Items in Jan, 2004
Filters: Year: 2004 × Month: Jan × Sorted by date
The PC G5 thing was a hoax. Thank goodness for that :) # 30th January 2004, 11:19 pm
Microsoft Holds Off on Eolas—Related Changes To Windows and ExplorerInternet (via) Patent validity still being reviewed # 30th January 2004, 9:43 pm
Ian Lloyd holding a wombat (via) I never knew they were so fat # 30th January 2004, 8:35 pm
Accessible UK Train Timetable (via) Great use of screen scraping to fix broken websites # 30th January 2004, 7:53 pm
Slouching toward Big Brother (via) Security is a trade-off # 30th January 2004, 7:18 pm
IE Factor, Exemplified. Detailed explanation of an obscure IE border bug # 30th January 2004, 7:16 pm
Election boxes easy to mess with (via) More on Diebold’s ludicrous security # 30th January 2004, 7:11 pm
Wired News: Flower Power Takes on Land Mines (via) Good science at work # 30th January 2004, 7:10 pm
RSS native parsing in the next Firebird. Aggregators, aggregators, everywhere I look # 30th January 2004, 6:59 pm
Bouncing Termsheets. Understanding venture capital # 30th January 2004, 6:17 pm
craigblog. Craig from craigslist blogs # 30th January 2004, 5 pm
Custom URLParser for Webware. Our new in-house CMS does something similar # 30th January 2004, 4:57 pm
Hutton—a wise old bird? (via) Hutton conspiracy theories # 30th January 2004, 4:39 pm
Greylisting (via) Interesting short term approach to email spam # 30th January 2004, 8:25 am
No more usernames in URLs
This one could get very interesting. Microsoft have announced that an upcoming update to Internet Explorer will remove the ability to include usernames in URLs completely. This is in response to the growing problem of so called “phishing” scams, which use trick URLs to con important information such as passwords and credit card details out of unsuspecting browser users.
[... 730 words]Greg Dyke’s resignation email. This sucks # 29th January 2004, 10:36 pm
Unison—Reinventing the Mac OS X Usenet newsreader! Usenet is the new Kazaa # 29th January 2004, 10:24 pm
What’s new in Mozilla Firebird 0.8. Coming soon # 29th January 2004, 9:41 pm
’Warspying’ San Francisco (via) War driving for wireless video cameras # 29th January 2004, 9:18 pm
Swedish Campground. So that’s where the funny symbol on the command key came from # 29th January 2004, 7:28 am
Solving and creating captchas with free porn. More spammer ingenuity # 28th January 2004, 8:37 am
How I PC’d an Apple G5. The humanity! # 28th January 2004, 8:23 am
A Call for the Complete Elimination of Joke Haiku Production on the Internet (via) Where’s my other sock? / It disappeared in the wash / How did that happen? # 28th January 2004, 7:24 am
The History of the DeCSS Haiku (via) Fascinating # 28th January 2004, 6:56 am
Allowing innovation in obscure parts of specifications. Hixie remains the master of the obscure # 28th January 2004, 6:40 am
Linus Torvalds: SCO Is “Just Too Wrong” (via) “There are literally several levels of SCO being wrong. And even if we were to live in that alternate universe where SCO would be right, they’d still be wrong.” # 28th January 2004, 4:57 am
Iterating over a sequence in reverse
At work today we stumbled across a situation where we needed to display a list of items in reverse order. The decision to show them in reverse is made in the presentation layer, so altering the code that generates the list in the application logic layer would add coupling between the layers that we would rather avoid. Python’s reverse() function acts on a data structure in place, which we would rather avoid as well. Then we realised that Python’s generators could be used to create a proxy around the sequence allowing us to cycle through it in reverse without altering the sequence itself. Here’s the code:
[... 242 words]MusicXML Definition (via) Royalty free XML sheet music standard # 28th January 2004, 3:32 am
Solving comment spam
There are two main schools of thought concerning comment spam: the optimists and the defeatists. Optimists believe that comment spam can be beaten with technology; defeatists (maybe I should call them pessimists) believe that comments are as doomed as email and we’re all going to hell in a hand basket.
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