December 2006
Dec. 19, 2006
Rogues are very keen in their profession, and know already much more than we can teach them
Chapter 15: Other contributed sub-frameworks (djangobook.com). Includes detailed documentation of the powerful (but under-exposed) sites framework, flatpages and CSRF protection.
How to turn your blog in to an OpenID
Wouldn’t it be great if you could use the same account to log in to multiple sites and applications, without having to trust them all with your password? Wouldn’t it be even better if you could do this without having to hand ownership of your online identity over to some monolithic third party? (I’m looking at you, .NET Passport Microsoft Passport Windows Live ID.)
digg: HOW TO turn your blog in to an OpenID. Trying to get some digg love for my OpenID how-to. I even used a digg-friendly exclamation mark.
botbouncer.com (via) Neat concept: a third party service for ensuring that an OpenID has passed a CAPTCHA.
Dec. 20, 2006
Nginx English wiki. I’m back up and running after the digg meltdown, currently using CherryPy load-balanced behind Nginx.
Create cross browser vector graphics. An accessible introduction to dojo.gfx, a powerful 2D drawing API built on SVG and VML.
Mapping the postal network. Image of a GPS trace for a unit that was left on and sent in the post.
Beginning of the end for open web data APIs? Google just ditched their SOAP API in favour of a crippled Ajax widget. What are the implications for other free-as-in-beer APIs?
ErlyWeb Documentation. The Erlang web framework finally gets some formal documentation.
Conditionally Sticky Sidebar. A nicer implementation of the trick I’m using for my add comment form; this one takes advantage of position: fixed in browsers that support it.
Three steps to OpenID. Maybe explaining OpenID isn’t as hard as I thought... Jacob Kaplan-Moss nails it in three.
I read on Niall Kennedy that del.icio.us has come up with an API that returns a JSON structure, and I figured, sheez it can't be that hard to parse, so let's see what it looks like, and damn, IT'S NOT EVEN XML! [...] Who did this travesty? Let's find a tree and string them up. Now.
Percussive maintenance, with a twist. How to fix your broken iPod by dropping it, repeatedly.
Why JSON isn’t just for JavaScript
Dave Winer’s discovery of JSON (and shock that “it’s not even XML”) has triggered an interesting discussion thread, on his blog and elsewhere. Plenty of people have re-assured him (and themselves) that it’s only used for JavaScript—it’s convenient in the browser but irrelevant elsewhere.
[... 787 words]Dec. 21, 2006
The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one.
Introducing text-stroke. Webkit has some sexy new CSS properties: -webkit-text-fill-color, -webkit-text-stroke-color, -webkit-text-stroke-width.
CNET interviewer assaulted by flying wang. Aah, Second Life. Never a dull moment.
Javascript character set screw-ups (via) Some browsers treat JavaScript files as having the same content-type as the page from which they are linked. This could cause problems with UTF-8 encoded JSON; the workaround is serving up ASCII with unicode escape sequences.
Comment transformer votre blog en une OpenID ? My piece on OpenID tranlated in to French by Christophe Ducamp.
Dec. 22, 2006
Seems easy to me; if you want to serialize a data structure that’s not too text-heavy and all you want is for the receiver to get the same data structure with minimal effort, and you trust the other end to get the i18n right, JSON is hunky-dory.
— Tim Bray
OpenID screencast
OpenID’s biggest problem is its learning curve. Using it as actually really simple, but if you’re not technical the amount of stuff you have to know before you can understand it is enormous. If you are technical, it just doesn’t seem like it should work—there are a bunch of questions that come up every time OpenID is discussed anywhere (“but surely there’s nothing to stop someone else from spoofing your ID”) which OpenID has answers for, but which are easily misunderstood.
[... 383 words]digg: Screencast: How to use OpenID. No exclamation mark this time—let’s see if it makes a difference.
The Daily Python-URL. Python’s number one news source, now powered by Django.
WebFaction blog: BIG holiday present! (via) WebFaction offer Django/Rails/TurboGears hosting for $7.50/month, allowing one long-running process and 40MB of RAM for their basic plan.
Dec. 23, 2006
killableprocess.py. “I have created a python module which can launch a subprocess, wait for the process with a timeout, and kill that process and all of its sub-subprocesses correctly, on Windows, Mac, and Linux.”
Dec. 24, 2006
A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection (via) Vista’s content protection is a nightmare for hardware manufacturers and consumers alike. It’s far worse than even BoingBoing readers would expect.
Rails vs Django Paper and Slides. Even if you’ve already read the paper you should check out the slides. Really good flow, clear and clever use of diagrams.
VMWare Fusion (virtualization for Mac). Competition is good. The race is on between VMWare and Parallels as to who can get 3D acceleration virtualized first (and let me play Half-Life 2 without using BootCamp).