March 2007
March 1, 2007
The Beauty Of The Diffie-Hellman Protocol. Some useful explanations here. Diffie-Hellman is used by OpenID to establish a shared secret between the provider and the consumer.
More Django (likely more than is healthy). Jacob’s advanced Django tutorial from PyCon. I really like the template he’s using to present the slides and notes.
March 2, 2007
Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin (via) Neat WordPress plugin that forces a redirect to an item’s permalink if the URL has any extra crud in it.
Steampunk Star Wars (via) Beautiful illustrations of Star Wars re-imagined in a steampunk context.
[...] I'm a fan of the virtual machine future. We should treat our operating system like a roll of paper towels. If you get something on it you don't like, you ball it up and throw it away, and rip off a new, fresh one.
i’m Home. “Every time you start a conversation using i’m, Microsoft shares a portion of the program’s advertising revenue with some of the world’s most effective organisations dedicated to social causes.” Microsoft are now getting their marketing ideas from spam e-mail forwards.
Brian Cox at LIFT07. An accessible 20 minute explanation of particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider.
Adobe wants to be the Microsoft of the Web. The base platform technology for RIAs is too important to be controlled or designed by any single party.
Safe JSON (via) Subtle but important point about JSON APIs: you shouldn’t use a callback or variable assignment for JSON incorporating private user data, especially if it’s at a predictable URL.
Math for the Masses. WordPress.com now supports inline LaTeX. A great example of a feature that will turn a small subset of a user base in to life-long fans.
March 3, 2007
WordPress 2.1.1 dangerous, Upgrade to 2.1.2. Helping to spread the word. You’re affected if you’ve downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 in the last three or four days.
Programming Erlang. A book on Erlang from the creator of the language himself, out in July but available to buy now as a beta PDF.
March 4, 2007
Rack. “Rack provides an minimal interface between webservers supporting Ruby and Ruby frameworks”. Ruby’s equivalent of WSGI has just hit v0.1.
json-taglib. Because JSON just doesn’t have enough angle brackets.
Scaling Python for High-Load Web Sites. Slides from a talk at PyCon. Be sure to switch to the notes view (Ø in the bottom right)—a really nice overview of scaling up from a CGIs to load balanced, memcached Python application servers.
pear 0.8. “A libevent/pyevent-based locking session daemon for the web”. Relational databases aren’t particularly well suited to the access characteristics of session data.
PHP 4 phpinfo() XSS Vulnerability. Another reason not to run an open phpinfo() page on your server.
Five things I hate about Python. By Jacob Kaplan-Moss. I didn’t know you could force eggs to install unzipped with an option in ~/.pydistutils.cfg—that’s always been my least favourite thing about them.
March 5, 2007
Wrong-headed impersonation. Kim Cameron discusses user absent authentication, and emphasises the importance of delegation using delegation coupons.
Dashcode review. “Dashcode is quite possibly the best non-Firebug Javascript environment I’ve ever used.” High praise indeed.
JSON is not as safe as people think it is. Joe Walker reminds us that even authenticated JSON served without a callback or variable assignment is vulnerable to CSRF in Firefox, thanks to that browser letting you redefine the Array constructor.
March 6, 2007
phpbb-openid: Your AIM screen name is your OpenID. Log in to a phpBB board with an AOL OpenID and it will try to associate your OpenID with an account that lists that AIM in the profile. This is the kind of behaviour I talked about in my FOWA talk.
Security; AJAX; JSON; Satisfaction. The JSON attack I linked to earlier only works against raw arrays, which technically aren’t valid JSON anyway.
OpenID on WordPress.com. My first project launch as a freelancer. You can now use your WordPress.com blog as an OpenID.
Hacking del.icio.us with Python. Nat introduces snaflr, a Python script for republishing selected links from a number of del.icio.us users to one communal account.
March 7, 2007
37 Signals’ next app Highrise will support OpenID. I can’t wait to see how the 37 Signals team deal with the UI challenges involved in supporting OpenID logins.
On any given Web page, users will either click something that appears to take them closer to the fulfillment of their goal, or click the Back button on their Web browser.
W3C Relaunches HTML Activity (via) “XHTML has proved valuable in other markets” == XHTML on the public Web has failed. Long live HTML!
Relying Party Best Practices. Proposed guidelines for OpenID consumers from Martin Atkins, currently under discussion on the mailing list.
March 8, 2007
Web Focus Leads Newspapers to Hire Programmers for Editorial Staff. It’s great to see this trend taking off. A newsroom is an excellent place to work as a programmer.