Blogmarks
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OpenID for Google Accounts. Google App Engine integrates with Google’s user accounts, so Ryan Barrett (of Google) used it to build an idproxy.net style OpenID provider.
Running Django on Google App Engine. Django 0.96 is included, but you need to disable the ORM related parts and use the Google App Engine Bigtable interface instead.
Google App Engine. Write applications in Python using a WSGI compatible application framework, then host them on Google’s highly scalable infrastructure. The most exciting part is probably the Datastore API, which provides external developers with access to Bigtable for the first time.
Hash Collisions (The Poisoned Message Attack). Demonstrates the MD5 weakness by providing two deliberately engineered PostScript documents with the same MD5 hash but radically different rendered output.
Comet at the Highland Fling. I thoroughly enjoyed the Highland Fling yesterday. Here are the slides from my talk on Comet.
Why the webstandards world appears to be choosing Django. I’m not convinced that this is a definite trend, but it certainly makes for an interesting discussion.
Implementing a syntax-higlighting JavaScript editor in JavaScript. Appropriately subtitled “a brutal odyssey to the dark side of the DOM tree”. Some seriously clever trickery going on here.
i am near (via) Inspired by wikinear.com and powered by FireEagle, currently just showing nearby pubs from OpenStreetMap but with more stuff planned. I love the URL scheme—pubs.iamnear.net.
Advanced JavaScript Debugging Techniques. There’s more to JavaScript debugging than just Firebug.
The Royal Mint: The New Designs Revealed. Matthew Dent’s design for the new UK coinage is inspired—absolutely beautiful. Can’t wait to get my hands on some of these.
Brendan Eich: Popularity. I never knew that Brendan went to Netscape on the promise of “doing Scheme in the browser”.
London Connections. Marvellously obsessive blog about the vagaries of London transport, including some really nice custom created maps. I love detailed maps of tube stations; anyone know a good place to find them?
Firefox 3’s password remembering. I’m loving Firefox 3, and the way it does password remembering (with a non-modal toolbar so you can tell if your password worked before deciding to save it) is just one of the major improvements. Opera gets this right as well.
CSS Compatibility and Internet Explorer (via) Official Microsoft guide to which CSS properties are supported by which versions of IE. This is the kind of documentation browser vendors should be providing as a matter of course.
OpenID and Spam. Matt Mullenweg: “OpenID has a ton of promise for the web—let’s not hurt it by setting people up for disappointment by telling them it’s a spam blocker when it’s not.” True for the case of general registration, but I still believe whitelisting known OpenIDs could be a powerful tool for fighting spam on personal sites.
Python-by-example. “This guide aims to show examples of use of all Python Library Reference functions, methods and classes”, thus addressing my number one complaint about Python’s standard library documentation.
What’s New in Edge Rails: Easier Timezones (via) Time zones can be a nightmare to get right—if this works well it’s going to make a lot of people’s lives a whole bunch easier.
Welcome to Game Neverending. It really is back! Hot tip: start by taking the survey, then sell the five pieces of blue paper at the bank with the pig on the roof.
Classy Query. Beautifully implemented parody of class-based JavaScript and verbose namespacing as a jQuery extension, from John Resig. The source code has some neat tricks in it, in particular the buildClass() function.
Find Your Friends. Flickr have added a characteristically classy friend import feature, pulling from Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail address books without any unhygienic password sharing. It’s a crying shame that the Yahoo! contacts API they are using isn’t available outside the company.
Sharing My Location Just the Way I Like It. Fire Eagle gets a great write-up from Brady Forrest over on the O’Reilly Radar.
Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day! jwz has recreated home.mcom.com, the original home of the Mosaic Communications Corporation, using a snapshot from 21st October 1994 and a domain borrowed from current owner AOL. Also includes instructions on running 1994 Mosaic Netscape binaries under a modern Linux distro.
Django Development with Djblets. The Review Board team have extracted a library of useful Django utilities from their application. The first to be documented are helpers for reducing boilerplate in custom template tags.
Graphication. Andrew Godwin’s Python graphing library, based on Cairo. Responsible for the very handsome graphs on The Carbon Account.
The Carbon Account. The carbon calculator project I contributed to at Torchbox last year has launched, and they’ve made the code available as open source.
Interviewing Simon Willison about OpenID. I sat down with Vikram Kumar at Webstock to talk about OpenID, and the video is now online.
hash. Douglas Crockford: “Any HTML tag that accepts a src= or href= attribute should also be allowed to take a hash= attribute”—to protect against file tampering and (more importantly) provide a truly robust caching mechanism.
Exposing calendar events using iCalendar in Django. A simple abstraction around the vobject Python library.
Google’s excanvas only works in quirks mode for IE8. IE8 in act-as-IE8 mode disables VML but doesn’t implement canvas, so there’s currently no 2D drawing method for that browser. UPDATE: The problem is Google’s excanvas library, not IE8 disabling VML; see comments.
god—process and task monitoring done right. I have a long running animosity towards every process monitoring tool currently in existence; I’ll have to put this one through its paces and see if it sucks less.