December 2003
Dec. 11, 2003
Comparing Iterables (via) itertools trickery
Shazam! Amazement personified
New Google results page design. Looks nice—it hasn’t hit our local cluster yet
Dec. 12, 2003
Mafia recruiting spammers, crackers (via) Cracking for spam gets serious
Rockin’ on without Microsoft (via) On the BSA: “We won’t do business with someone who treats us poorly.”
Python to Perl Language Translation (via) Going the other way would be far more interesting
The downside of building for IE only. If you start competing with Microsoft you’re instantly at a disadvantage
Dec. 13, 2003
Content management, the hard way (via) “Open source software ... pretty much guarantees lock-in to one vendor”—what’s this guy smoking?
Static content generation
Ian Bicking has an interesting pieces on using static publishing in a CMS. The choice between static and dynamic when building software for the web is a critical one, and one that I think deserves in-depth discussion.
[... 672 words]New Python Computer Science text book
Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science is a new Computer Science text book designed for use in introduction to programming classes, written by John Zelle, who’s Teaching with Python page . Kirby Urner recently posted a mostly positive review of the book to the Python Edu-SIG mailing list, which sparked an interesting discussion about Python’s place in the CS curriculum.
[... 183 words]Grouping table data by header
Andy’s latest Javascript experiment is over a week old now but I managed to miss it the first time round. It’s an interesting twist on the sortable tables idea, allowing table data to be grouped as well as sorted by dragging each table header on to a box at the top of the table. Unfortunately the grouping feature seems unstable in IE but it works a treat in Firebird.
CVS version control for web development (via) CVS tutorial targetted at groups maintaining a web site
Night of the Image Map. Combining image replacement and absolute positioning to recreate the Image Map effect
Spider-Man 2 blog templates (via) Smart blog related marketing
Ward Takes On Microsoft. Let’s hope they don’t lock up all his cool ideas
Learning how to be a developer (via) aka “Why intensive 5 day training courses suck”
Widgetopia (via) Website UI elements, collected
John Zelle response to Kirby’s review. Insight in to aims of a CS1 course
Javascript debugging: IE Option gotcha
I’ve been debugging Javascript today. I like Javascript as a language, but I doubt anyone would disagree that it’s a horrible, horrible language to debug across multiple browsers. Firebird at least has good debugging support—I currently use the Javascript Console and Jesse Ruderman’s shell bookmarklet and I really need to learn to use Venkman some day. If anyone knows a better way of debugging Javascript in IE than relying on the lame popup box I’d love to hear about it.
[... 238 words]LunaticPython. Python inside Lua inside Python and more
2004: Year of Linux? And 2003, and 2000, and 1999, and 1998...
Dec. 15, 2003
Pythonic Geometry. Teaching maths and Python to 13 year olds
PolyglotMan. Translates man pages in to HTML
Dec. 16, 2003
We are all nerds now. I proudly call myself a “geek”
SiteBar. Like blogmarks but different
Problems at University. Bath’s new academic year structure sounds bloody awful
Pricelessware (via) The best in Windows freeware
Mac buying advice needed
I’m in the market for a new laptop, and I’m almost 100% certain it’s going to be a Mac. I’m going to be using it as my primary personal computing platform, but the vast majority of what I do with a computer is browsing, using email and messing around Python, Apache and other geeky toys. I’m sorely tempted by one of the 14" iBooks. Since I’ll be using this thing a lot (and I’ve never been a huge fan of laptop keyboards) 12 inches seems to small, and I’m not convinced that the extra cash for a PowerBook is worthwhile now that iBooks go up to 1 GHz.
[... 417 words]Summer Internship at Fog Creek. One heck of an opportunity