December 2003
Dec. 4, 2003
HTMLTemplate. Another Python XHTML-to-object structure templating system
Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow (via) Nice use of CSS as well
The Importance of Good Copy. We should learn from direct marketers... <shudder>
Do What I Mean (dwim) (via) One for the tool box
How to Design (Declarative) Programming Languages (via) Language design 101
DTML in Zwiki pages. A Wiki you can reprogram on the fly sounds like a pretty neat toy
Dec. 5, 2003
Simpler content managment
Perls of wisdom in a sea of site mismanagement, via the ever-excellent Column Two:
[... 497 words]New PHP community site
Via The Farm, Chris Shiflett is calling for assistance in setting up a new PHP community site to run along similar lines to use Perl. Chris has already secured an offer of hosting and support from O’Reilly and is now seeking offers of help from potential contributers. PHP has long needed a site of this kind (PHP Builder has lost a lot of momentum since being sold by Tim Perdue) so this could be a worth while project to get involved with if you have the time.
[... 140 words]Bounty Hunting
Via Jeremy Hylton, Mark Shuttleworth (super-rich geek and space tourist) is offering $100,000 worth of bounties in 2004 to developers willing to help out with a number of Open Source projects, most of which are to be developed in Python. A comparison can be made here with Mitch Kapor, another geek-done-well who funds open source development through his sponsorship of the Open Source Applications Foundation.
[... 207 words]Antilog. Interactive querying of HTTP log files, via Python
Simon Willison done different. An attractive redesign suggestion
The Fabled “Five Eights” of J2EE Availability (via) J2EE complexity leads to poor stability
Silly JavaScript Security. “Sorry, you do not have permission to press this key,”
How not to use OOP
Via Hans Nowak, Understanding Object Oriented Programming, or how to turn 19 lines of easily maintained code in to an OO monstrosity spanning 7 class files. This is not the way to make code more maintainable. For comparison, here’s how I would implement a solution to the same problem in Python, assuming the availability of an equivalent function to Java’s System.getProperty("os.name") (os.name is similar but inappropriate for this example):
Ulli’s Roy Orbison in Cling-film site. Marvellous, particularly the bits about the terrapin
Dec. 7, 2003
Patents in an internet video shop (via) Patent insanity illustrated
Public, private, secret. On the loss of privacy on the web
Dec. 8, 2003
On Search: Robots. Everything you need to know about writing a tool to crawl the web
User Interface Hierarchies Rant. Russell on interface
Dec. 9, 2003
YAGNI and DRY
Two acronyms that have been seeing a lot of action at work recently are YAGNI and DRY. They’re great principles to go by in any case, but in a pair programming environment they take on a whole new level of utility.
[... 230 words]The GNU Privacy Handbook. How to use GPG. Encryption is anything but simple.
Python shlex module. Parsing of simple UNIX shell-like syntax, contributed by ESR
Debian’s Response. Praise for Debian’s handling of their recent security incident
Five Geek Social Fallacies (via) How many of these do you exhibit?
Nasty new IE vulnerability
Most people reading are probably aware of the common trick whereby spammers and other assorted ne’er-do-wells publish URLs with usernames that look like hostnames to fool people in to trusting a malicious site—for example, http://www.microsoft.com&session%123123123@simon.incutio.com. This trick is frequently used by spammers to steal people’s PayPal accounts, by tricking them in to “resetting” their password at a site owned by the spammer but disguised as PayPal.com.
[... 164 words]Jeremy Zawodny’s 2004 Crystal Ball. PageRank Still Dead
Ben’s 2004 Crystal Ball. The year of CSS is nigh
NABA Compiler (via) A Java compiler in Python?