October 2005
Oct. 3, 2005
Announcing the Open Content Alliance. Yahoo! are teaming up with the Internet Archive and others.
Open Content Alliance. Their website.
Oct. 4, 2005
Ning. A social software app for building social software apps. That’s so meta.
Oct. 5, 2005
Yahoo and Upcoming, Sitting In A Tree. This is really good news.
On RSS and the coming wave of content theft. A reason to avoid commercial-use-allowed Creative Commons licenses.
Canvas demos
Jesse Andrews (of Book Burro and userscripts.org fame) has built some awesome canvas demos for users of Safari or Firefox 1.5. He has a bar chart and some animated rectangles, but the real gem is the live chart which polls a server using XMLHttpRequest and updates a line graph with live data. He also has some fun mathematical experiments: a cellular automata generator and a neat exploration of Lindenmayer systems (both static and interactive). Read more on his blog.
Oct. 7, 2005
Django gods—Uncyclopedia. Utterly bizzare. I do like squirrels though.
Oct. 9, 2005
Internet Explorer’s Mark of the Web. Anyone else reminded of the Mark of the Beast?
Oct. 11, 2005
Core Data as a Cheap Database. Build a database GUI application with virtually no code.
Heatmapping Google Earth. Coolest use of Django to date.
Oct. 13, 2005
Is ESPN returning to the nest? Back to layout tables from CSS. Anyone know why?
Flash for client-side vector graphics! This is a holy-crap moment. You could emulate the canvas tag API for IE with this.
HOWTO Rip DVD Movies To Your iPod Using Free Software (via) Mark Pilgrim’s Handbrake tutorial.
Oct. 14, 2005
Jot-Ning AdSense Shenanigans (via) Cute.
Samy, Their Hero (via) An interview with the author of the MySpace worm
Technical explanation of myspace worm. Fascinating description of the holes in their HTML stripping algorithms.
Django design philosophies. The guiding principles behind Django’s design.
Using prototype.js v1.3.1 (via) Prototype: the missing manual.
Oct. 17, 2005
Farewell BBC—and hello Yahoo! (plasticbag.org). We have a Tom Coates!
Oct. 19, 2005
Scryer: Django page-view counter. Simple but informative Django recent stats package.
Oct. 24, 2005
Something Rotten in AdSense. Click fraud is a nasty problem.
Things I learned at EuroOSCON
Last week was the first ever O’Reilly European Open Source Convention, held in the magnificent NH Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky in Amsterdam. It was the first big budget conference I’d been too (previously I’ve stuck to less expensive affairs such as SxSW Interactive and PyCon) but the money seems to have been well spent. The venue was fantastic and there was a great line-up of speakers, keynotes and panels.
[... 878 words]Oct. 25, 2005
Hurricane Wilma survival blog. My friend Levi is weathering the storm.
Google Base, the spirit of our times. Are Google about to kick-start a centralised imitation of the semantic web?
Google at it again. Ian’s rant perfectly reflects my own feelings on the matter. Don’t break existing apps.
Simple JavaScript Database (via) Flash-based local storage + JS SQL engine = abundant possibilities.
Oct. 26, 2005
Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? As a non-Windows programmer, this was an interesting look at the other side of the fence.
RubyZilla—a demo movie. Creating a simple browser in 20 minutes with Ruby and Glade2.
BBC job involving dynamic languages. “Software Engineer Team Leader” should be read as “build cool shit”.
Oct. 27, 2005
Leak Free Javascript Closures. This is some pretty brilliant JavaScript voodoo.