December 2003
Dec. 1, 2003
What the heck is: A type (via) More computer science fundamentals
Dec. 2, 2003
Selectutorial
New from Russ Weakley: Selectutorial, which taks his widely acclaimed step by step CSS tutorial style and applies it to CSS selectors. Having a full understanding of selectors is critical if you’re going to take full advantage of CSS, so if you don’t get them yet you should really check this out.
The 2003 Perl Advent Calendar (via) I wish Python had one of these
HTML entities for email addresses: don’t bother
I’ve suspected this for a long time, and now here’s the empirical evidence: Popular Spam Protection Technique Doesn’t Work. If you’re relying on HTML entities to protect your email address from spam harvesters—for example username@example.com—your email address may as well be in plain text. Chip Rosenthal downloaded a tool called “Web Data Extractor v4.0” and tried it on some test data to prove once and for all that the technique doesn’t work.
Downloading your hotmail inbox
Adrian just pointed me to a fantastic tool: Gotmail, a utility to download mail from Hotmail accounts. It’s a command line utitlity, written in Perl and making use of the curl binary, which can connect to Hotmail over the web and grab any new emails, saving them locally as an mbox file and deleting them from the Hotmail server.
[... 289 words]Sidewinder: Resolution. My cousin’s new album. Buy it and support fresh talent ;)
Dynamic or batch publishing? (via) A management-friendly guide to static vs dynamic
A New Website for Harper’s Magazine. Paul Ford’s semantic web publishing system gets a commercial outing
Sortable Tables, with colour. An extension to Stuart’s sorttable.js
FetchYahoo! Like Gotmail, for Yahoo
CSS Centering—fun for all! A good overview of a common gotcha
userland can access Linux kernel memory. Major local root exploit (and nothing to do with Dave Winer)—patch those boxen
radiac.net Christmas decorations. Thankfully Firebird doesn’t play the midi files
Dicts from lists (via) Neat Python one-liner using 2.3’s extended slices
Hire Dave Shea. You know you want to
Netstrings. Easy, secure method for transmitting strings over a network
Experiences of Using PHP in Large Websites. Global function namespace + oversimplification = trouble
Dating Design Patterns (via) Reusable solutions for a complex system
A Tale of Two (Linux) Cities (via) Local government and Open Source
Collective Ownership of Code and Text. Ward Cunningham interview, part II
The mystery of why only four properties apply to table columns. More deep and gruesome CSS theory from Hixie
Skip This Rant and Read Shirky (via) More metadata challenges
Python vs PHP. He’s not the messiah! He’s a very naughty boy.
Dec. 4, 2003
Brief Guide to Regular Expressions (via) Regular expressions for everyone else
Will IE even be better in Longhorn? Off topic doom and gloom on css-discuss
On Search: XML. Tim Bray on search and XML? You know it’s going to be good.
Extracting the length from MP3 files with Python
Ned Batchelder recently wrote about the difficulties involved in extracting the length from an MP3 file. We’re going to need to solve this problem soon at work; luckily, it seems that the answer may lie in the Python bindings for mpgedit, an audio file editing library available for both Windows and Linux.
[... 149 words]Dates on the web
D. Keith Robinson writes about Using Dates For Featured Web Content. Keith’s right, including a date with your content really is a no-brainer. I’ll add an anecdote of my own. Several years ago I ran a popular news site for Team Fortress Classic, a team based online first person shooter game with a thriving clan scene. I was careful to include dates on every piece of content, but in my youthful naivety I neglected to include the year. The years rolled by and the content built up until I suddenly realised that I was no longer sure what year some of it was written in! The site has sadly now passed in to history but the lesson remains: the web moves faster than you might think, so omitting the year in your dates is a pretty dumb thing to do.
[... 220 words]GAWDS now inviting new members
The Guild of Accessible Web Designers is a world wide organisation of web designers and developers committed to helping each other, and promoting the message that accessible web design is ’good for business’
. I’d describe the organisation in detail here, but the official site does a far better job than I could. If you’ve been following the web accessibility community in any detail You’re likely to recognise a number of the names on the registered members list; I’ve been following GAWDS developments for a while and its shaping up to be a great resource for accessibility minded designers. I’ve also contributed an article on Writing good ALT text which hopefully provides some useful advice on a frequently misunderstood topic.
Mad Skateboarding Skillz. Signs of a mis-spent youth