Blogmarks
Filters: Sorted by date
Consumption is also about choice. Tom Armitage’s thoughtful response to Clay Shirky’s Web 2.0 talk on television as “cognitive surplus”.
so-you-wanna-see-an-image (via) WordPress.com use Amazon S3 to store images (presumably to save having to create a massive scalable redundant filesystem themselves) but the images are served via a load balanced memcached / varnishd caching system that they control.
Load Balancer Update. WordPress.com has switched from Pound to nginx for load balancing, resulting in a significant drop in CPU usage. I’ve been using nginx on my little VPS for over a year now with no complaints, nice to know it scales up as well as down.
Adobe and Industry Leaders Establish Open Screen Project (via) Talk about burying the lede... the real story is that Adobe are going to drop the license restriction that prevents other people from implementing SWF players. They’re also publishing the AMF and Flash Cast protocols and removing licensing fees for Flash Player on devices.
Core Techniques and Algorithms in Game Programming. Scarily detailed online book on games programming, including 2D and 3D graphics, AI, multiplayer network code, indoor and outdoor rendering, character animation and much more. UPDATE: Removed the original link, which appeared to be a pirated copy.
The Sea Forts (via) History and stunning photos of British World War II sea forts (kind of steel castles on stilts) seven and a half miles off the coast of Kent.
Promise and Peril for Alternative Ruby Impls. Charles Nutter’s detailed and opinionated overview of the state of twelve different Ruby implementations (six of which are covered in detail).
QuerysetRefactorBranch. What’s new and changed now that queryset-refactor has merged to trunk.
Queryset-refactor branch has been merged into trunk. Malcolm’s latest Django masterpiece is complete.
Multi-Inflection-Point Alert. Dammit, Tim, stop giving away our competitive advantages!
MediaWiki API. Wikipedia’s best kept secret?
Speechification. “A blog of Radio 4. Not about Radio 4 but of it. We point to the bits we like, the bits you might have missed, the bits that someone might have sneakily recorded. Other speech radio from around the world will no doubt find its way here too.”
Python one-liner of the day. I love the idea of publishing one-liners accompanied by one-line test suites.
Mass Attack FAQ. Thousands of IIS Web servers have been infected with an automated mass XSS attack, not through a specific IIS vulnerability but using a universal XSS SQL query that targets SQL Server and modifies every text field to add the attack JavaScript. If an app has even a single SQL injection hole (and many do) it is likely to be compromised.
CSS Variables. Hooray! My number one requested CSS feature (and I know I’m not alone), proposed by Daniel Glazman and David Hyatt so I imagine we’ll see it trialled in WebKit pretty soon.
Internet Asshattery, Armchair Scaling Experts Edition (via) Leonard says what needs to be said about the most recent case of Twitter scaling flame-bait.
Generator Tricks for Systems Programmers. The best tutorial on Python’s powerful generator feature I’ve seen anywhere.
Google AJAX Search API: Flash and Server Side Access. Over a year after Google shot down their SOAP Search API, they’ve quietly released a JSON based one under the guise of supporting “Flash and other non JavaScript environments”. Comes with the strange requirement that an HTTP referer be sent with every request; the API key is optional.
Reading binary files using Ajax. There’s a simple trick for Firefox, and (amazingly) you can get IE to play along using a function written in VBScript.
OSM Super-Strength Export. Awesome new feature on OpenStreetMap: you can browse to anywhere on the map, then hit “export” and download a rendered bitmap or vector (PDF and SVG) image of the currently displayed map—and because it’s OSM there’s no watermark and a very liberal usage license.
Plazes adds Fire Eagle Support. The Plazer software can now automatically update your location in FireEagle based on fingerprinting your laptop’s local network.
ISPs’ Error Page Ads Let Hackers Hijack Entire Web (via) Earthlink in the US served “helpful” links and ads on subdomains that failed to resolve, but the ad serving pages had XSS holes which could be used to launch phishing attacks the principle domain (and I imagine could be used to steal cookies, although the story doesn’t mention that). Seems like a good reason to start using wildcard DNS to protect your subdomains from ISP inteference.
Embedding custom non-visible data in HTML 5. “Every HTML element may have any number of attributes starting with the string ’data-’ specified, with any value.”—this will be incredibly useful for unobtrusive JavaScript where there’s no sensible place to store configuration data as HTML content. It will also mean Dojo has an approved method for adding custom attributes to declaratively instantiate Dojo widgets.
JavaScript: The Good Parts. Douglas Crockford’s soon-to-be-published book on the subset of JavaScript that he recommends. Promises to be “short, but dense”—if it’s half as good as his JavaScript lectures this is going to be a must-have.
HTML 5 vs. Yadis. The draft HTML5 spec currently disallows values for http-equiv and link rel which aren’t listed in the spec—meaning both methods of specifying a link to an OpenID server are invalid for HTML5. This should probably be fixed...
Mibbit (via) Excellent web-based IRC client, should be great for when pesky firewalls get in the way. Also a good candidate for use with a site-specific browser.
PayPal Plans to Ban Unsafe Browsers. At first I thought they were going to encourage real anti-phishing features in browsers, which would be a big win for OpenID... but it turns out they’re just requiring EV SSL certificates which have been proven not to actually work.
Cluetrainwreck. Comcast’s official Twitter account is pretty creepy... “I hope we can change your perception of Comcast!”.
Quotation search in Google News (via) Extremely impressive application of (I suppose) natural language processing in Google News—it now extracts quotations from news stories, even handling things like “he said” and “she said” and resolving them back to the speaker.
KML: A new standard for sharing maps. Google’s KML format, which is already supported by both Microsoft and Yahoo!’s map software, has been accepted under the wing of the Open Geospatial Consortium and is now an international standard.