Blogmarks
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The Elements of JavaScript Style. Douglas Crockford illustrates better coding practises through refactoring of old code.
A CouchDB GUI front end. Written in C# and .NET. It looks like writing frontends for CouchDB could make an excellent project for learning a new GUI environment.
Paul Otlet described the “radiated library” in 1934. Beating Vannevar Bush in predicting something not unlike the Web by more than a decade.
£5 app. Monthly Brighton meetup for people interested in building (and maybe selling) lightweight software with 1-2 man teams. Nat and I went along last night and really enjoyed it.
Ways in Which iTunes’s Just-Released Official Ringtone Support Is Weird, Rude, and/or Just Plain Buggy. I’ve long been saying that the existence of a ringtone “industry” is a bug, not a feature.
jQuery 1.2. Lots of neat new stuff; my favourite new feature is “Partial .load()” which lets you pull in HTML with Ajax and then use a CSS selector to grab a subset of that page and inject it in to the DOM.
Styling File Inputs with CSS and the DOM. Clever hack to style the un-stylable: set the opacity of the file input to 0, then use a bit of JavaScript to make sure the (now invisible) browse button is always under the mouse.
The Tale of the Mechanical Virus. “What I had discovered, in essence, was a mechanical virus. It infects Mac laptops and speads via the DVI adapters.”—I really hope this isn’t why my DVI adapter is on the blink.
Building the Social Web with OpenID. Slides from my keynote at yesterday’s PyCon UK.
django-sphinx (via) More code from Curse Gaming; this time a really nice API for adding Sphinx full-text search to a Django model.
wikimarkup (via) “MediaWiki markup in Python”. I’ve always suspected that MediaWiki was like Perl; the only thing that can parse MediaWiki is MediaWiki. Not sure how faithful this Python port is but I’d love my theory to be proved wrong.
Advanced Django. Slides from my hour long tutorial at PyCon UK this morning. Most of the material was adapted from OSCON, but I also added a new section covering newforms.
Google Maps API gets clickable polylines and polygons. Interesting explanation of how they optimised calculating the distance to the nearest point on a polyline.
Corrupt countries were more likely to support the OOXML document format. “We used the 2006 CPI index (Corruption Perceptions Index) as a measure of corruption.”—a statistical study by Electronic Frontier Finland.
Protoscript (via) JavaScript tool designed for easy prototyping of JS interactions; powered by YUI and jQuery.
HTTPOnly cookie support in Firefox. Five years after the bug was filed, HTTPOnly cookie support has gone in to the Mozilla 1.8 branch. This is a defence in depth feature that has been in IE for years—it lets you set cookies that aren’t available to JavaScript, and hence can’t be hijacked in the event of an XSS flaw.
Opera 9.5 (Kestrel). The latest Opera alpha includes a bunch of CSS3 features (including an almost full implementation of CSS3 Selectors) as well as the ability to use SVG for scalable background images.
Django on Jython: What I’ve done until now. It’s not quite there yet (the new Jython is Python 2.2 with a few 2.3 features; Django requires 2.3 at least) but it’s looking pretty promising.
Primary & Secondary Actions in Web Forms. Fascinating results from an eye tracking study on the placement of “Submit” and “Cancel” buttons—one layout was a whole six seconds slower than the others. Luke Wroblewski’s “Web Form Design Best Practices” book looks like it will be excellent.
CouchDb: Some Context. CouchDb developer Jan Lehnardt wrote up detailed notes on slides from a presentation he gave back in June, explaining most of what’s interesting about CouchDb (although without the new JavaScript function query language).
Imaginary numbers. “We would like to back up our survey with an equation from an expert to work out which celebrity has the sexiest walk, with theory behind it”—Ben Goldacre provides inside information on how PR firms invent science to back up their campaigns.
Amazon EC2 Basics For Python Programmers. Detailed introduction and tutorial from James Gardner.
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.