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Django and Rails London meetup
Here’s a date for your diary: Sam Newman is arranging a meetup for Django and Rails enthusiasts (and anyone else with an interest) on Monday the 5th of September at 7pm in Smiths of Smithfield. If you want to attend, leave a comment on Sam’s entry to give an idea of numbers. I’m signed up—it should be a fun evening.
How Django processes a request
I’ve decided to kick-start some architecture documentation for Django by describing how the core request handling mechanism in Django works. I’m talking about the part of Django that takes a request from a browser and turns it in to a response—I won’t be discussing the template system, object-relational mapper or automated admin interface, which are all separate components; in fact, you don’t need to use any of those to build a Django application.
[... 674 words]Exciting developments with Django
The amount of activity surrounding the Django web framework since its not-quite release a few weeks ago is amazing. Adrian, Jacob and Wilson have been working over-time, with 395 check-ins to source control since the 13th of July. They’ve added WSGI support, a development web server, unit-tests, a ton of documentation, SQLite support, database introspection and dozens of other feature tweaks and bug fixes. Check out the project Timeline for an idea of just how frenetic things have been.
[... 271 words]Understanding the Greasemonkey vulnerability
If you have any version of Greasemonkey installed prior to 0.3.5, which was released a few hours ago, or if you are running any of the 0.4 alphas, you need to go and upgrade right now. All versions of Greasemonkey aside from 0.3.5 contain a nasty security hole, which could enable malicious web sites to read any file from your hard drive without you knowing.
[... 809 words]Introducing Django
You may know that I spent a year working in Kansas for a local newspaper—the Lawrence Journal-World. I’m delighted to announce that a decent chunk of the software I worked on there is now available as open-source, in the form of the Django web framework.
[... 614 words]Less code is more
I’ve pointed to it a couple of the times from the blogmarks, but it’s worth re-iterating here: if you have any interest at all in LAMP, agile programming or open-source development methodologies you should take a look at lesscode.org. To quote their about page:
[... 211 words]Dissecting the Google Firefox Toolbar
Google have finally released a Firefox version of the Google Toolbar, with some nice praise for XUL in to the bargain. Of course, the most interesting part of the toolbar from a geeky point of view is the bit that queries Google’s servers for PageRank. Sure enough, if you download the google-toolbar.xpi file, unzip it, then unzip the google-toolbar.jar file within there’s a file called pagerank.js with all of the juicy details.
London
My heart goes out to all those affected by yesterday’s terrible attack on London. I think it’s safe to say that here in Britain we are shaken but not stirred—the response here from both the emergency services and the Great British Public has been inspiring. To my knowledge, my friends and relatives are all safe. Thanks to all who asked after me.
[... 85 words]LUG Radio Live
I’ve been very busy for the last three days. My last two exams (HCI and Marketing) were on Thursday evening and Friday morning respectively, followed by a celebratory barbecue. I was up at 7am on Saturday to get up to Wolverhampton for LUG Radio Live, then back to Bath again by 5.30pm for our graduation summer ball. Finally, I’m heading off to Denmark in the early hours of Monday morning for a week and a bit of camping and Roskilde Let’s hope it’s a bit drier than Glastonbury was.
[... 322 words]Space Shuttle Columbia Accident
The official accident report is surprisingly readable—I had to look at it a while back for a university project.
[... 33 words]Tweaking Wikipedia
Does anyone know why Wikipedia displays a redirected page at the same URL rather than using a proper HTTP redirect? Case in point: Topics in human-computer interaction actually displays the content from List of human-computer interaction topics (that’s my next exam topic)—the same content appears at two different URLs. Yuck. Here’s a Greasemonkey script to fix it: wikipedia-redirect.user.js.
[... 125 words]Staying social
June is finals month, but the call of @media 2005 is hard to resist. I won’t be attending the actual conference (sadly my student budget doesn’t stretch that far) but I’ll be in London on Saturday the 11th to ride on the coat-tails of the conference.
[... 174 words]Stuart’s book
I meant to mention this earlier, but Stuart’s book, DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using JavaScript & DOM, has been published. I worked as a technical editor on the book, and I’m proud to have been associated with it. Don’t worry about the hairy title (apparently you have to have DHTML in it or bookshops won’t know where to put it / people won’t know what it’s about), the inside is pure gold. In their usual style, SitePoint have posted the first four chapters online for your perusal so you don’t have to take my word for it, you can try it out for yourself.
Fixing web applications with Greasemonkey
In Greasemonkey FUD, I highlighted the importance of Greasemonkey as a tool for fixing interface problems in “enterprise” web applications. DJ Adams has done exactly that for OSS Notes, part of the SAP service portal. His user script ditches the frames in the interface, makes the page title more useful and adds hyperlinks to other note references on the page—significantly improving the user experience in less than 40 lines of code. The improvements are clearly explained in the accompanying screencast.
