Blogmarks
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BBC Radio Labs: Perl on Rails. BBC engineered built their own Rails clone in Perl to fit in with the BBC’s engineering infrastructure—it’s already running the new programmes guide.
Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6. 24ways kicks off again, with the first article introducing super-sleight, an updated script for getting transparent PNGs to work in IE6.
The Rissington Podcast. Resize the browser window and marvel at the way the various background images seamlessly overlay each other—Nat and I cooed at it for about five minutes.
Blogger: OpenID commenting (via) I may be wrong, but I think this is the first Google property to support OpenID in any way.
Oxford Geek Night 4. Tomorrow night, usual venue. Topics include mySociety, Pylons, MythTV and more.
sorl-thumbnail. This looks like a decent attempt at a generic Django thumbnailing service, but I’m always wary of code that allows URL hackers to create large numbers of files that will be cached to disk. UPDATE: My mistake, thumbnail creation can only be caused by template authors.
Jetty WebServer. Jetty 6.1 was the only cometd / Bayeux implementation I tried which worked out of the box.
Using django.newforms with Pylons. It’s always good to see Django components used outside of the framework itself. For the record, you can avoid the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable entirely using django.conf.settings.configure (search for it).
Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark’s clock. Les UX (previously known for constructing a secret underground cinema in the Paris catacombs) strikes again.
Eventlet—Second Life Wiki. Seriously powerful non-blocking IO library for Python, currently maintained by Linden Lab as part of the server architecture used for Second Life.
Open Rights Group: Our first two years. ORG’s review of the past two years shows just how worthwhile a cause they have become—highlights include their hugely successful campaign against copyright term extension and their involvement in this year’s e-voting trials.
Deconstructing Facebook Beacon JavaScript. How Facebook’s new Beacon service (also known as “Facebook ruined Christmas”) actually works.
DebugBar. Suggested at BarCamp London 3 as a useful tool for developing with IE; apparently includes a great JavaScript debugger.
A Little Laptop With Big Ambitions. I hadn’t realised how much competition OLPC faced from Microsoft and Intel’s Classmate. It would be amazing to see a generation grow up understanding that computers are open tools that they can control themselves rather than closed black boxes.
Portable Social Networks: Take Your Friends with You. Brian Suda explains how OpenID, XFN and hCard can be used together to bootstrap portable social networks.
Newforms, part 1. James Bennett provides a detailed description of Django’s newforms (not so new now though, they’ve been around for over a year), complete with attractive diagrams.
Subversion WebDAV Autoversioning. Set up a WebDAV share that automatically versions any file saved to it. I had no idea Subversion could do this out of the box.
Django Evolution. Really smart take on the problem of updating database tables to reflect changes to Django models. Code that automatically modifies your database tables can be pretty scary, but Evolution seems to hit the right balance.
Is Facebook Really Censoring Search When It Suits Them? Apparently MoveOn’s group “Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy!” stopped showing up in search results for “privacy”—the search claimed 17 results but suspiciously only showed 16.
Safari CSS Reference. Official documentation covering the CSS properties supported by Safari, including the -webkit proprietary extensions.
Musical hackery. Indescribably clever musical video game creation, where images from classic games spell out their own theme tunes. The smartest thing I’ve seen on YouTube, well, ever.
Why Guiness tastes better in Ireland. Two reasons: it’s more popular so kegs empty faster (and you always get a fresh pint), and Guinness send someone round to every pub to flush the lines once every three weeks.
Happy 30th Birthday Internet! “Exactly 30 years ago today on November 22, 1977 the first three networks were connected to become the Internet.”
WS-dämmerung. Tim Bray collects the latest round of WS-* repenting, which saves me from linking to them individually.
Giant Global Graph. Tim Berners-Lee points out that the Semantic Web is designed to solve problems such as portable social networks.
A Taxonomy of Event- and REST-based Comet. Kris Zyp describes a conceptual model for Comet messages based on REST semantics (so you can send a PUT referencing a specific URI down to a client to represent an idempotent state change).
Photos taken in Brighton on Flickr! (via) The new Flickr Places feature has finally launched, and it’s absolutely beautiful.
Weewar (Nat v.s. me). Really impressive turn based strategy game, implemented entirely in the browser. Surprisingly addictive; you have been warned.
Mock—Mocking and Test Utilities (via) New mocking library for Python based on the “action ... assertion” pattern (as opposed to the more common “record ... replay”).
IE ActiveX(“htmlfile”) Transport, Part II. Fascinating tricks for working around IE memory leaks using explicit CollectGarbage() calls and setInterval() to an empty function.