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Fabjectory. 3D printing company that can print out your Second Life avatar or Nintendo Mii.
Poll results: 50.4% of respondents maximise windows. Interesting graphs that break down browser window maximisation by operating system.
MyOpenID relaunches. Now with a handsome redesign and support for SSL client certificates as a secure alternative to passwords.
Google Reader Theme. Jon Hicks’ beautiful alternative skin for Google Reader, installable as a user stylesheet for various browsers.
SoundManager 2. JavaScript sound API, using a bridge to Flash.
Most HTML templating languages are written incorrectly. “If you ever find yourself in the position of designing an html template language, please make the default behavior when including variables be to HTML-escape them.” I couldn’t agree more.
Fading Out Nofollows? Philipp Lenssen suggests automatically removing the nofollow from links in comments a few days after they have been posted, to allow administrators time to delete spam without penalising legitimate authors.
modwsgi. Apache module (written in C) for hosting Python WSGI applications, no mod_python required. Includes Django integration instructions. Has anyone tried this out?
Rails and Scaling with Multiple Databases. Ryan Tomayko explains how his team spreads a high traffic Rails application across five separate PostgreSQL databases by giving each client their own schema—similar to how WordPress MU scales.
Harper’s Magazine (via) The site with the best metadata on the Web just relaunched, with even MORE metadata.
So that was Oxford Geek Night 2. Nat’s writeup, including video of the local news coverage (in which I look like a total dork).
Discourse DB. A collaborative effort to collect the opinions of the world’s journalists and commentators about ongoing political events and issues, powered by Semantic MediaWiki so there’s metadata coming out of its ears.
Quercus: PHP in Java (via) A “fast, open-source, 100% Java implementation of the PHP language”, built to run on top of Resin. Claims to be compatibly with MediaWiki, Drupal, Wordpress, Gallery2 and DocuWiki.
HTML5, XHTML2, and the Future of the Web. Covers similar topics to my talk, but in much more detail.
What the heck is HTML 5? Slides from my five minute HTML 5 talk at Oxford Geek Night 2.
Quakr 7d Tiltometer. How the Quakr team built their own seven dimensional metadata camera using sellotape, protractors and a ball of string.
quakr. Uses Flickr machine tags to add tilt/pan/direction information to photos, then displays them in the correct orientation in a 3D Flash viewer. Presented at last night’s Oxford Geek Night.
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.