Blogmarks
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Dashcode review. “Dashcode is quite possibly the best non-Firebug Javascript environment I’ve ever used.” High praise indeed.
Wrong-headed impersonation. Kim Cameron discusses user absent authentication, and emphasises the importance of delegation using delegation coupons.
Five things I hate about Python. By Jacob Kaplan-Moss. I didn’t know you could force eggs to install unzipped with an option in ~/.pydistutils.cfg—that’s always been my least favourite thing about them.
PHP 4 phpinfo() XSS Vulnerability. Another reason not to run an open phpinfo() page on your server.
pear 0.8. “A libevent/pyevent-based locking session daemon for the web”. Relational databases aren’t particularly well suited to the access characteristics of session data.
Scaling Python for High-Load Web Sites. Slides from a talk at PyCon. Be sure to switch to the notes view (Ø in the bottom right)—a really nice overview of scaling up from a CGIs to load balanced, memcached Python application servers.
json-taglib. Because JSON just doesn’t have enough angle brackets.
Rack. “Rack provides an minimal interface between webservers supporting Ruby and Ruby frameworks”. Ruby’s equivalent of WSGI has just hit v0.1.
Programming Erlang. A book on Erlang from the creator of the language himself, out in July but available to buy now as a beta PDF.
WordPress 2.1.1 dangerous, Upgrade to 2.1.2. Helping to spread the word. You’re affected if you’ve downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 in the last three or four days.
Math for the Masses. WordPress.com now supports inline LaTeX. A great example of a feature that will turn a small subset of a user base in to life-long fans.
Safe JSON (via) Subtle but important point about JSON APIs: you shouldn’t use a callback or variable assignment for JSON incorporating private user data, especially if it’s at a predictable URL.
Adobe wants to be the Microsoft of the Web. The base platform technology for RIAs is too important to be controlled or designed by any single party.
Brian Cox at LIFT07. An accessible 20 minute explanation of particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider.
i’m Home. “Every time you start a conversation using i’m, Microsoft shares a portion of the program’s advertising revenue with some of the world’s most effective organisations dedicated to social causes.” Microsoft are now getting their marketing ideas from spam e-mail forwards.
Steampunk Star Wars (via) Beautiful illustrations of Star Wars re-imagined in a steampunk context.
Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin (via) Neat WordPress plugin that forces a redirect to an item’s permalink if the URL has any extra crud in it.
More Django (likely more than is healthy). Jacob’s advanced Django tutorial from PyCon. I really like the template he’s using to present the slides and notes.
The Beauty Of The Diffie-Hellman Protocol. Some useful explanations here. Diffie-Hellman is used by OpenID to establish a shared secret between the provider and the consumer.
soupselect. My simple extension to BeautifulSoup that allows you to grab elements using CSS selectors; should be useful for parsing microformats.
A Review of a Book That Should Be Read Much More Widely Than It Will Be. Greg reviews “Why Aren’t More Women in Science?”, a collection of 15 articles that make their arguments based on scientific research.
Microformats Bookmarklet. Microformats bookmarklet, targetted at Safari. Uses jQuery CSS selectors for parsing, and generates .vcf vCard files using data: uris.
swf Image Replacement. Really neat idea: unobtrusively replace an inline image with a SWF, then apply effects like rotation, rounded corners and drop-shadowns. Shame it suffers from Flash-Of-Unstyled-Content.
OpenID and microformats support on XTech site. “A single-sign on solution like OpenID solves an important problem for us, as most people tend to interact with our conference web sites in only one or two time periods each year.”
The No-Shit Guide To Supporting OpenID In Your Applications. Fantastically useful: Dan Webb digs through the API documentation so you don’t have to. The example code is for Rails but the PHP and Python libraries work in much the same way.
Oxford Geek Night 2 call for proposals. The next event is coming up in April. Get your talk proposals in now!
OpenID makes web identities real and appealing. DHH has caught the OpenID bug. Expect to see a flurry of activity around OpenID in the Rails community over the next few weeks.
More on Decentralised Social Networking. Martin Atkins has been thinking hard about the practicalities of building decentralised social networking on top of OpenID.
Django snippets. James Bennett’s new site for Django snippets. The source code to the whole site is available.
Facebook Query Language. The Facebook API now lets you run SQL-like queries. You can’t do joins but you can perform very simple subselects.