[... 101 words]Testing a new version of IXR
Almost two years to the day since the last release, I’ve put together a new version of IXR, my PHP XML-RPC library. I haven’t published it on the site just yet as I want to make sure any bugs are ironed out first, but you can grab a copy here:
[... 177 words]Eurovision scores
Aah sweet Eurovision. This time last year I was in Kansas, no one had even heard of it and I was forced to watch it over RealPlayer as it wasn’t being carried by any of the TV channels. This year, we’ve had a Eurovision party. Here are our scores:
[... 261 words]Fighting RFCs with RFCs
Google’s recently released Web Accelerator apparently has some scary side-effects. It’s been spotted pre-loading links in password-protected applications, which can amount to clicking on every “delete this” link — bypassing even the JavaScript prompt you carefully added to give people the chance to think twice.
[... 353 words]Giving away the index
My final year project is due in two weeks, and I’m going to be running on silent for most of them. I have, however, upgraded to Tiger and playing with Spotlight has given me plenty to think about.
[... 414 words]A Firefox observation
There are (to my knowledge) around 80 people on my undergraduate computer science course. Of those 80, I know of at least fourfive who’s final year project involves writing a Firefox extension of some sort. That’s 1 in 2016.
Why the term Ajax is useful
Software design patterns are useful mainly because they provide a shared vocabulary: rather than discussing the intimate details of a three layered application architecture, we say “MVC”. Rather than describing an object that tracks your progress while looping over a collection, we say “Iterator”.
[... 152 words]Safari 1.3 has a JavaScript Console
My single biggest complaint about Safari in the past has been its terrible support for JavaScript debugging. Safari 1.3 has just been released, and tucked away in the Debug menu is a brand new JavaScript console option. It’s not as good as the Firefox equivalent (it throws up far too many “Undefined value, line: 0” errors for my liking) but it’s a big step in the right direction.
Greasemonkey FUD
Wow, that didn’t take long. Via the Greasemonkey mailing list, Forrester Research have released a report entitled Greasemonkey Primes Firefox For Embarrassment. I have no intention of paying the $49 asking price for the full 3 page report (!), but here’s the executive summary:
[... 283 words]Greasemonkey etiquette
In Meme tracking with Greasemonkey, Jon Udell introduces a userscript which grabs the number of references from del.icio.us and bloglines and appends that information to the top of every page you visit. To be fair on Jon, the version he has released defaults to only doing this for pages on Infoworld.com but modifying it to run on every web page is trivial.
[... 252 words]Flickr without the Flash
One of my favourite panels at SxSW this year was the Flash vs. HTML Game Show, in which a team of HTML/JavaScript gurus took on a team of Flash gurus showing off pre-prepared solutions to tasks set for the panel. One of the challenges was to come up with enhancements to Flickr using the team’s assigned technology.
[... 353 words]Enter the hedgehog
The Ubuntu community have released Hoary Hedgehog, otherwise known as Ubuntu 5.04. If you haven’t tried Ubuntu yet, it’s an excellent Linux distribution based on Debian with a strong focus on desktop usability. Unlike most Linux distros, Ubuntu comes with just one desktop manager (Gnome) and one obvious default application for each of the essentials: Firefox for browsing, OpenOffice for office work, Evolution for mail.
[... 209 words]Greasemonkey as a lightweight intermediary
In The architecture of intermediation, Jon Udell discusses the need for a mechanism for a high-level tool for adding custom features to web applications. In Jon’s case, he wants to add a private bookmarks feature to del.icio.us. Jon thought about using a web proxy to intercept and modify del.icio.us pages, but ruled it out as too low-level.
[... 354 words]PyCon observations
I’m back from my two week stint in the US, and currently suffering from vicious jet-lag (my body wants me to go to sleep at 5am and wake up just past noon). Herewith some observations on PyCon, SxSW and the differences between the two.
[... 791 words]Choice SxSW quotes
My American adventure is ongoing; I’m still in Austin at the moment, but I’ll be off to Washington D.C. in a few days and there’s a small chance I’ll get there via Dallas. This doesn’t leave much opportunity for online shenanigans, but there were a few things from SxSW that really needed a mention. The conference, as ever, was awesome—if not for the panels then certainly for the socialising. If anything I stretched myself too thin this year trying to keep up with the Brit Pack, the WaSP crew, some ex-colleagues from Lawrence and the people I met in San Francisco back in May.
[... 383 words]Fixing Paul Graham’s Footnotes
I’m a big fan of Paul Graham’s essays, the latest of which is How to Start a Startup. There’s just one niggling problem with them: Paul makes extensive use of footnotes, but provides no way of jumping from the reference in the text to the footnote at the bottom of the page and back up again. Instead, you have to manually down to the bottom of the article and back up again every time you hit a footnote reference.
[... 172 words]Problems with Trac? Switch to FSFS
I’m head over heels in love with Trac, and have been for about 6 months now. It really is best-of-breed software: it neatly integrates a wiki, a simple bug tracker and a Subversion repository browser with clean markup, a nice default design and a learning curve for new users that can be measured in minutes. No wonder it’s started to show up all over the place.
[... 350 words]