November 2007
Nov. 16, 2007
Ten New Things in WebKit 3. Does “incremental updates for persistent server connections” for XMLHttpRequest mean Safari now has native support for Comet?
CSS3 and the death of Handheld Stylesheets. I hadn’t looked at CSS 3 media queries before (which let you apply different styles based on media features such as screen width, height and colour availability)—they seem like a much smarter solution that handheld stylesheets and also appear to be preferred by device vendors.
I don't understand why the NSA was so insistent about including Dual_EC_DRBG in the standard. It makes no sense as a trap door: It's public, and rather obvious. It makes no sense from an engineering perspective: It's too slow for anyone to willingly use it. And it makes no sense from a backwards-compatibility perspective: Swapping one random-number generator for another is easy.
Taking the canvas to another dimension. Opera have finally released a test version with support for a opera-3d canvas context—Windows only for the moment, but Mac and Linux versions are promised “soon”.
Yahoo! Search Contextual Precaching. Neat performance trick on Yahoo! Search: the moment you start typing (indicating you intend to search) the site quietly fires off a bunch of requests to precache assets needed for the search results page.
JavaScript Beautifier (via) Useful online tool (source code also available) for un-obfuscating JavaScript that has had its whitespace stripped out.
Professional Python Frameworks: Web 2.0 Programming with Django and Turbogears. Apparently published by Wrox in October 2007, beating the “official” Django book by just over a month. Has anyone seen this on bookshelves yet?
Nov. 17, 2007
[Release] CouchDB 0.7.0. This is a huge milestone for the project—it’s the first official release to include the JSON REST API instead of XML, and it’s also the first release that is “intended for widespread use”.
Nov. 18, 2007
I think it is well established that HTTP Authentication needs a major kick in the ass and OpenID and OAuth may get us most of the way there. However, until I see RFC#s attached to both I'm hardly going to consider them to be complete. I propose the creation of an IETF WG on Identity and Authentication. The WG would be chartered to produce two RFCs covering each of the two areas. OpenID and OAuth could be used to seed the WG effort.
Ubuntu JeOS 7.10 released. JeOS = “Just enough Operating System”—a minimal Ubuntu image designed for creating “virtual applications” that are embedded in a VMWare (or similar) virtual machine.
Proprietary Software Does Not Scale. I’ve been thinking this for a while: if you’re using software with a per-CPU license you can’t just roll it out as an image across a bunch of virtual machines when you need to.
Harry Potter and the Order of Typography. Jon Hicks highlights some of the beautiful typography displayed by the latest Harry Potter film.
Why Virtual Theft Should Matter to Real Life Tech Companies. Interesting trend: sites that profit from sales of virtual goods (such as Habbo Hotel) are seeing users use phishing attacks to steal those goods from each other.
UK domain registrar 123-Reg crashes and burns, taking its customers with it. I was hit by this yesterday: can anyone recommend an alternative DNS host with a really easy to use interface (I’ve made mistakes modifying DNS in the past) and rock-solid reliability?
Nov. 19, 2007
IE ActiveX(“htmlfile”) Transport, Part II. Fascinating tricks for working around IE memory leaks using explicit CollectGarbage() calls and setInterval() to an empty function.
Nov. 20, 2007
Mock—Mocking and Test Utilities (via) New mocking library for Python based on the “action ... assertion” pattern (as opposed to the more common “record ... replay”).
Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.
Weewar (Nat v.s. me). Really impressive turn based strategy game, implemented entirely in the browser. Surprisingly addictive; you have been warned.
Nov. 21, 2007
Photos taken in Brighton on Flickr! (via) The new Flickr Places feature has finally launched, and it’s absolutely beautiful.
A Taxonomy of Event- and REST-based Comet. Kris Zyp describes a conceptual model for Comet messages based on REST semantics (so you can send a PUT referencing a specific URI down to a client to represent an idempotent state change).
Nov. 22, 2007
Giant Global Graph. Tim Berners-Lee points out that the Semantic Web is designed to solve problems such as portable social networks.
WS-dämmerung. Tim Bray collects the latest round of WS-* repenting, which saves me from linking to them individually.
Happy 30th Birthday Internet! “Exactly 30 years ago today on November 22, 1977 the first three networks were connected to become the Internet.”
Why Guiness tastes better in Ireland. Two reasons: it’s more popular so kegs empty faster (and you always get a fresh pint), and Guinness send someone round to every pub to flush the lines once every three weeks.
Musical hackery. Indescribably clever musical video game creation, where images from classic games spell out their own theme tunes. The smartest thing I’ve seen on YouTube, well, ever.
Safari CSS Reference. Official documentation covering the CSS properties supported by Safari, including the -webkit proprietary extensions.
Nov. 23, 2007
Is Facebook Really Censoring Search When It Suits Them? Apparently MoveOn’s group “Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy!” stopped showing up in search results for “privacy”—the search claimed 17 results but suspiciously only showed 16.
Django Evolution. Really smart take on the problem of updating database tables to reflect changes to Django models. Code that automatically modifies your database tables can be pretty scary, but Evolution seems to hit the right balance.
Subversion WebDAV Autoversioning. Set up a WebDAV share that automatically versions any file saved to it. I had no idea Subversion could do this out of the box.
Newforms, part 1. James Bennett provides a detailed description of Django’s newforms (not so new now though, they’ve been around for over a year), complete with attractive diagrams.