July 2004
July 26, 2004
WORDCOUNT / Tracking the Way We Use Language / (via) Wouldn’t you know it, there’s a power curve at work.
“My Beef With Big Media” by Ted Turner (via) Ted Turner speaks out against media consolidation.
Sorry, you can’t do that. Poor Windows XP usability.
wordlog.com (via) “WordPress news from around the web”
July 27, 2004
Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby: Expansion Pak #1. The Tiger’s Vest (with a Basic Introduction to Irb). More Ruby insanity.
Worst Album Covers Ever (via) These are fantastic.
Barclaycard dumps Mac users (via) Two weeks old and already in the Google top 10 for ’Barclaycard’.
pMock: a mock object library for Python (via) This should add quite a bit of flexibility to standard unit testing.
Throwing Tables Out the Window (via) Doug Bowman: “There’s no longer any reason to use tables for layout”.
Conventions over configuration. Making things flexible by convention.
Dean outfoxes Hannity! Good to see Outfoxed is making an impact.
July 28, 2004
Want your kid to disappear? (via) Quite simply terrifying.
World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools. The WikiPedia take on legalised child abduction and imprisonment.
Why you shouldn’t be using passwords of any kind on your Windows networks... (via) Recommends pass phrases instead. Seems like smart advice.
Implementing XHTML 2.0 (via) Client side behaviour hacks have serious disadvantages.
July 29, 2004
HTTP Caching & Cache-Busting for Content Publishers (via) I learnt a lot from this—especially the no-cookie domain stuff.
How to handle international dates and times in PHP and MySQL. Keith tackles a common point of irritation.
Jimmy Wales on battling wiki spam
Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia was interviewed recently by the Slashdot community. One of the questions regarded protecting Wikis from spammers:
[... 241 words]Great Hackers. “Of all the great programmers I can think of, I know of only one who would voluntarily program in Java. And of all the great programmers I can think of who don’t work for Sun, on Java, I know of zero.”
Improving online credibility
If you’ve browsed Amazon’s product reviews recently you may have noticed an interesting new feature: Badges, little icons displayed below certain people’s names. This isn’t a new idea by any means—many online communities use special icons as rewards for members who make valuable contributions (SitePoint is a good example). What’s interesting about Amazon’s badges is that one of them is “Real Name”. Amazon’s Real Names FAQ explains the badge, and includes the following:
[... 230 words]Interactive generators. Uche says generators are issuing in an exciting new era of Python XML processing.
July 30, 2004
76000-in-1 TV Game Power Player. A friend recently acquired one of these. Best. Illegal. Toy. Ever.