s Google Charts tutorial on 24 ways has proved invaluable for figuring out how to handle grid lines and axis labels, both of which are pretty unintuitive (and not hugely helped by the official documentation).
QUnit. The jQuery unit testing framework is now documented and supported as a separate project.
Twitter / MarsPhoenix. NASA’s Mars Phoenix lander, due to land on the planet today, has a Twitter account. Bio: “I dig Mars!”.
Debugging Django, a slidecast. I used SlideShare’s slidecast tool for the first time to synchronize audio of my Django London User Group talk with the slides. The talk included several live demos which aren’t represented in the slides so it’s a bit piecemeal in places.
Easy way to reset your sleep cycle: Stop eating (via) New research shows that you can quickly reset your sleep cycle by not eating for 12-16 hours and then using breakfast to flip in to another time zone. I get clobbered by jet lag when I fly from the US to Europe; this could be really useful.
LastGraph 3. Andrew Godwin’s last.fm profile visualisation tool, now in its third incarnation.
Walk, Don’t Run (via) A retrospective look at Grim Fandango (possibly my favourite game of all time) and the fan community that are keeping it alive, nearly a decade after it was first released.
Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine. Too much great stuff in here to attempt to summarise.
modswgi: Debugging Techniques. mod_wsgi is excellent software, and the documentation is equally superb. I used these instructions recently to run the Python debugger inside a running instance of Apache, which helped my track down some import errors that weren’t occurring with Django’s development server.
On the spot. Did you know Jupiter just grew a third spot? Apparently the spots are storms, and the largest has been raging for several centuries.
Search Engine Optimization Through Hoax News. Devious new black-hat SEO technique: invent a news story that’s pure link-bait. The recent “13 year old steals dad’s credit card to buy hookers” story was a hoax: it was a pure play for PageRank.
On-board vs. Off-board Comet. Useful distinction. On-board comet runs on the same server as the rest of your application; Off-board comet is served from a separate server (generally a subdomain) and a separate stack. If you want to stick with PHP, Rails or Django for the rest of your site off-board comet looks like the way to go.
AOP aspect of JavaScript with Dojo. Fantastic post—concisely explains Aspect Oriented Programming, then shows how Dojo’s dojox.lang.aspect brings AOP to JavaScript, including some really useful built-in aspects for logging, profiling and more. Aspects are like Python decorators on steroids.
GeoNames Commercial Webservices. Wikinear has been loading slowly recently, so I’ve signed up for GeoNames very reasonably priced commercial plan which provides access to better servers at their end. This might speed things up to the point that I can reliably run the site on Google AppEngine, which times out aggressively if an external HTTP request takes too long.
Dopplr place googlemaps, with and without Yahoo Geo API bounding box adjustment. Dopplr uses Geonames for most geo information, but is now mixing in bounding box data from the Yahoo! Geo web service to improve the default zoom level for their maps. The JSON callback API means no server-side code is required on Dopplr’s end.
Firebug Command Line API. Another thing I didn’t know about Firebug: you can set a breakpoint at the start of a function with “debug(fn)” and log all calls to it with “monitor(fn)”.