Blogmarks
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Amazon.com: amazon oddities. Warning: reading the user reviews on these items has the potential to soak up hours.
Yahoo!’s Latest Performance Breakthroughs. 20 new performance tips to join the previously published 14. Flushing the buffer while the backend code is still working to cause the browser to start loading CSS earlier is interesting.
Simple Exception Response for AJAX debugging. Neat solution to the problem of Django error pages showing up as raw HTML in the Firebug Ajax log.
IronPython, MS SQL, and PEP 249. How Dino Viehland got Django’s ORM to talk to the .NET database layer.
Queryset Implementation. Malcolm explains the work that has gone in to the queryset-refactor branch. Executive summary: Python’s ORM is probably a lot better at SQL than you are.
Integrating reCAPTCHA with Django. Looks pretty straight forward.
Standing in Line. Simon Wistow coins “CLAMP” for LAMP + Cache, and expresses the need for a dirt-simple, high performance open source queue system.
Wikihistory (via) International Association of Time Travellers: Members’ Forum.
Open Tech 2008—5th July in London. Awesome—I still have happy memories of the last Open Tech (back in 2005), very excited about this one. Once again, it’s only a fiver to get in.
Consistent Hashing. Beautifully clear explanation of consistent hashing, a simple technique that allows you to add new caching servers to a cluster without re-hashing your keys and hence invalidating all of your caches.
Django on IronPython. Dino Viehland demonstrated Django running on IronPython and SQL Server at PyCon.
Lessons from mySociety conversion tracking. Neat trick: show the user a “subscribe” form with their e-mail address pre-filled for them and there’s a much higher chance that they’ll click the button.
Firebug + Dijit tips. News to me: Firebug has a magic $1 variable which corresponds to the currently selected node. Very handy.
A brief introduction to Opacity and RGBA. The CSS opacity property is inherited by an element’s children; opacity set using the new rgba() declaration in CSS 3 differs in that it is not inherited.
dojox.gfx demos. Impressive demos of the Dojo 2D drawing APIs—these need to be linked from the dojo site, it took me quite a while to find them.
Clickpass. Peter Nixey’s new OpenID startup has finally launched—does a great job of making OpenID more approachable with a clean, well designed UI and a neat orange button.
Hacking Contributed Models. Neat Django trick using monkeypatching to make some minor tweaks to built-in contributed models such as auth or flatpages.
python4ply tutorial. python4ply is a parser for Python written in Python using the PLY toolkit, which compiles to Python bytecode using the built-in compiler module. The tutorial shows how to use it to add support for Perl-style 1_000_000 readable numbers.
In Response to “What Sucks About Erlang”. Yariv Sadan responds to Damien’s criticism.
What Sucks About Erlang. Damien Katz shares his greatest frustrations from working with Erlang on CouchDB.
IE8 speeds things up. Steve Souders notes that IE8 downloads script files in parallel before executing them sequentially, giving it a significant speed boost over other browsers that download sequentially.
The GigaOM Interview: Mark Zuckerberg. Some interesting titbits on Facebook’s architecture.
Major Update to Prism (via) Mozilla’s site-specific browser tool can now use separate profiles (and hence separate cookie jars) for each instance, making it an excellent tool for protecting yourself against CSRF vulnerabilities in the web applications you rely on.
Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication. Would make life a lot simpler if they just supported OAuth, but at least they include sample code in Python, Ruby and PHP.
Windows Live Contacts API (via) I didn’t realise Microsoft already have a contacts API for Live (which presumably covers hotmail as well).
JavaScript in Internet Explorer 8. John Resig’s analysis. News to me: IE 8 doesn’t support the W3C event model—I had assumed that would be a priority.
Introducing the Google Contacts Data API. Brilliant! (and about time)—now there’s no excuse for asking your users for their Gmail username and password so you can import contacts from their address book. Yahoo! and Microsoft need to catch up on this one fast.
Welcome to Fire Eagle! It’s launched! A service and accompanying API for saving your physical location and selectively sharing it with applications that you trust.
Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit. The new built-in development tools look similar enough to Firebug to make me very happy. Also of interest: Selectors API (for fast getElementsBySelector), CSS 2.1 support, support for XHTML style namespaces in HTML, an interesting Web Slices feature based on the hAtom microformat and 6 connections per host (up from 2) which should make Comet easier.
Equidistant Objects with CSS. Handy tip; I needed to do this recently and ended up setting everything using pixels. This works much better.