47 posts tagged “natalie-downe”
2025
TIL: Styling an HTML dialog modal to take the full height of the viewport.
I spent some time today trying to figure out how to have a modal <dialog> element present as a full height side panel that animates in from the side. The full height bit was hard, until Natalie helped me figure out that browsers apply a default max-height: calc(100% - 6px - 2em); rule which needs to be over-ridden.
Also included: some spelunking through the HTML spec to figure out where that calc() expression was first introduced. The answer was November 2020.
2022
Measuring traffic during the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival
This weekend was the 50th annual Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival.
[... 2,693 words]Weeknotes: Camping, a road trip and two new museums
Natalie and I took a week-long road trip and camping holiday. The plan was to camp on Santa Rosa Island in the California Channel Islands, but the boat to the island was cancelled due to bad weather. We treated ourselves to a Central Californian road trip instead.
[... 872 words]Pillar Point Stewards, pypi-to-sqlite, improvements to shot-scraper and appreciating datasette-dashboards
This week I helped Natalie launch the Pillar Point Stewards website and built a new tool for loading PyPI package data into SQLite, in order to help promote the excellent datasette-dashboards plugin by Romain Clement.
[... 1,985 words]2020
Datasette 0.51 (plus weeknotes)
I shipped Datasette 0.51 today, with a new visual design, plugin hooks for adding navigation options, better handling of binary data, URL building utility methods and better support for running Datasette behind a proxy. It’s a lot of stuff! Here are the annotated release notes.
[... 2,020 words]Weeknotes: Rocky Beaches, Datasette 0.48, a commit history of my database
This week I helped Natalie launch Rocky Beaches, shipped Datasette 0.48 and several releases of datasette-graphql, upgraded the CSRF protection for datasette-upload-csvs and figured out how to get a commit log of changes to my blog by backing up its database to a GitHub repository.
Weeknotes: Datasette alphas for testing new plugin hooks
A relatively quiet week this week, compared to last week’s massive push to ship Datasette 0.44 with authentication, permissions and writable canned queries. I can now ship alpha releases, such as today’s Datasette 0.45a1, which means I can preview new plugin features before they are completely ready and stable.
[... 728 words]Happy Birthday Sea Lions! (via) Today, June 15th, is Sea Lion birthday—half of all California Sea Lions are born today thanks to clever co-ordinated delayed implantation by Sea Lion females. Natalie has started making nature videos and I’ve been tagging along as her camera-person—this three minute video, shot at Pier 39 in San Francisco, celebrates Sea Lion birthday and explains how it works.
2018
Develop Your Naturalist Superpowers with Observable Notebooks and iNaturalist (via) Natalie’s article for this year’s 24 ways advent calendar shows how you can use Observable notebooks to quickly build interactive visualizations against web APIs. She uses the iNaturalist API to show species of Nudibranchs that you might see in a given month, plus a Vega-powered graph of sightings over the course of the year. This really inspired me to think harder about how I can use Observable to solve some of my API debugging needs, and I’ve already spun up a couple of private Notebooks to exercise new APIs that I’m building at work. It’s a huge productivity boost.
Automatically playing science communication games with transfer learning and fastai
This weekend was the 9th annual Science Hack Day San Francisco, which was also the 100th Science Hack Day held worldwide.
[... 1,174 words]Letterboxing on Lundy
Last week Natalie and I spent a delightful two days with our friends Hannah and Adam on the beautiful island of Lundy in the Bristol Channel, 12 miles off the coast of North Devon.
[... 1,461 words]Photos from our tour of the amazing bone collection of Ray Bandar. Ray Bandar (1927-2017) was an artist, scientist, naturalist and an incredibly prolific collector of bones. His collection is in the process of moving to the California Academy of Sciences but Natalie managed to land us a private tour lead by his great nephew. The collection is truly awe-inspiring, and a testament to an extraordinary life lived following a very particular passion.
owlsnearme source code on GitHub. Here’s the source code for our new owlsnearme.com project. It’s a single-page React application that pulls all of its data from the iNaturalist API. We built it this weekend with the SuperbOwl kick-off as a hard deadline so it’s not the most beautiful React code, but it’s a nice demonstration of how React (and create-react-app in particular) can be used for rapid development.
