Items in 2007
Filters: Year: 2007 × Sorted by date
Misapplying book terms, Pylons, and the ’end-user’. Ben Bangert responds to Adam Gomaa’s claim that Pylons lacks “conceptual integrity”. # 19th December 2007, 11:09 am
Frameworks Exist for Conceptual Integrity. Adam Gomaa just taught me a bunch of interesting things about Django’s underlying philosophy. Looks like I need to re-read the Mythical Man-Month. # 17th December 2007, 1:58 pm
The future of web standards. Nice analysis from James Bennett, who suggests that successful open source projects (Linux, Python, Perl etc) could be used as the model for a more effective standards process, and points out that Ian Hickson is something of a BDFL for the WHAT-WG. # 17th December 2007, 1:16 pm
To get a better future, not only do we need a return to “the browser wars”, we need to applaud and use the hell out of “non-standard” features until such time as there’s a standard to cover equivalent functionality. Non-standard features are the future, and suggesting that they are somehow “bad” is to work against your own self-interest.
— Alex Russell # 16th December 2007, 11:33 pm
Don’t EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence _much_ too much credit.
— Linus Torvalds # 16th December 2007, 9:53 pm
Chapter 7: Form Processing. The chapter on newforms I contributed to “The Definitive Guide to Django” is now online, along with the rest of the published book. # 16th December 2007, 9:44 pm
AppJet: Instant Web Programming. Another attempt at simple server-side JavaScript application hosting. Worth checking out for the impressive syntax highlighting code editor, which even matches braces. # 15th December 2007, 3:37 pm
Techniques for safely consuming external HTTP on demand? I asked this question on programming.reddit.com yesterday and got some really insightful answers, including Joe Stump from Digg describing how Digg Images uses Danga’s Gearman worker queue. # 15th December 2007, 12:29 pm
DeWitt Clinton: T-Mobile and Twitter. “If you think the rest of Internet needs net neutrality laws, that’s nothing compared with the backward-facing worldview of the established mobile carriers.” # 15th December 2007, 12:26 pm
Fire foxes, fire eagles, fire dogs: myth in a new media world (via) Entertaining over-analysis of Fire Eagle, the code name for Yahoo!’s soon-to-be-released geo location broker. It’s actually named after Ze Frank’s Ride The Fire Eagle Danger Day, as any Sports Racer would know. # 15th December 2007, 12:25 pm
ExtInfoWindow 1.0: Ajax powered, CSS customization. Finally, a semi-official way of creating customised info windows for the Google Maps API. You lose the default shadow but gain the ability to style the entire info window using CSS. # 15th December 2007, 12:22 pm
NginxMemcachedModule. nginx can be set up to directly serve a URL from memcache if the corresponding cache key is set, and fall back to a backend application server otherwise. Application servers can then write directly to memcache when content needs to be cached or goes stale. # 15th December 2007, 1:59 am
stompserver. I think this is the lightweight message queue I’ve been looking for: written in Ruby and EventMachine, easy to set up (thanks to gems), interoperates perfectly with stomp.py. # 14th December 2007, 4:40 pm
Two-Faced Django. Excellent Django tutorial by Will Larson that shows how to build a polling application with an interface both on the Web and in Facebook. Also touches on unit testing and Ajax using jQuery. # 14th December 2007, 2:44 pm
BBC iPlayer now supports streaming Flash for Mac and Linux. Absolutely fantastic—it Just Works, you hit the homepage and you can be watching video in seconds. No need to even sign up for an account. I imagine IP ranges are used to block access from outside the UK. # 14th December 2007, 12:36 pm
Amazon SimpleDB overview. Attribute values are limited to 1,024 bytes; Amazon suggest that you store larger fields in S3 and use SimpleDB to query metadata about those objects. # 14th December 2007, 11:39 am
What You Need To Know About Amazon SimpleDB. Amazon have finally launched the database component of their web service suite. It fits a bunch of current trends: key/value pairs, schemaless, built on top of Erlang. “Eventual consistency” is an interesting characteristic. # 14th December 2007, 11:21 am
Two HTTP Caching Extensions. stale-while-revalidate serves cached content even while a refresh has been triggered and is currently being pulled in to the cache; stale-if-error serves cached content if a service has gone down. # 12th December 2007, 11:23 am
Unobtrusively Mapping Microformats with jQuery
Microformats are everywhere. You can’t shake an electronic stick these days without accidentally poking a microformat-enabled site, and many developers use microformats as a matter of course. And why not? After all, why invent your own class names when you can re-use pre-defined ones that give your site extra functionality for free?
[... 2277 words]PostgreSQL 8.3 beta 4 release notes. In addition to the huge speed improvements, 8.3 adds support for XML, UUID and ENUM data types and brings full text (tsearch2) in to the core database engine. # 12th December 2007, 12:43 am
PostgreSQL 8.3 vs. 8.2—a simple benchmark. Stefan Kaltenbrunner reports a 2.2x speed increase for PostgreSQL 8.3 compared to 8.2 for a relatively simple benchmark. # 12th December 2007, 12:42 am
Unobtrusively Mapping Microformats with jQuery. My contribution to 24 ways: using Mapstraction to geocode hCards (extracted with jQuery) and plot them on a Google Map. # 12th December 2007, 12:28 am
“The Definitive Guide to Django” is now shipping from Amazon. The book looks absolutely fantastic (bias disclosure: I contributed the newforms chapter)—huge congratulations to Adrian and Jacob. # 11th December 2007, 9:12 pm
The Future of Comet: Part 1, Comet Today. Absolutely the best summary I’ve seen of all of the current Comet techniques in one place. # 11th December 2007, 1:13 pm
Shadowmaker. Upload a PNG with a transparent background and get back a shadow image suitable for use with the Google Maps API. # 10th December 2007, 3:45 pm
ErlyWeb vs. Ruby on Rails EC2 Performance Showdown. ErlyWeb’s peak response rate beats Rails by 47x, albeit with a hugely simplified benchmark. More interesting than the results is the idea of using EC2 for benchmarking on identical simulated hardware. # 10th December 2007, 3:27 pm
Updates to template_utils. James Bennett’s Django template_utils library now provides tags for consuming external RSS and Atom feeds. Combine with template fragment caching for an instant mashup written just using templates. # 10th December 2007, 3:25 pm
Django snippets: Authenticate against Active Directory. Uses a custom authentication backend with the Python ldap module. If Django hasn’t seen the user before a new Django user account is created with data from ldap. # 10th December 2007, 8:40 am
A Fair Proxy Balancer for Nginx and Mongrel. nginx uses round robin for proxying by default; this extension module ensures requests are queued up and sent through to backend mongrel servers that aren’t currently busy. I don’t see any reason this wouldn’t work with servers other than mongrel. # 9th December 2007, 2:57 pm
Insert Dojo and YUI bookmarklets. Combine with Jash for interactive API experimentation on any web page. # 9th December 2007, 12:38 pm