July 2004
July 12, 2004
Why Mac OS X is Better. Pure, unadulterated advocacy.
Improved Search. Getting the most out of search built on LIKE queries.
Spotlight on Spotlight. Spotlight re-indexes every time you create, modify or move a file.
July 14, 2004
PHP 5 is out!
It’s finally here! Unfortunately PHP.net, while a great site in most respects, fails miserably when it comes to permalinks for news items and/or new software releases. You can grab it from their downloads page, and read more about it in the changelog. Now all it needs is widespread adoption. Unfortunately, something tells me PHP 4 is going to stick around for a long, long time.
MSNBC.com sees surge in video ads. With thoughts from Cory Bergman on the role of video in local news sites.
Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5 (via) A migration guide from the PHP manual.
Fuck You And Your H2 (via) 845 photos of people flipping off hummers.
Rock, Paper, Saddam! (via) Outstanding.
allmusic.com—Standards-based Rebuild. It took Tim Murtaugh two hours.
Cheap debugging trick: inspect + pprint. Easy python stack tracing.
Tutorial: Creating a Mozilla Extension (via) I spent nearly an hour looking for this the other day with no success.
Picking apart Allmusic.com. Echos my thoughts exactly.
July 15, 2004
Instant authentication against an existing web application
I was thinking today about the problem of querying an existing authentication database from a new application—exactly the kind of thing web services are useful for. Then I realised that any web application protected by HTTP Basic authentication already provides a standard API against which queries can be run. Here’s the Python code to do exactly that:
[... 187 words]How to write Firefox extensions. Somone emailed me a link to this.
Wikalong Firefox Extension. I got an email tip off about this one too!
Per-site user stylesheets
I’ve been thinking a lot about per-site user stylsheets recently. Eric Meyer’s CSS signatures are great for sites that support them (as this site does), but the sites that really need altering are highly unlikely to carry them. I posted a comment to that effect on photomatt.net a while ago, and thankfully it was spotted by Ryan Tomayko who has published a simple brilliant hack that uses XBL in Mozilla’s user stylesheet to execute JavaScript which adds a CSS signature to every site you visit.
[... 261 words]July 16, 2004
PHP 5 Object References. Mind the gotchas!
Processing XML with JavaScript. My notes on Sarissa and Mozilla’s XML Extras.
Iraqi women beg to be killed as American soldiers sodomize their children. The most upsetting MetaFilter thread I’ve ever read.
Learning Python As You Go. Ryan Tomayko on language learning approaches.
News site registration
The single hottest topic in the online news industry at the moment is that of required registration. A number of large news sites (the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune) have moved to this model, and many local newspapers are following suit.
[... 660 words]Wired News: Searching for The New York Times. Opinion piece on how registration and paid archives are crippling the New York Times.
July 17, 2004
Version 2 | Blog | 1976design.com. Plenty of entertaining little details—be sure to dig around.
July 19, 2004
Jeffrey Veen: Damage in Web Design. Users route around damage.
Rock, Paper, Saddam! Beware the awesome tiger hand.
Indispensable Mac OS X products. I’ve been having some fun with MenuMeters as a result of this post.
TheyWorkForYou Full Source Code Published. Open source political hackery.
Fred Durst Has a Blog. And it’s even worse than it sounds.
Clickable Link Backgrounds. With a twist to avoid the IE6 flicker bug.
Apple: Lithium-ion Batteries (via) Tips for improving your battery’s lifespan.