December 2005
Dec. 1, 2005
Have a webby Christmas
Sadly there’s no Perl Advent Calendar this year, but the slack has been picked up by Drew McLellan’s 24 ways to impress your friends—a neat web development tip every day until Christmas.
[... 81 words]Dec. 5, 2005
Announcing washingtonpost.com’s U.S. Congress Votes Database. The Post’s first public Django application.
Dec. 6, 2005
Playing with Django. “For content-heavy websites, Django is likely to require very little business logic, just a solid model and a well-designed set of views.”
Dec. 7, 2005
Don’t be eval()
JavaScript is an interpreted language, and like so many of its peers it includes the all powerful eval() function. eval() takes a string and executes it as if it were regular JavaScript code. It’s incredibly powerful and incredibly easy to abuse in ways that make your code slower and harder to maintain. As a general rule, if you’re using eval() there’s probably something wrong with your design.
The Japanese game to end all Japanese games. Fighting girls who take pictures of each other’s panties.
Django job in Kansas. This is a case study in how to write a great job advert.
Dec. 13, 2005
Django performance tips. How Django scales at the Lawrence Journal World.
Performance Tuning PostgreSQL (via) Anything Frank has to say about PostgreSQL is well worth listening to.
Alexa Web Search Platform. The first search API to come with a visible commercial use price tag?
Dec. 14, 2005
Django Screencast. Tom Dyson has put together an excellent unofficial Django screencast.
Rails 1.0. Congrats to David and the Rails community as a whole.
Dec. 15, 2005
Rubyless Ruby. sh + curl + awk + tryruby.hobix.com
Microsoft Team RSS Blog : Icons: It’s still orange. MS are adapting the Mozilla RSS/Atom icon. Excellent.
Using JSON with Yahoo! Web Services (via) No more cross-domain script access problems.
Dec. 16, 2005
JSON and Yahoo!’s JavaScript APIs
I had the pleasure yesterday of seeing Douglas Crockford speak about JSON, the ultra-simple data interchange format he has been promoting as an alternative to XML. JSON is a subset of JavaScript, based around that language’s array, string and object literal syntax.
[... 240 words]BBC News: The Open News Archive (via) 79 news clips for download under the Creative Archive license.
Dec. 18, 2005
Surfin’ Safari: SVG Has Landed. Now in Safari nightly builds.
The departure of the hyper-enthusiasts. Bruce Eckel on Java, Ruby, Python, Rails and more.
gathering the troops (via) danah on Yahoo!’s progressing cultural shift.
Dec. 19, 2005
reflection.js demo. iChat AV style reflections with the canvas element.
Dec. 20, 2005
Rails Weenie—find answers to your Ruby on Rails questions. Kind of like a specialized Yahoo! Answers for Ruby on Rails.
Dec. 21, 2005
Scoble asks why people preper RoR to ASP.NET... ... and gets 49 detailed replies.
Google Zeitgeist: Celebrities. I’m impressed that this is the first I’ve heard of Britney having a baby.
CanvasGraph.js. Uses canvas to draw graphs in JavaScript. It can pull data from HTML tables!
Productivity Arbitrage. Rails goes enterprise. Django gets a mention as well.
Dec. 22, 2005
Python Creator Guido van Rossum now working at Google. Google are taking dynamic languages really seriously.
Dec. 23, 2005
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Speech at the Sierra Club (via) How environmentalism is a form of free market capitalism.
Dec. 24, 2005
Chris Shiflett: Google XSS Example (via) UTF-7 is a nasty vector for XSS.
The Dojo Manual (via) Dojo finally gets some really good extensive documentation.
Dec. 28, 2005
Get tickets for filming of Jools Holland’s TV show
I was in the audience for “Later” once. I called up the BBC’s ticket office and asked for tickets—they told me there was a year long waiting list. I asked to be put on it anyway, and sure enough just over a year later I got 4 tickets in the mail. Well worth the wait!
[... 73 words]