Items in Jan, 2010
Filters: Year: 2010 × Month: Jan × Sorted by date
Hot Code Loading in Node.js. Blaine Cook’s patch for Node.js that enables Erlang-style hot code loading, so you can switch out your application logic without restarting the server or affecting existing requests. This could make deploying new versions of Node applications trivial. I’d love to see a Node hosting service that allows you to simply upload a script file and have it execute on the Web. # 31st January 2010, 1:57 pm
32.38 percent of visitors to DF last week did not have Flash.
— John Gruber # 31st January 2010, 12:05 pm
Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes? John Gruber makes the case for the fading significance of Flash, brought about by Apple’s point-blank refusal to support it on the iPhone or iPad. “Flash is no longer ubiquitous. There’s a big difference between “everywhere” and “almost everywhere”.” # 31st January 2010, 12:05 pm
Dojo 1.4.1 vs jQuery 1.4.2pre on Taskspeed. John Resig’s reponse. When JavaScript libraries compete on performance, everybody wins. # 29th January 2010, 2:19 pm
Dojo: Still Twice As Fast When It Matters Most. Alex Russell shows how Dojo out-performs jQuery on the TaskSpeed benchmark, which attempts to represent common tasks in real-world applications and has had code that have been optimised by the development teams behind each of the libraries. # 28th January 2010, 10:40 pm
Why the iPad may be just what we need for Digital Inclusion. Chris Thorpe: “It may not be a Jesus phone, a Moses tablet or something that lives up to hype and hyperbole, but if it does something for the digital inclusion agenda it might live up to Steve Jobs saying it’s the most important thing he’s ever done.” # 28th January 2010, 9:03 pm
Introducing docent. Paul Mison’s clever little Flickr app for viewing galleries that have been added by your contacts. It runs in Python on App Engine and makes extensive use of the Task Queue API. # 28th January 2010, 8:35 pm
Why I Believe Printers Were Sent From Hell To Make Us Miserable (via) I just don’t get it. How has no one managed to produce a printer that doesn’t suck yet? # 28th January 2010, 6:56 pm
Reexamining Python 3 Text I/O. Python 3.1’s IO performance is a huge improvement over 3.0, but still considerably slower than 2.6. It turns out it’s all to do with Python 3’s unicode support: When you read a file in to a string, you’re asking Python to decode the bytes in to UTF-8 (the new default encoding) at the same time. If you open the file in binary mode Python 3 will read raw bytes in to a bytestring instead, avoiding the conversion overhead and performing only 4% slower than the equivalent code in Python 2.6.4. # 28th January 2010, 1:28 pm
If Apple is really successful, it’s likely that other companies will be more emboldened to forsake openness as well. The catch is that customers won’t accept the sudden closing of a previously open platform, that’s one of the reasons Palladium failed. But Apple has shown that users will accept most anything in an entirely new platform as long as it offers users the experience they want.
— Rafe Colburn # 28th January 2010, 9:54 am
World Government Data. Launched last week, this is the Guardian’s meta-search engine for searching and browsing through data from four different government data sites (with more sites planned). Under the hood it’s Django, Solr, Haystack and the Scrapy crawling library. The application was built by Ben Firshman during an internship over Christmas. # 27th January 2010, 12:27 pm
Applications: the real stars of the data.gov.uk launch. A write-up of the data.gov.uk launch event at the Guardian. I demonstrated the Guardian’s World Government Data search engine and a small data.gov.uk inspired feature on WildlifeNearYou. # 27th January 2010, 12:23 pm
After Three Months, Only 35 Subscriptions for Newsday’s Web Site. Not an entirely representative figure, since it doesn’t include the print and cable subscribers who get access to the website as part of their existing package. # 27th January 2010, 8:16 am
OSM the default map in Haiti. A search and rescue team member in Haiti sends word that digital maps constructed by the OpenStreetMap community are spreading by word of mouth and being loaded on to GPS units on the ground. # 25th January 2010, 9:26 pm
The making of the NYT’s Netflix graphic. A database dump from Netflix, some clever hackery in ArcView GIS, hpricot to scrape Metacritic and a lot of careful thought about the UI for navigating the data. # 25th January 2010, 1:11 pm
Fixing the Google Account problem. 3,000+ words explaining how to open a Google Doc invitation sent to an e-mail address that isn’t associated with your Google account. Worth reading just to get an idea for the enormous complexity involved in running a large scale identity system and designing an interface for managing aliases and multiple profiles. Google haven’t got it right yet—has anyone else? # 25th January 2010, 11:21 am
If you’re ever debugging a problem and you see the number 42-mumble-mumble-mumble-7295 you’ve run out of 32-bit storage. If you see 2-mumble-mumble-mumble-647 (2147483647) you’ve run out of signed 32-bit storage. 167-mumble-mumble-15 (16777215) you’ve run out of 24-bits and 65-mumble-mumble-35 (65535) you’ve run out of 16-bits of integers.
