Blogmarks
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Monkeypatching idioms—elegant or ugly? Guido offers a decorator and a metaclass as syntactic sugar for monkeypatching existing Python classes.
iTimeMachine. Enables Time Machine to see network drives (a ReadyNAS NV+ for example). There’s also a defaults setting but it didn’t seem to work; this did.
On the design of the first-run assistant. NetNewsWire’s Brent Simmons explains the in-depth thinking behind the new first-run assistant.
Google Maps Clusterer. I’ve looked at a few clustering libraries for Google Maps, but this one seems to have the nicest API.
Linkherd—django. Linkherd is a Django-powered startup that offers sub-reddit style functionality. I’ve set up a Django site there as well.
Django sub-reddit. Reddit are trialling the ability to create custom sub-reddits, so I put one up for Django links and discussions.
Blob Sallad—canvas tag and JavaScript physics simulation experiment. Björn Lindberg provides a detailed code walkthrough of his brilliant canvas demo, inspired by Loco Rocco.
Symfonians (via) Similar concept to Django People but for Symfony developers—coincidentally launched within the past week as well.
The overdue Places post II—Prototyping Iconicness. How Flickr Places works.
Usability Disaster Story. A strange combination of usability oddities culminated in 95% of visitors to the Mono website downloading a two year old version by mistake.
Community sites on Django People. Small new feature: I can now add community sites to individual country pages. If you know of any regional community sites that I’ve missed, let me know in a comment or by e-mail.
Canon EOS 450D / Digital Rebel XSi. Two weeks after a buy I EOS 400D. Sigh. It’s not out until April, but the big new features are a 3" LCD and "live view" mode. The kit lens now has image stabilisation.
flickr.places.findByLatLon. New API method for Flickr Places. If only Flickr could return a bounding box for each place...
Introducing EveryBlock. EveryBlock launched! Adrian Holovaty, Wilson Miner, Paul Smith and Daniel X. O’Neil’s startup which answers the question, “What’s happening in my neighborhood?” Cities covered by the launch are Chicago, New York and San Francisco.
Dynamic Time-Travel Maps. Absolutely beautiful dynamic implementation of Chris Lightfoot’s Time Travel project, put together by Stamen Design and MySociety. Drag sliders to specify your preferred commute and housing budget to see where in London you can live.
Troubleshooting Memory Usage. Useful for getting the most out of a VPS.
Django People: Colophon. I’ve added a colophon to Django People, something I try to do for all of my personal projects.
Caching Layer for Django ORM. Interesting extension to Django’s ORM that adds automatic caching of querysets and smart cache invalidation.
Cashing in the Bling. Pownce is open to the public, and Leah has written up some neat friend importing tricks that take advantage of the pre-existing “profile bling” links to profiles on other sites. I hope to do something smart with the profile links on Django People in the future, although I’m not convinced the site would benefit from a “friends” mechanism.
Sunsetting Quirks Mode. Apparently proper standards support in IE (or at least the IE8 renderer) will be triggered by the HTML5 doctype, providing an alternative to those who don’t wish to pollute their markup with an IE-specific meta tag.
Legacy. James Bennett has what I think is the most interesting analysis of the X-UA-Compatible header to date.
GeoNames: missing countries. United Arab Emirates and a few other countries are missing from the GeoNames XML set I used to seed Django People. I’ve added UAE by hand; I’ll add the others as soon as I have time.
Photo Matt: Act Two. Automattic is an excellent case-study of building a business on top of an open source project.
HTML 5 published as W3C First Public Working Draft! A significant step, almost completely overlooked in the hubbub over IE8.
RSS Duplicate Detection. “Detecting duplicate items in an RSS feed is something of a black art”. I hadn’t realised quite how involved such a basic function of an aggregator could be.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="X-BALL-CHAIN">. Mozilla hacker Robert O’Callahan discusses the technical implications of freezing copies of older rendering engines, including the increased footprint and the terrifying prospect of documents in different rendering modes communicating through iframes and the DOM.
Broken. Jeremy highlights the fly in the ointment: if you want IE 8 to behave like IE 8 (and not pretend to be IE 7), you HAVE to include the X-UA-Compatible header.
The versioning switch is not a browser detect. PPK: “In other words, the versioning switch does not have any of the negative effects of a browser detect.”
Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8. This has huge implications for client-side web developers: IE 8 will include the ability to mark a page as “tested and compatible with the IE7 rendering engine” using an X-UA-Compatible HTTP header or http-equiv meta element. It’s already attracting a heated debate in the attached discussion.
World’s ugliest Django app. Brilliant hack from Paul Bissex: a self-contained Django application in 70 lines of code which shows off some internals trickery and makes use of a bunch of handy django.contrib packages.