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Items in 2010

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Vintage Ad Browser. Fantastic. 100,000+ vintage advertisements scanned and organised by date and topic, going all the way back to the 1840s and covering every decade in between. An absolute gold mine. # 6th January 2010, 9:04 am

What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise.

Tim Bray # 6th January 2010, 8:20 am

rlisagor’s freshen. A Python clone of Ruby’s innovative Cucumber testing framework. Tests are defined as a set of plain-text scenarios, which are then executed by being matched against test functions decorated with regular expressions. Has anyone used this or Cucumber? I’m intrigued but unconvinced—are the plain text scenarios really a useful way of defining tests? # 5th January 2010, 7:30 pm

FleetDB (via) Yet Another Key-Value Store: Schema-free, JSON protocol, everything cached in RAM, append-only log for durability, multi-record transactions... but what’s really interesting about this one is that it’s written in Clojure and takes full advantage of that language’s concurrency primitives. The prefix operators used by the select API hint at its Lisp heritage. # 5th January 2010, 11:21 am

Timing attack in Google Keyczar library. An issue I also need to fix in the proposed Django signing code. If you’re comparing two strings in crypto (e.g. seeing if the provided signature matches the expected signature) you need to use a timing independent string comparison function or you risk leaking information. This kind of thing is exactly why I want an audited signing module in Django rather than leaving developers to figure it out on their own. # 4th January 2010, 3:23 pm

Design and code review requested for Django string signing / signed cookies. Do you know your way around web app security and cryptography (in particular signing things using hmac and sha1)? We’d appreciate your help reviewing the usage of these concepts in Django’s proposed string signing and signed cookie implementations. # 4th January 2010, 1:24 pm

PythonInterface—OpenCV (via) OpenCV’s new Python interface looks very nice. I’d love to see some full fledged examples of using it to solve real-world computer vision problems. # 4th January 2010, 11:33 am

Self-Proclaimed Social Media Gurus on Twitter Multiplying Like Rabbits (via) 15,740 of them, including 2,091 social media consultants, 807 social media experts, 445 social media gurus and 68 social media stars. # 4th January 2010, 1:49 am

Balsamiq: A look back at 2009. Peldi Guilizzoni from Balsamiq shares some numbers from 2009—$1.1 million profit on $1.6 million revenue, with a team of three people. # 3rd January 2010, 12:13 pm

Videos from DjangoCon 2009. The videos from September’s DjangoCon are now available, including my “Cowboy development with Django” talk. # 3rd January 2010, 11:02 am

countdown_to_newyear.py. A quick Python / OS X script I knocked up last night to count in the new year (using the OS X “say” command). # 1st January 2010, 4:24 pm

The Tablet. John Gruber further demonstrates his mastery of long-form blogging. It’s reassuring to know that he started putting the notes for this entry together way back on the 24th of September. # 1st January 2010, 3:49 am

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