February 2007
Feb. 7, 2007
If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store.
Useless Account. “Change your password 1000 times a day... For Free!”
Reading Between the Lines of Steve Jobs’s ’Thoughts on Music’. John Gruber’s analysis.
TurboGears and Pylons (a technical comparison). Ian Bicking explores the differences between the two, and finds that the most significant is probably CherryPy v.s. Paste.
method_missing: best saved for last. My least favourite thing about Ruby is the cultural tendency towards introducing weird new bugs in other people’s code.
Feb. 8, 2007
Why people hate SEO... (and why SMO is bulls$%t). Jason Calacanis explains SMO, or “Social Media Optimisation”—digg spamming now has its own TLA.
Pipes. New Yahoo! service for combining and remixing Atom/RSS feeds using a really sophisticated drag-and-drop UI.
Yahoo!'s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.
Feb. 9, 2007
The OpenID Directory. A new directory of OpenID consumers and providers. If they can make sure that the listed sites actually let you log in this could become a really valuable resource.
First Oxford Geek Night a success! It really was the best evening geek event I’ve been to in a very long time.
Add OpenSearch to your site in five minutes. OpenSearch is easy. DeWitt demonstrates how you don’t even need a site search engine to implement it if you take advantage of Google’s site: operator.
Mono 1.2.3 has been released (via) More importantly, it ships with IronPython in the form of Seo Sanghyeon’s Community Edition.
.php? .cgi? .who-cares? J-P Stacey argues that “URLs need to be hackable by the developer as well as by the user”. There’s certainly room for improvement in keeping complex URL structures maintainable from a server-side developer’s perspective.
The Psychology of Security. I haven’t even started on this yet, but I bet it’s worth reading.
Parallel Python. A simple mechanism for running Python code in parallel across multiple processes and/or machines, based on submitting jobs and retrieving their results.
Hanselminutes Podcast on OpenID. Good podcast discussion on OpenID, from a .NET developer’s perspective.
Sumo! A Generic Microformats Parser For JavaScript. Dan Webb’s BarCamp talk on Metaprogramming JavaScript will be a must-see.
Feb. 10, 2007
No boys allowed. Ask MetaFilter on how to build the perfect fort.
Blanket Fort. xkcd on why you still want one.
OpenID (and TypeKey) using native OpenSSL functions in PHP. Wez Furlong shows how a small patch to PHP’s OpenSSL support makes it a whole lot easier to perform the cryptography behind OpenID (at the moment you need to use the bc or gmp modules).
LiveBus.org (via) Brilliant Google Maps mashup in a similar vein to Chicago Crime—displays screen-scraped bus timetable information for Oxfordshire and Surrey in a far more useful format.
About LiveBus.org. I love sites with a colophon. LiveBus.org is powered by Django.
Speaking at the Future of Web Apps
Just a quick update to say that I’ll be speaking at the Future of Web Apps conference in London on February the 21st, talking about OpenID. I really enjoyed last year’s event and feel honored to be included in such an exciting schedule.
[... 86 words]Feb. 11, 2007
boto. Python library for accessing Amazon’s S3, SQS and EC2 Web Services, with excellent documentation.
Cats or Dogs (via) Finds statistically interesting facts based on people answering a sequence of “X or Y” questions. Written in Django by James Tauber in less than four hours.
Feb. 12, 2007
United Nuclear (via) Gotta love an online store that stocks both “Misc Radioactive Items” and “Anti-Radiation Pills”.
Fake bloggers soon to be “named and shamed” (via) Apparently due to a new EU directive banning companies from “falsely representing oneself as a consumer”.
Please, fanboys, don't send me dumb notes averring that Apple's failure to police this use of its mark will lead to the end of its ability to stop manufacturers from producing rival MP3 players and calling them iPods. That's a fairy tale that trademark lawyers tell their kids when they want to reassure them that they'll have a healthy college fund.
Say Hello to Elixir for SQLAlchemy. New ActiveRecord style layer over SQLAlchemy; a collaboration that includes the authors of ActiveMapper and TurboEntity.