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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)”.
Using Git as a versioned data store in Python. gitshelve supports the same interface as Python’s built-in shelve module but stores things to a versioned Git repository instead of just a pickled dictionary. I’ve been casually wondering what a Git-powered CMS would look like.
Cubescape. Beautiful isometric cube building tool by Cameron Adams, written in JavaScript and jQuery.
Crossdomain.xml Invites Cross-site Mayhem. A useful reminder that crossdomain.xml files should be treated with extreme caution. Allowing access from * makes it impossible to protect your site against CSRF attacks, and even allowing from a “circle of trust” of domains can be fatal if just one of those domains has an XSS hole.
Engineering @ Facebook: Facebook Chat. The new Facebook Chat uses Comet (long polling with a hidden iframe) against a custom web / chat server written in Erlang, designed to handle a launch to all 70 million users at once. It was tested using a “dark launch” period where live pages simulated chat request traffic without showing any visible UI.
goog/useragent/iphoto.js. The Goog library includes code to detect the user’s installed version of iPhoto, based on reverse engineering the Mac.com Gallery RSS feeds. This has Mark Pilgrim written all over it.
Doctype: /trunk/goog. Google’s newly released JavaScript library (pure JavaScript, so more along the lines of YUI and jQuery than GWT). I haven’t found the documentation for it yet, but the code is extremely well commented. UPDATE: The documentation is spread throughout Doctype.
Doctype on Google Code. Alternative way of browsing Google Doctype—if you link to articles here instead of using the permalinks in the official version non-JavaScript user agents will be able to access the content you’ve linked to.
Google Doctype. So now we know what Mark Pilgrim’s been doing at Google... heading up a project to create an encyclopaedia of web development. The JavaScript UI for browsing it is a bit weird (though you do at least get real pages if you disable JavaScript in your browser).
Google Maps now shows photos and Wikipedia articles. Click the “More...” button. My first thought was “how do they get so many photo markers on the map?”—Firebug shows that they’re generating tiles on the server containing multiple photo markers, then when you click on one an Ajax call checks which photo is in that particular spot.
Django: security fix released. XSS hole in the Admin application’s login page—updates and patches are available for trunk, 0.96, 0.95 and 0.91.