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UK domain registrar 123-Reg crashes and burns, taking its customers with it. I was hit by this yesterday: can anyone recommend an alternative DNS host with a really easy to use interface (I’ve made mistakes modifying DNS in the past) and rock-solid reliability?
Why Virtual Theft Should Matter to Real Life Tech Companies. Interesting trend: sites that profit from sales of virtual goods (such as Habbo Hotel) are seeing users use phishing attacks to steal those goods from each other.
Harry Potter and the Order of Typography. Jon Hicks highlights some of the beautiful typography displayed by the latest Harry Potter film.
Proprietary Software Does Not Scale. I’ve been thinking this for a while: if you’re using software with a per-CPU license you can’t just roll it out as an image across a bunch of virtual machines when you need to.
Ubuntu JeOS 7.10 released. JeOS = “Just enough Operating System”—a minimal Ubuntu image designed for creating “virtual applications” that are embedded in a VMWare (or similar) virtual machine.
[Release] CouchDB 0.7.0. This is a huge milestone for the project—it’s the first official release to include the JSON REST API instead of XML, and it’s also the first release that is “intended for widespread use”.
Professional Python Frameworks: Web 2.0 Programming with Django and Turbogears. Apparently published by Wrox in October 2007, beating the “official” Django book by just over a month. Has anyone seen this on bookshelves yet?
JavaScript Beautifier (via) Useful online tool (source code also available) for un-obfuscating JavaScript that has had its whitespace stripped out.
Yahoo! Search Contextual Precaching. Neat performance trick on Yahoo! Search: the moment you start typing (indicating you intend to search) the site quietly fires off a bunch of requests to precache assets needed for the search results page.
Taking the canvas to another dimension. Opera have finally released a test version with support for a opera-3d canvas context—Windows only for the moment, but Mac and Linux versions are promised “soon”.
CSS3 and the death of Handheld Stylesheets. I hadn’t looked at CSS 3 media queries before (which let you apply different styles based on media features such as screen width, height and colour availability)—they seem like a much smarter solution that handheld stylesheets and also appear to be preferred by device vendors.
Ten New Things in WebKit 3. Does “incremental updates for persistent server connections” for XMLHttpRequest mean Safari now has native support for Comet?
google-axsjax (via) “The AxsJAX framework can inject accessibility enhancements into existing Web 2.0 applications using any of several standard Web techniques”—including bookmarklets and Greasemonkey. The enhancements conform to W3C ARIA, supported by Firefox 2.0 and later.
Django Changeset 6671. Malcolm Tredinnick: “Implemented auto-escaping of variable output in templates”. Fantastic—Django now has protection against accidental XSS holes, turned on by default.
Django Book Update. It’s done! Went to the printer on Friday, due in bookstores in the second week of December (just in time for Christmas). Congrats to Adrian and Jacob.
JavaScript Method Overloading. John Resig shows a clever trick for overloading JavaScript methods based on the number of arguments, using the little-known .length property of a JavaScript function object.
HTML5 Media Support in WebKit. WebKit continues to lead the pack when it comes to trying out new HTML5 proposals. The new audio and video elements make embedding media easy, and provide a neat listener API for hooking in to “playback ended” events.
Reinteract—Better interactive Python. Really neat Mathematica-style pygtk interactive prompt for Python, where previous lines can be edited in place and graphs and other graphical primitives can be displayed inline. Includes an elegant plugin mechanism.
Using multiple classes within selectors. Pretty much definitive guide to using multiple classes in a CSS selector, including problems with IE 5 and 6 and one way of addressing them using conditional comments.
Eye-Fi launches. Really neat idea: a digital camera SD card with built-in WiFi to beam your photos straight to your laptop. SitePen built the UI, which runs in your browser on top of Dojo and talks to a small web server running locally.
Prism Prototype Now Available on Mac and Linux. Prism is the new name for Mozilla Webrunner, a toolkit for building native desktop applications on top of the Mozilla technology stack.
mochiweb—another faster web server. Bob Ippolito’s latest project: a high performance Erlang web server.
JavaScript Madness: Keyboard Events. Keyboard events in JavaScript are a total pain. This looks like a pretty comprehensive reference to getting them to work cross-browser.
Using Time Machine across the network (via) Haven’t tried this tip yet, but apparently “defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1” lets Time Machine back up to a network drive.
Pseudo-custom events in Prototype 1.6. Useful tutorial showing how to use Prototype 1.6’s custom events to implement a cross-browser mouse wheel event.
Orbited: The Orbit Event Daemon. HTTP daemon designed for long-lasting comet connections, written in Python using pyevent on top of libevent.
dojo.NodeList API docs. Support in Dojo for jQuery-style chaining operations.
Django documentation bookmarklets. James Bennett continues his month-long series of daily Django tutorials with documentation for one of Django’s best kept secrets: application introspection HTTP headers and bookmarklets that make use of them.
Announcing Dojo 1.0. The tough learning curve that accompanied 0.4 and earlier has been replaced with an elegant core module (dojo) and two exciting subprojects (dojox and dijit). Well worth a look.
Comet Daily. New regularly updated site covering Comet, the Ajax-like umbrella term for JavaScript server-push techniques. Already a bunch of great stuff on there.