April 2007
April 2, 2007
Don’t buy Parallels in a box. If you buy a boxed retail copy of Parallels Desktop in the UK (as I did) you’ll have all sorts of problems with your license key. Buy it online from the US website instead.
The RADAR Architecture: RESTful Application, Dumb-Ass Recipient (via) Dave Thomas points out that REST expects smart clients, but browsers are dumb (only really support POST and GET). His suggested fix is to build a pure REST service and then drop in a server-side application proxy that sits between the browser and the REST backend.
The problem with pixels. IE7 lets users resize pixel-based fonts. Is it finally time to stop avoiding pixel sizing in CSS?
April 3, 2007
phpsh. An interactive shell for PHP, developed at Facebook and written mostly in Python. Facebook are really pushing their open-source stuff at the moment.
Ekranoplan! Crazy awesome Soviet “ground effect” vehicle, visible in dry dock on Google Maps.
Lawrence Journal-World Marketplace (via) While other newspapers complain about competition from the internet, my former employer is embracing it. This is why local newspapers still matter.
Ext JS. Jack Slocum is building a business around his excellent Ext JavaScript library (which can now run on top of YUI, jQuery or Prototype). The library itself is LGPL, but you can pay for a commercial license and support.
mail rail on Flickr (via) Photos of the Royal Mail’s private underground railway, sadly closed in 2003.
Mass Video Conversion Using AWS. How to use S3, SQS, EC2, ffmpeg and some Python to bulk convert videos with Amazon Web Services.
April 4, 2007
IE 7 does not resize text sized in pixels. I said it does the other day; I was wrong. Text sizing is still broken, but it does have a full page zoom feature (like Opera’s but not as smooth).
White- (or green, or blue, or yellow) label Dabble. DabbleDB can pick a colour scheme based on a logo that you upload. Pure class.
April 5, 2007
CSS Naked Day. Today is CSS naked day. Get naked!
Google My Maps: Bodeans. I’ve been talking about how useful a simple tool for creating custom maps would be for ages... looks like Google beat me to it. Here’s one I created showing the location of Bodeans, an excellent Kansas-style BBQ joint in Soho, London. It’s a shame the URLs suck.
Eat Brain At Fleshmob This Saturday. Zombie fleshmob on Saturday afternoon somewhere near the Thames.
Twitter / secgen. The UN Secretary-General has an (unofficial) Twitter page.
Fortify JavaScript Hijacking FUD. Bob Ippolito points out the flaws in the recent widely disseminated JavaScript Hijacking paper. While the paper does miss some important details, it’s good that more people are now aware of the security implications involved in serving JSON up wrapped in an array.
Thankfully, because of the accountability that is built into the web itself (the URL structure is fundamentally accountable), I believe that while the vulnerability of the live web to spam is real, it is managable.
April 6, 2007
Talks for Oxford Geek Nights announced. Microslots on Yahoo! Pipes, Semantic Mediawiki, Second Life and more.
PyCon Wireless Network. Conference WiFi is generally bad, and getting worse as more people turn up with laptops. Here’s how Sean Reifschneider built a solid network for PyCon 2007 for $2200 in hardware and 70 hours of work.
mod_magnet (via) lighttpd module that will be included by default in version 1.5—it lets you write Lua scripts that can hook in to any phase of the request, including URL rewriting and content generation.
The problem is a lack of respect for the consumer. The manufacturers don't act as if the computer belongs to you. They act as if it is a billboard for restricted trial versions of software and ads for Web sites and services that they can sell to third-party companies who want you to buy these products.
April 7, 2007
If you're designing social media systems, you should be keeping an eye on the $2B industry that sells links from your site to their clients.
Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. But eventually the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.
April 8, 2007
There are some ideas that are broken, but attractive enough to some people that they are doomed to be tried again and again. DRM is one of them.
Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 released. Includes Iceweasel (Firefox), Icedove (Thunderbird), Iceape (Seamonkey) and Python 2.4.4 as standard.
How to Write a Spelling Corrector. Example code in Python, by Peter Norvig.
April 9, 2007
Avoid IE Brokenness When using Vary and Attachments (via) Django middleware that works around a bug in IE where external applications fail to load content that was served with a Vary header.
XML and JSON. James Clark on JSON’s strengths and weaknesses compared to XML.
April 10, 2007
Naming URL patterns
(via)
You can now apply a name to a URL pattern in Django development version, which makes the {% url %} template tag far more useful.
Understanding your (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) daemons. A handy bestiary.