— Kellan Elliott-McCrea # 25th January 2010, 8:11 am
Help pick the best photos, but watch out, it’s addictive! My favourite WildlifeNearYou feature yet—our new tool asks you to pick the best from two photos, then uses the results to rank all of the photos for each species. It’s surprisingly addictive—we had over 5,000 votes in the first two hours, peaking at 4 or 5 votes a second. The feature seems to be staying nice and speedy thanks to Redis under the hood. Photos in the top three for any given species display a medal on their photo page. # 25th January 2010, 12:36 am
Linux performance basics. This kind of Linux knowledge is rapidly becoming a key skill for server-side web development. # 24th January 2010, 1:50 pm
A suggestion for a business. Sooner or later, some hosting company is going to figure out that it can provide a service and make a killing (as it were) by offering ten-, twenty-, and hundred-year packets of posthumous hosting. A hundred years is not eternity, but you are not Shakespeare, and it’s a start.
— Jeffrey Zeldman # 24th January 2010, 1:40 pm
Amazon S3: Versioning Proposal. The us-west-1 S3 bucket region now optionally supports versioning—once enabled on a bucket, all previous versions of keys will be preserved. # 24th January 2010, 1:38 pm
Don’t Hash Secrets. A well written explanation from 2008 of why you must use hmac instead of raw SHA-1 when hashing against a secret. # 24th January 2010, 1:30 pm
The Seven Deadly Sins of Solr. Useful advice on managing and deploying Solr. # 24th January 2010, 1:30 pm
A successful Git branching model (via) This looks eminently sensible. The master branch is used for production-ready code, and is only updated by merging from either release branches or emergency hotfix branches. A develop branch is used for integration (from feature branches), and is branched to create release branches when a release is nearly ready. It’s all comprehensively documented and comes with some well-designed diagrams. # 20th January 2010, 7:30 pm
Owls, Otters, Monkeys and Lions Near You.com. It’s not just Owls—we also registered ottersnearyou.com, monkeysnearyou.com and lionsnearyou.com. We’ll probably stop there though, or this could turn in to a very expensive marketing gimmick. # 19th January 2010, 2:54 pm
owlsnearyou.com. Nat and I built this over the weekend. It asks for your location, then tells you where your nearest Owl is (using sightings data people have entered on WildlifeNearYou.com). If you’re using Firefox 3.6 or an iPhone it grabs your location using the W3C geolocation API so you don’t have to type anything at all. # 19th January 2010, 2:45 pm
Crayola Crayon Colors Multiply Like Rabits. “In 1903, Crayola had eight colors in its standard package. Today, there are 120”—and here’s a brilliantly designed infographic showing how it happened. # 19th January 2010, 2:44 pm
If You Don’t Date Your Work, It Sucks. I learnt this lesson the hard way, when I realised that I had no idea exactly what year I created my earliest web-facing projects. # 18th January 2010, 5:46 pm
Locations of Ancient Woolworths Stores follow Precise Geometrical Pattern. Excellent send-up of shoddy science reporting. # 18th January 2010, 2:51 pm
WildlifeNearYou: Help identify animals in other people’s photos. The first of a number of crowdsourcing-style features we have planned for WildlifeNearYou—users can now help identify the animals in each other’s photos, and photo owners get a simple queue interface to approve or reject the suggestions. # 15th January 2010, 1:35 am