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How much is that standard in the window, the one with the lovely tale? “The real loser in this could be ISO’s reputation itself.” Simon Wardley summarises the embarrassing shenanigans surrounding ISO’s rubber stamping of Microsoft’s OOXML.
CouchDB: Thinking beyond the RDBMS. CouchDB is a fascinating project—an Erlang powered non-relational database with a JSON API that lets you define “views” (really computed tables) based on JavaScript functions that execute using map/reduce. Damien Katz, the main developer currently works for MySQL and used to work on Lotus Notes.
Freebase developer documentation. The JSON API and particularly the query language are fascinating.
Freebase. Out of closed beta, although you still need an invite code to contribute. I hope they drop the JavaScript requirement for viewing content on the site.
Obviously, it’s not Obvious. “It was obvious to us that FeedBurner was a very powerful concept around which an ecosystem could flourish. It wasn’t obvious to most other people until they actually saw several examples of people using FeedBurner in powerful ways.”
calendar.timegm() (via) An “unrelated but handy function” that converts a time.gmtime() in to a corresponding Unix timestamp. I’ve been hand-rolling this one for years; never thought to look in calendar.
It Is Estimated That NBC Could Not Have Screwed This iTunes Thing Up Any Worse. NBC’s request that Apple “stiffen anti-piracy provisions” is down-right scary.
Sam Ruby: 2to3. Sam’s report on an attempt to port the Universal Feed Parser to Python 3.0. The 2to3 tool does most of the work, but it seems the unicode changes can be pretty tricky.
Django vs feedparser on dates. Some useful tips in the comments. I find Python’s timezone stuff endlessly frustrating: I know it can do what I want, but it always takes me a ridiculously long time to figure out the necessary incantations.
Wikipedia trust colouring (with demo) (via) “The text background of Wikipedia articles is colored according to a value of trust, computed from the reputation of the authors who contributed the text, as well as those who edited the text.”
What’s New in Python 3.0. They’re definitely taking advantage of the break in backwards compatibility—lots of niggling inconsistencies are finally being cleaned up.
Webistrano. Web based interface for managing Capistrano deployments. Cal recommends having a “deploy to live site” button in his book; this looks like an easy way to build that.
Python 3.0a1 released. Wow, that was a pretty fast turnaround. Betas are planned for 2008, with a final release scheduled for August.
They promised us jetpacks, too. Ben Hammersley points out that the recent flying car story has done the rounds many times before. I’m sure I remember it from my childhood.
XFML (via) Throwing the new home for the XFML specification some Google juice; the domain name got nabbed by a squatter.
Ganeti (via) New from Google (developed in the Zurich office): virtual server management tool designed to “facilitate cluster management”, built on top of Xen.
Long pages work. And thanks to Pay Per Click advertising, splitting an article over multiple pages to get more ad impressions doesn’t make sense any more.
Thoughts on (and pics of) the original Macintosh User Manual. “[I] was struck by how it had to explain a total paradigm shift in interacting with computers”.
Google Web Toolkit: Towards a better web. Good overview of why GWT exists, but I take exception to the title: requiring JavaScript to even display something does not make the web “better”.
A Django Cache Status. Django view to display stats pulled from your memcached server.
Why the Alt Attribute May Be Omitted. “The benefit of requiring the alt attribute to be omitted, rather than simply requiring the empty value, is that it makes a clear distinction between an image that has no alternate text (such as an iconic or graphical representation of the surrounding text) and an image that is a critical part of the content, but for which not alt text is available.”
BCS Oxfordshire: 2007/8 Programme. Need to get these in to Upcoming and tagged for oxfordgeeks.net.
jQuery 1.1.4: Faster, More Tests, Ready for 1.2. The backwards compatibility policy for 1.2 is pretty clever: provide a plugin that restores removed functionality (such as XPath selectors).
Building a JavaScript Library. Slides from John Resig’s Google Tech Talk. Some great tips in here, including: make your APIs orthogonal, look for common patterns, keep things extensible and write the documentation yourself.
Brad Neuberg’s Personal Research Agenda. Inspiring; lots of interesting problems to solve. I also liked the idea of moving to Thailand during a tech downturn and hacking on interesting projects while spending $200/month on living costs.
Satchmo 0.5 Release. Django powered e-commerce application, “the webshop for perfectionists with deadlines”.
The Shrinking Python Web Framework World. Python used to suffer from a paradox of choice with regards to Web frameworks; today things are considerably easier for new developers.
Live Query jQuery plugin. Ingenious plugin that lets you register jQuery event bindings to be executed when a new element matching the provided selector is added to the DOM. Performance is kept snappy by only running the check after a jQuery DOM manipulation method has been executed (append, prepend, attr etc); it won’t notice elements added using regular DOM methods.
Django and the iPhone tutorial. How to install SSH, Python and Django on your iPhone and get Django running against the call database. Less complicated than I expected.
H.264 support coming to the Flash player. It looks like this is a response to the higher video quality offered by Silverlight. I wonder if YouTube knew about this when they started transcoding their videos to H.264 for the Apple TV and iPhone.