January 2004
Jan. 26, 2004
Pwyky (A Python Wiki) (via) A neat little wiki in a single CGI file
Joel on Software—Getting Your Resume Read. Advice you can’t afford to miss
XML.com: Lightweight XML Search Servers [Jan. 21, 2004] (via) More fun with Python and libxml2
Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories (via) Anecdotes about the development of Apple’s original Macintosh computer, and the people who created it.
Jan. 27, 2004
Apple UK pricing insanity. I saved over 1000 pounds thanks to a student discount
The Making of OK/Cancel Archives (via) Collaboration across time zones
Bender Soundboard. Almost as much fun as Arnie
Jan. 28, 2004
Solving comment spam
There are two main schools of thought concerning comment spam: the optimists and the defeatists. Optimists believe that comment spam can be beaten with technology; defeatists (maybe I should call them pessimists) believe that comments are as doomed as email and we’re all going to hell in a hand basket.
[... 967 words]MusicXML Definition (via) Royalty free XML sheet music standard
Iterating over a sequence in reverse
At work today we stumbled across a situation where we needed to display a list of items in reverse order. The decision to show them in reverse is made in the presentation layer, so altering the code that generates the list in the application logic layer would add coupling between the layers that we would rather avoid. Python’s reverse() function acts on a data structure in place, which we would rather avoid as well. Then we realised that Python’s generators could be used to create a proxy around the sequence allowing us to cycle through it in reverse without altering the sequence itself. Here’s the code:
[... 242 words]Linus Torvalds: SCO Is “Just Too Wrong” (via) “There are literally several levels of SCO being wrong. And even if we were to live in that alternate universe where SCO would be right, they’d still be wrong.”
Allowing innovation in obscure parts of specifications. Hixie remains the master of the obscure
The History of the DeCSS Haiku (via) Fascinating
A Call for the Complete Elimination of Joke Haiku Production on the Internet (via) Where’s my other sock? / It disappeared in the wash / How did that happen?
How I PC’d an Apple G5. The humanity!
Solving and creating captchas with free porn. More spammer ingenuity
Jan. 29, 2004
Swedish Campground. So that’s where the funny symbol on the command key came from
’Warspying’ San Francisco (via) War driving for wireless video cameras
What’s new in Mozilla Firebird 0.8. Coming soon
Unison—Reinventing the Mac OS X Usenet newsreader! Usenet is the new Kazaa
Greg Dyke’s resignation email. This sucks
Jan. 30, 2004
No more usernames in URLs
This one could get very interesting. Microsoft have announced that an upcoming update to Internet Explorer will remove the ability to include usernames in URLs completely. This is in response to the growing problem of so called “phishing” scams, which use trick URLs to con important information such as passwords and credit card details out of unsuspecting browser users.
[... 730 words]Greylisting (via) Interesting short term approach to email spam
Hutton—a wise old bird? (via) Hutton conspiracy theories
Custom URLParser for Webware. Our new in-house CMS does something similar
craigblog. Craig from craigslist blogs
Bouncing Termsheets. Understanding venture capital
RSS native parsing in the next Firebird. Aggregators, aggregators, everywhere I look
Wired News: Flower Power Takes on Land Mines (via) Good science at work