Blogmarks
Filters: Sorted by date
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.
Using the jQuery test suite for your own projects. jQuery’s test suite has clever start(), stop() and expect() methods for running assertions within asynchronous code.
Configuring Apache httpd. Ben Laurie shows how to build up an Apache configuration file from first principles.
A Visual Explanation of SQL Joins. It turns out Venn diagrams are an excellent way of illustrating joins.
The password anti-pattern. What I don’t understand is why Google / Yahoo! / other webmail providers haven’t just deployed a simple OAuth-style API for accessing the address book. Sites have been scraping them for years anyway; surely it’s better to offer an official API than continue to see users hand out their passwords?
Apple—Web apps. Interesting (and slightly confusing) to see Apple choose “Web apps” as the term for applications targeted at the iPhone and iPod touch.
/trunk/jl/scraper. journa-list.com is open source, and the screen scrapers are written in Python.
journa-list.com. Fantastic new site that indexes UK news stories by the person who wrote them. Being able to track a journalist’s output like this makes it much easier to figure out their personal biases over time.
nose 0.10.0 final! Nose is my favourite Python testing tool: it can auto-discover and execute tests in a directory hierarchy, which makes it easy to run just a sub-set of your test suite.