Blogmarks
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EventScripts 2.0, now with Python. EventScripts is a plugin that lets you write scripts to customise dedicated servers for Valve’s Source engine games (Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 and the like). Version 2.0 adds support for Python 2.5 as an embedded scripting language.
OpenStreetMap on the iPhone! Via an ingenious hack. The Google Maps iPhone client caches downloaded tiles using SQLite—to display your own custom tiles, you just need to dump them straight in to the “cache”.
If It Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must Be Enterprise Software. Interesting discussion about why enterprise software tends to completely suck from an end-user point of view.
ASP.NET MVC Framework. This looks pretty good. It includes clean URL support that’s very similar to how Django does things (with a nice alternative syntax for developers who don’t like regular expressions).
OPSI asks users to contribute to new web channel. The Office of Public Sector Information now has an online forum for people interested in reusing UK government information for commercial benefit, based on a recommendation in the “Power of Information” report by Tom Steinberg and Ed Mayo.
WebKit Does HTML5 Client-side Database Storage. SQLite strikes again. The WebKit team have included a neat update to their Web Inspector that lets you browse and modify your client-side databases.
New on Dopplr: The Past (with Pictures). Dopplr’s trip pages automatically display your Flickr/Facebook photos that were taken during the duration of the trip—simple and smart integration of third party sites.
jQuery Logging (via) Brilliant four line jQuery plugin that lets you insert Firebug console.log() calls directly in to chains.
CouchDB first impressions. Jacob’s been poking at CouchDB. Inserting data is slow, but everything else looks pretty slick considering how recently the JSON / JavaScript views functionality was added.
MyOpenID adds Information Card Support. First client SSL certificates, now Information Cards. MyOpenID is certainly taking browser-based phishing solutions seriously.
Radiohead Album Available for Free, But Fileshared Anyway. “Why are some people getting In Rainbows from P2P rather than the band’s site? Probably because they find P2P easier to use.”
Infowar: strike early, strike often. “The study found that the American participants’ belief in the truth of an initial news report was not affected by knowledge of its subsequent retraction. In contrast, knowing about a retraction was likely to significantly reduce belief in the initial report for Germans and Australians.”
Http-https transitions and relative URLs. Finally, a reason to use those weird protocol-relative URLs (//example.com/path and the like).
Gozi Trojan. The full security paper on the Gozi trojan: how it was discovered, how it was traced and details of the “customer interface for on-line purchases of stolen data” at the other end (which, incidentally, was ridden with security holes).
Global Hackers Create a New Online Crime Economy (via) Fascinating, detailed look at the evolution of the hacker service economy. Of particular interest: a web application that sells access to hacked machines to identity thieves on a timeshare basis.
SVG and text/html. Anne van Kesteren discusses the need for SVG and MathML to be embeddable in HTML 5, not just XHTML.
Findings From the Web Design Survey (via) 32,831 people responded to A List Apart’s survey, and the conclusions have been packaged up in an elegant PDF. You can also download the (anonymized) raw data and run your own analysis.
Roy Orbison in Cling-film, the novel. If you missed the original internet meme you might be a bit baffled by this one, but I picked up a copy of the novel today and it completely lives up to the standard set by the short stories.
Dealing with the Flexibility of JavaScript. Some thoughts on function signature overloading in JavaScript.
Why Accessibility? Because It’s Our Job! “A chef must care about health, a builder must care about safety, and we must care about accessibility.”
Cruciforum (via) Stuart’s new PHP forum—single script, stores threads as static HTML on the filesystem (no database), installation is a one-step process.
Ignorance and inspiration. I’m pretty gobsmacked at the levels of ignorance about web accessibility out there—it’s not that hard people! I’m obviously more out of touch with mainstream developers than I thought; I was under the impression that people had generally got the message.
The Art & Science of JavaScript. My first author credit: I’m contributing a chapter to SitePoint’s next JavaScript tome.
LastGraph. Now Available. Andrew Godwin has relaunched his LastGraph Last.fm graphing application. The new version is built on Django and S3 and uses Andrew’s Graphication graphing library based on Cairo.
Two Weeks With Django. A Rails developer tries Django but ends up switching back to Rails. I think we could definitely take some steps towards making the initial user experience a bit smoother—currently you have to decide things like how you’ll serve static files and where you’ll keep your templates. Once you’ve got that lot set up it’s mostly plain sailing but it does mean there’s a bit of a bump in the learning curve.
Information Freeway (via) Really lovely interface to Open Street Map, sadly suffering from a horribly vague name and almost no publicity at all.
Future of Web Apps—Past Events. MP3s of talks at the Future of Web Apps Expo are starting to trickle on to the official site.
Videos tagged ’hd’ on Vimeo. Vimeo are now hosting HD videos. Worth playing full screen—I had no idea Flash video was capable of that kind of quality. The speed of loading is pretty astonishing; I get no delay at all, making this essentially TV quality video on demand.
Unfuddle. Private Subversion repository hosting provider with plans starting at free: now there’s no excuse not to have a svn repository somewhere. Also provides web based repository browsing and a reasonable looking ticket system.
Get Lat Lon. I finally got fed up of hunting around for simple latitude/longitude tools when messing around with mapping APIs, so I built my own with a memorable URL. I plan to add new features as and when I need them.