January 2007
Jan. 22, 2007
Group Membership Protocol. Martin Atkins’ proposal for a simple “is OpenID X a member of group Y?” protocol, useful for whitelists that can scale to handle large numbers of entries.
Ma.gnolia Blog: OpenID is Taking Off! Since November, 15% of new Ma.gnolia members signed up using an OpenID.
Oxford Geek Nights. 8pm on the 7th of February 2007 at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford. Three 15 minute talks and a bunch of 5 minute microslots. I’ll be giving a talk on OpenID.
Wikipedia nofollows links. Wikipedia’s high PageRank means this is likely to have a noticable knock-on effect on the rankings of many other sites.
The way you make users understand your program model is with metaphors. When you make things look, feel, and most importantly, behave like things in the real world, users are more likely to figure out how to use the program, and the app will be easier to use. When you try to combine two very dramatically different real-world items (email and appointments) into the same kind of thing in the user interface, usability suffers because there’s no longer a real-world metaphor that applies.
In Which I Think About Java Again, But Only For A Moment. Convincing argument as to why desktop applications written in Java rarely have decent user interfaces.
You need to lay out the user interface components visually, by hand, with total control over where they go. Automated LayoutManagers don't cut it. A corollary of this is that you can't move a UI layout from one platform to another and have the computer make everything fit. Computers don't lay out interfaces by themselves any better than they can translate French to English by themselves.
On Space Art in Sebastopol... Awesome. Our giant mosaic space invaders are going to show up on Google Earth!
Twitter Updater (a WordPress plugin). “The Twitter Updater automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post.” Fantastic idea—I really want this for my own site.
Jan. 23, 2007
Stopping spambots with hashes and honeypots. Ned’s analysis of how spambots work, along with some relatively simple tricks that should fool most of them.
Pickles Begone. Barry Warsaw’s notes on adding SQLAlchemy persistence to Mailman.
Jan. 24, 2007
We have a unique opportunity with phishing and OpenID. OpenID can make the possibility for bad things to happen from phishing that much worse. However, having an OpenID means you create a more intimate relationship with your OpenID provider. You go there everyday. You will more likely know when something is wrong.
MyOpenID: New anti-phishing tools available. Includes SafeSignIn, which removes the login form from the landing page. You have to enable it in your preferences though.
Flickr Machine Tags. A new feature for API developers that lets them stuff arbritrary namespaced key/value pairs in to tags and query them using the API. Even without range queries, this will enable a ton of exciting new third party developments.
Which is the real explanation of where the name XMLHTTP comes from- the thing is mostly about HTTP and doesn't have any specific tie to XML other than that was the easiest excuse for shipping it so I needed to cram XML into the name (plus- XML was the hot technology at the time and it seemed like some good marketing for the component).
Jan. 25, 2007
The basic concept here is given the ongoing dramatic drop in the price of bandwidth and hardware, they cost very little. I looked at the bandwidth bill for Wikipedia, for instance, and it is actually substantially lower in the last year than the year before, despite traffic growing by a factor of 4.
The Spotlight File System for MacFUSE (via) Finally, an easy way to create proper virtual folders on OS X using Spotlight and FUSE.
Jan. 26, 2007
Social whitelisting with OpenID... (plasticbag.org). Tom’s write-up of the social whitelisting idea. Lots of sceptics in the comments.
Justin Mason: more on social whitelisting with OpenID. The author of spam assassin warns that whitelist-based trust networks are a lot harder than they look.
Ninja kitten band win Coke battle (via) There’s a headline you don’t expect to see on BBC News.
MySpace Allegedly Kills Computer Security Website. No need for the allegedly; it’s been confirmed. MySpace got GoDaddy.com to redirect DNS for seclists.org after a list of phished user accounts posted to the full disclosure mailing list list was archived there.
XForms in Firefox (via) Practical tutorial on taking advantage of the Firefox XForms plugin, sadly not yet bundled with the browser itself.
We're the largest domain registrar in the world, and my view is, for $8.95 its not okay for somebody to come and use our services to harm other people.
Farm subsidies in United Kingdom. Top recipients of EU subsidies in the UK include Tate and Lyle and Nestle—do they really need the money?
The Django Book: Deploying Django. Solid advice based on years of experience at the Journal-World and the Washington Post.
Opera Skins: Tango CL. This skin is the first thing I install when I set up Opera. It’s an enormous improvement on the default.
Web 2.0 Company Name Generator. I talked to a company recently who had actually used this to come up with a name for one of their products.
Web 2.0 domain name generating shell script. ... sed “s/er$/r.com/g” ...
VCS Migration: The Hare and the Tortoise. Bazaar and Mercurial compared from the point of view of importing 1 million diffs from Mozilla CVS. Bazaar’s import is more robust but will take more than a month to complete.
Jan. 27, 2007
Introduction to Neogeography (via) Having run in to Andrew Turner at last year’s EuroOSCON, this is the first O’Reilly Short Cuts PDF that I’ve been seriously tempted to buy.