May 2007
May 10, 2007
Six Months Later: The New HTML Working Group. In case you haven’t been paying attention, Kevin Yank summarises some of the key discussions in the new HTML working group.
Test stubbing httplib2. Nice demonstration of monkey-patching as part of unit testing in Python.
May 11, 2007
Wikipedia internals (PDF) (via) A gold mine of scaling tips.
Wikimedia Grid Report. Wikipedia’s Ganglia monitoring page.
The web can eat toolchain bait like this for breakfast.
HBO Exec Wants to Rename DRM. “... until recently nobody had complained that the term ’Digital Rights Management’ was insufficiently Orwellian.”
May 12, 2007
Pidgin developers: please get a clue. Lossy abstraction: You can’t tell which protocol people are using, and Pidgin’s developers are ignoring dozens of sensible arguments for why this information matters.
May 13, 2007
Encyclopedia of Life. Ambitious, well funded project to create a professionally maintained Wikipedia for species. I really hope they get their URL design right.
May 15, 2007
Online and offline development with the YUI and Charles (via) Stuart Colville shows how the Charles debugging proxy can be used to serve up hosted YUI files while developing offline.
May 16, 2007
SWFUpload. Fantastic Flash widget for handling multiple file uploads with progress indicators; degrades gracefully to a regular HTML upload field.
JavaScript Libraries: The Big Picture
I just gave my first talk at XTech 2007 (I’m speaking again on Friday, on OpenID). Slides are on slideshare.net.
[... 40 words]May 17, 2007
dojo.query: A CSS Query Engine For Dojo. I incorrectly criticised Dojo for not having a CSS node selection tool in my talk yesterday; not sure how I missed this.
Packing Prototype. Why Prototype doesn’t ship with an official compressed version.
Slideshows tagged with xtech2007. I like slideshare a lot.
Arduino. Open source hardware hacking. It’s way easier than you would think.
May 18, 2007
The Implications of OpenID
My second presentation at XTech 2007. Unfortunately there’s just the Matt Webb keynote to go, and I spent most of the conference worrying about my talks. There’s a lot to be said for speaking as early as possible.
[... 86 words]May 20, 2007
the.british.museum (via) Great URL.
May 21, 2007
d.Construct 2007 is go! One of my favourite UK events. This year’s theme is “Designing the User Experience”.
May 22, 2007
Ten Reasons The World Needs Patent Covenants (via) Sun just made their OpenID patent covenant official. Simon Phipps explains why these are a Good Idea.
May 24, 2007
OpenID for all Estonians. 1.37 million Estonians will soon have OpenIDs, secured using smart cards. I’d like to hear more about how the smart cards help tackle phishing.
Web Security for Estonia—OpenID. “Every Estonian eID holder (around 80% of Estonian population) has an unique OpenID with the format open.id.ee/[firstname].[lastname](.number)”
Rapid development serving 500,000 pages/hour (via) Curse Gaming are getting impressive performance out of Django.
Knight Foundation grant. Adrian’s leaving the Washington Post to found EveryBlock, a startup focusing on local news and information in the style of chicagocrime.org.
Lacking a Strunk and White Elements of Style for URI namespace, we've made a mess of it. It's long past time to grow up and recognize the serious importance of principled design in this infinitely large namespace.
There’s a hole in your Twitter. If you’ve been using friends-only messages on Twitter they may currently be exposed via the API.
The Twitter API Respects Your Privacy. Not Twitter’s fault: The users who exposed their data through Twittervision had given that site their username and password; Twittervision was failing to hide protected updates.
Django unicode-branch: testers wanted. Malcolm’s outstanding work on the unicode branch appears to be nearing completion.
May 26, 2007
WiFi Hotspots in Oxford. The best list I’ve found, but that’s not saying a lot.
Oxford on hotspotr. Nicely designed community WiFi hotspot site. Only lists two for Oxford at the moment; I plan to add more as I confirm them.
Category Free Wifi on The Oxford Guide (via) More hotspots, this time with RDF, Atom and RSS feeds.