Monday, 27th January 2003
Another standards rant
A message to clueless website authors is an entertaining and informative rant against browser specific, standards incompliant sites. Via Aquarionics.
Adequacy gone
It looks like Adequacy.org has come to an end. For those unfamiliar with the site, it was a truly unique evolution of the common internet troll. Adequacy specialised in posting stories that were deliberately designed to cause controversy, then sending out carefully crafted “invitations” to any online communities that were most likely to take the bait. Since, unlike other trolling situations, the trolls were now in control of the discussion they could prolong the scam by deleting any comments which had figured out what was going on and were trying to warn other clueless participants.
[... 151 words]Letter to the editor spam
Scott is horrified by the fact that some American political organisations are co-ordinating massive “letter to the editor” campaigns using email lists and websites. It’s certainly a worrying trend, but once again Google comes to the rescue. Try this query and see for yourself.
Work safe CSS
Here’s a novel use of a stylesheet switcher: Providing a “work safe” edition of a weblog.
Dynamic Python class methods
Dynamically extending APIs: Mark Pilgrim demonstrates how Python’s “new” module can be used to dynamically add new methods to existing classes at run time, and shows how this can be used to increase productivity when parsing XML. I’ve long been impressed with Python’s ability to add new methods to an object at runtime just by assigning a function reference to an object property but I had no idea it was possible to do this with classes as well. If you liked that tip, Dive Into Python has in depth explanations of more obscure Python features than you can shake a stick at.