October 2006
Oct. 2, 2006
Equal Height Columns using CSS. Some seriously brilliant CSS trickery from Edward Eliot.
Markup Maker. Handy tool from Ian Lloyd.
Why learning Haskell/Python makes you a worse programmer. It demotivates you when working with less expressive languages.
Peter Callesen’s papercut art. I incorrectly attributed these to an anonymous Vietnamese artist.
3 Easy Steps to Avoid JavaScript Memory Leaks. YUI handles two of them for you; avoid DOM expandos as well and you should be set.
Oct. 4, 2006
WordPress Clone in 27 Seconds (Part 1 of 40). A pleasantly informal Django blog tutorial.
Cookbook/Matplotlib/Maps. Making neat globe diagrams with Python.
Gutenkarte. Browse locations from Project Gutenberg books on a map.
MetaCarta Labs. Geocoding and related tools.
Romeo. An open-source Salling Clicker equivalent.
Multimap API v1.1 (via) Multimap have released their JavaScript map API. It’s really nice.
Oct. 5, 2006
Screening People with Clearances. Classic Schneier analysis.
Oct. 6, 2006
xkcd: Nihilism. Zomg squirrels!
Clean your flat in sixty seconds... Time-lapse video as personal productivity tool.
Oct. 10, 2006
Framework Shootout Part 2, Django. Video of my 20 minute wiki demo at EuroPython back in July.
Oct. 11, 2006
SimpleXML processing with PHP. Good tutorial, with honest discussion of SimpleXML’s limitations.
Keep your JSON valid
I’m a big fan of JSON, and it’s great to see it turning up as an output option for so many Web APIs. Unfortunately, many of these APIs are getting the details slightly wrong and in doing so are producing invalid JSON.
[... 311 words]MetaCarter Labs: Map Rectifier. Tool for georeferencing images.
Oct. 12, 2006
Geotagging with Zonetag and Bluetooth GPS. I’ve been playing with this stuff for a while—it’s awesome fun.
Obi-Wan the Cursor. Neat hardware hack for tracking a mouse cursor over four screens.
Oct. 17, 2006
err.the_blog: My Rails Toolbox. Good overview of what’s hot in Rails land this season.
Graphing requests with Tamper Data
I spent the weekend in Boston, speaking at GBC/ACM’s Deep Ajax seminar with Alex Russell and Adrian Holovaty. I’ll be posting some notes on this later, but I wanted to share a really neat Firefox extension that Alex showed me: Tamper Data.
[... 318 words]Oct. 20, 2006
The Virtual Life: IE At Arms Length. Developing for IE with a RAID disk full of VMs.
Oct. 21, 2006
Calendar of Strange English events in England, Scotland and Wales (via) Fantastically useful calendar.
Pygments: Python syntax highlighter. Well designed API, really elegant software design.
SQLite Keynote. SQLite 3.3.8 has full text indexing!
Oct. 23, 2006
Poking new holes with Flash Crossdomain Policy files. Very scary attack: if you can upload a file to a server, you can probably open it up to XSRF.
Dojo 0.4 release notes (via) GFX (a 2D drawing API) is awesome; dojo.html.metrics looks extremely useful, and onDomLoad is always nice.
Oct. 24, 2006
Brazil elections and postponed DST start. I’m doing stuff with timezones at the moment. Timezones are evil.
Oct. 25, 2006
BT acquires Counterpane Internet Security (via) They just bought Bruce Schneier.