Owls Near Me. Back in 2010 Natalie and I shipped owlsnearyou.com—a website for finding your nearest owls, using data from the sadly deceased WildlifeNearYou (RIP). To celebrate #SuperbOwl Sunday we rebuilt the same concept on top of the excellent iNaturalist API. Search for a place to see which owls have been spotted there, or click the magic button to geolocate your device and see which owls have been spotted in your nearby area!
2017
Deploying an asynchronous Python microservice with Sanic and Zeit Now
Back in 2008 Natalie Downe and I deployed what today we would call a microservice: json-head, a tiny Google App Engine app that allowed you to make an HTTP head request against a URL and get back the HTTP headers as JSON. One of our initial use-scase for this was Natalie’s addSizes.js, an unobtrusive jQuery script that could annotate links to PDFs and other large files with their corresponding file size pulled from the Content-Length header. Another potential use-case is detecting broken links, since the API can be used to spot 404 status codes (as in this example).
2010
Getting married and going travelling
It’s been a busy month. On Saturday the 5th of June I married the wonderful Natalie Downe in a beautiful ceremony at Roedean School in Brighton. The reception had owls, cheese, a ferret, a golden eagle, amazing Turkish food, Jewish chair dancing and lovely guests. It was the happiest day of my life.
[... 342 words]WildlifeNearYou talk at £5 app, and being Wired (not Tired)
Two quick updates about WildlifeNearYou. First up, I gave a talk about the site at £5 app, my favourite Brighton evening event which celebrates side projects and the joy of Making Stuff. I talked about the site’s genesis on a fort, crowdsourcing photo ratings, how we use Freebase and DBpedia and how integrating with Flickr’s machine tags gave us a powerful location API for free. Here’s the video of the talk, courtesy of Ian Oszvald:
[... 171 words]2009
Going Nuts with CSS Transitions. Nat’s article for this year’s 24ways—adding special effects to images using CSS rotation, box shadows and the magical -webkit-transition property.
Styling buttons to look like links. Nat has a neat trick for styling submit buttons to look like regular links—so there’s absolutely no excuse for using a “delete” link when you should be using a POST request.
TiddlyPocketBook. Paul Downey took Nat’s dinky pocketbooks CSS and combined it with TiddlyWiki to create a single page pocketbook editor.
Dinky pocketbooks with WebKit transforms. Nat used 90 degree CSS transform rotations in print stylesheets for WebKit and Safari to create printable cut-out-and-fold pocketbooks from A4 pages. Very neat.
djangopeople.net on GitHub. I’ve released the source code for Django People, the geographical community site developed last year by myself and Natalie Downe (it hasn’t otherwise been touched since April last year, so it needs porting to Django 1.1). If you want a new feature on the site, implement it and I’ll see about merging it in.
Practical, maintainable CSS (via) Nat’s posted slides and a video from her latest talk at last week’s Brighton Girl Geeks evening.
2008
Tweetersation. Nat and my latest side project: a JSONP API powered tool to more easily follow conversations between people on Twitter, by combining their tweets in to a single timeline.
CSS Systems for writing maintainable CSS. Nat has published the slides and notes from her BarCamp presentation this morning. I’m really excited about her approach, which involves designing a “CSS system” of markup patterns and CSS that embodies the design of an individual site. Future maintenance can then take this overall system in to account, which is assisted by a defined ordering system and shared vocabulary.
addSizes.js: Snazzy automatic link file-size generation. Posted to Nat’s snazzy new blog: a script that uses my json-head API to grab the file size of linked documents on a page and insert those sizes in to the document.
Django People
I’m constantly surprised by the number of people I run in to at conferences (or even in one case on the train) who are using Django but are completely invisible to the Django community. It seems that this is the downside of having good documentation: many people just read it and start building, without ever showing their face on the mailing lists or IRC.
[... 194 words]Poorly Macbook, ineffective error message design. Nat’s MacBook died the other day, throwing out some impressively meaningless error symbols. How exactly are you meant to Google for a circle with a line through it?
2007
Back To The Future of Print. Nat’s contribution to 24 ways: a long needed update on the state of the art in print stylesheets.
Brighton geek venues. Nat’s latest project: a neat Google Maps mashup listing venues for geek events in Brighton, managed using Google MyMaps to edit a KML file.