Items in Feb, 2004
Filters: Year: 2004 × Month: Feb × Sorted by date
Perl Gets Extreme Makeover. Surprisingly informative overview of Perl 6 from Yahoo! News. # 20th February 2004, 4:17 am
Om Malik on Broadband: pMachine is now Expression Engine. Interesting interview with the man behind pMachine and Expression Engine. # 20th February 2004, 3:47 am
Codeville (via) Not content with revolutionising file distribution, Bram “BitTorrent” Cohen has his sights set on CVS. # 20th February 2004, 3:38 am
Wired News: Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Porn (via) In which Larry Flynt discusses the Patriot Act. # 20th February 2004, 2:28 am
If foxes can learn Ruby, why can’t you?
Why The Lucky Stiff’s (poignant) guide to Ruby is shaping up to be a masterpiece. Trust me, you’ve never read a programming language guide that’s even remotely comparable. Even if you have no interest in Ruby you should check it out, if only for the cartoon foxes. Here’s Why’s explanation of Ruby’s array syntax:
[... 219 words]Hypocrisy: RDF and the Atom API. Russell really doesn’t like PUT and DELETE. # 19th February 2004, 3:58 am
Electrolite: Upholding standards. (via) Judge denies court order over rogue semicolon. # 18th February 2004, 11:16 pm
Yahoo! Birth of a New Machine (via) Did you know Yahoo! owns both AltaVista and AllTheWeb? # 18th February 2004, 9:49 pm
Largest Living Thing Is a 2,200 Acre Fungus in Oregon. 2,000 years old and mostly harmless. # 18th February 2004, 9:24 pm
AT&T Trips Up SCO. Things are getting a lot trickier for Darl and chums. # 18th February 2004, 6:47 pm
Killer rabbit 404. Creative ;) # 18th February 2004, 6:32 pm
Catching up with Harry
I’m not sure how I missed this, but Harry Fueck’s new book The PHP Anthology was published by SitePoint back in December, as a hefty 2 volume epic. Harry is the guru behind PHP Patterns and really knows his stuff. While the book is at first glance a cookbook for solving web related problems, Harry also uses it as a platform for teaching sensible development practises:
[... 237 words]New PHP releases (via) Joey reports on PHP 4.3.5 RC 2 and PHP 5.0 Beta 4 # 18th February 2004, 3:42 am
Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks (via) Cory’s notes from Danny O’Brien’s Etcon session. # 18th February 2004, 3:41 am
Advanced Python network programming
Understanding Network I/O, Part 2 by George Belotsky (via The Farm) is the best tutorial on the subject of network programming I’ve seen yet. It provides a detailed explanation of simple threaded network clients, thread pools using the Queue module and asynchronous I/O using both Twisted and Python’s asyncore library—then discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.
[... 93 words]End user license agreements hit a new low
So apparently there’s an unpleasant worm going around AOL Instant Messenger at the moment. Only it’s not a worm—it’s a semi-legitimate piece of adware which asks you for permission to “modify the instant messenger software, deliver additional content such as advertisements and promotional messages” and announces that “In addition, the software will interoperate with your current instant messaging client so as to permit the automatic sending of advertising messages originating from your computer to your contact or ’buddy’ list regarding content offered by PSD Tools or its suppliers.”
[... 126 words]What’s New in Python 2.4. An early look at Python 2.4’s new proposed features. # 17th February 2004, 2:21 am
Hacking the political system
Danny O’Brien has a fascinating post up about the nature of hacking and how to game entrenched political systems. It’s all worth reading, but the part about how Fax Your MP was created as a deliberate political hack in particular caught my attention. I’ve long been a fan of Fax Your MP and it’s really interesting to see some of the ideas behind the system explained:
[... 380 words]EtherPEG (via) Watch GIFs and JPEGs loaded on your local network # 17th February 2004, 2:10 am
Automatic line ending conversions in IE
I’ve just updated my SitePoint blog with a tale of Javascript debugging woe. To cut a long story short, Internet Explorer for both Mac and Windows automatically converts sane line endings in to the platform specific alternatives whenever you assign a Javascript string to the value attribute of a text area. It’s the kind of quirk that can take up a whole morning’s worth of debugging.
[... 71 words]WaveBlog. So that’s what Russell’s been up to... # 16th February 2004, 11:44 pm
document.getElementsByWhatever() (via) Like getElementsBySelector() but... different. # 12th February 2004, 11:10 pm
Webmonkey R.I.P. The site responsible for my unofficial job title is no more. # 12th February 2004, 4:41 pm
Photoshop a Google logo for a ficticious holiday (via) Fark fun. # 12th February 2004, 3:50 pm
foxs_view_of_the_bbc_player.swf (via) This one left me speechless. # 12th February 2004, 4:14 am
Scary-cool: Decompression bombs. How to crash a mail scanner with a 7 KB attachment. # 12th February 2004, 3:35 am
Compilers. Not, it turns out, a difficult thing. Dan says they’re easy. But then he did write most of Parrot... # 11th February 2004, 6:38 am
Optimizing Mozilla Firebird. Hacking prefs.js # 11th February 2004, 6:10 am
Code generation vs data driven programming
Via Ned Batchelder, this interview with pragmatic Dave Thomas on code generation closely reflects my own nascent thoughts on the issue:
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