Blogmarks
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Web Technologies for Opera Web Applications. A one page summary of the various standards and extensions supported by Opera.
Disabling keyboard controls in the Yahoo! Maps Ajax API. map.disableKeyControls() is the incantation—without it, the map will pan when you use the keyboard to scroll up and down the containing page.
Soviet Military Maps History. “I have been researching the history of the Soviet global mapping project and, in particular, the large scale plans of British and Irish towns and cities produced from 1950s to 1990.”
JSON and Browser Security. Douglas Crockford suggests using secret tokens to protect JSON content, and avoiding wrapper hacks to protect unauthorised JSON delivery as they may fall foul of undiscovered browser bugs in the future.
Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid. Wilson Miner introduces a smart, methodical approach to well proportioned Web typography.
factoryjoe: Design Patterns. Chris Messina’s collection of user interface design pattern screenshots, collated on Flickr.
Understanding your (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) daemons. A handy bestiary.
Naming URL patterns
(via)
You can now apply a name to a URL pattern in Django development version, which makes the {% url %} template tag far more useful.
XML and JSON. James Clark on JSON’s strengths and weaknesses compared to XML.
Avoid IE Brokenness When using Vary and Attachments (via) Django middleware that works around a bug in IE where external applications fail to load content that was served with a Vary header.
How to Write a Spelling Corrector. Example code in Python, by Peter Norvig.
Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 released. Includes Iceweasel (Firefox), Icedove (Thunderbird), Iceape (Seamonkey) and Python 2.4.4 as standard.
mod_magnet (via) lighttpd module that will be included by default in version 1.5—it lets you write Lua scripts that can hook in to any phase of the request, including URL rewriting and content generation.
PyCon Wireless Network. Conference WiFi is generally bad, and getting worse as more people turn up with laptops. Here’s how Sean Reifschneider built a solid network for PyCon 2007 for $2200 in hardware and 70 hours of work.
Talks for Oxford Geek Nights announced. Microslots on Yahoo! Pipes, Semantic Mediawiki, Second Life and more.
Fortify JavaScript Hijacking FUD. Bob Ippolito points out the flaws in the recent widely disseminated JavaScript Hijacking paper. While the paper does miss some important details, it’s good that more people are now aware of the security implications involved in serving JSON up wrapped in an array.
Twitter / secgen. The UN Secretary-General has an (unofficial) Twitter page.
Eat Brain At Fleshmob This Saturday. Zombie fleshmob on Saturday afternoon somewhere near the Thames.
Google My Maps: Bodeans. I’ve been talking about how useful a simple tool for creating custom maps would be for ages... looks like Google beat me to it. Here’s one I created showing the location of Bodeans, an excellent Kansas-style BBQ joint in Soho, London. It’s a shame the URLs suck.
CSS Naked Day. Today is CSS naked day. Get naked!
White- (or green, or blue, or yellow) label Dabble. DabbleDB can pick a colour scheme based on a logo that you upload. Pure class.
IE 7 does not resize text sized in pixels. I said it does the other day; I was wrong. Text sizing is still broken, but it does have a full page zoom feature (like Opera’s but not as smooth).
Mass Video Conversion Using AWS. How to use S3, SQS, EC2, ffmpeg and some Python to bulk convert videos with Amazon Web Services.
mail rail on Flickr (via) Photos of the Royal Mail’s private underground railway, sadly closed in 2003.
Ext JS. Jack Slocum is building a business around his excellent Ext JavaScript library (which can now run on top of YUI, jQuery or Prototype). The library itself is LGPL, but you can pay for a commercial license and support.
Lawrence Journal-World Marketplace (via) While other newspapers complain about competition from the internet, my former employer is embracing it. This is why local newspapers still matter.
Ekranoplan! Crazy awesome Soviet “ground effect” vehicle, visible in dry dock on Google Maps.
phpsh. An interactive shell for PHP, developed at Facebook and written mostly in Python. Facebook are really pushing their open-source stuff at the moment.
The problem with pixels. IE7 lets users resize pixel-based fonts. Is it finally time to stop avoiding pixel sizing in CSS?
The RADAR Architecture: RESTful Application, Dumb-Ass Recipient (via) Dave Thomas points out that REST expects smart clients, but browsers are dumb (only really support POST and GET). His suggested fix is to build a pure REST service and then drop in a server-side application proxy that sits between the browser and the REST backend.