November 2007
Nov. 23, 2007
Portable Social Networks: Take Your Friends with You. Brian Suda explains how OpenID, XFN and hCard can be used together to bootstrap portable social networks.
Nov. 24, 2007
A Little Laptop With Big Ambitions. I hadn’t realised how much competition OLPC faced from Microsoft and Intel’s Classmate. It would be amazing to see a generation grow up understanding that computers are open tools that they can control themselves rather than closed black boxes.
Nov. 25, 2007
DebugBar. Suggested at BarCamp London 3 as a useful tool for developing with IE; apparently includes a great JavaScript debugger.
Deconstructing Facebook Beacon JavaScript. How Facebook’s new Beacon service (also known as “Facebook ruined Christmas”) actually works.
Open Rights Group: Our first two years. ORG’s review of the past two years shows just how worthwhile a cause they have become—highlights include their hugely successful campaign against copyright term extension and their involvement in this year’s e-voting trials.
Nov. 26, 2007
Eventlet—Second Life Wiki. Seriously powerful non-blocking IO library for Python, currently maintained by Linden Lab as part of the server architecture used for Second Life.
Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark’s clock. Les UX (previously known for constructing a secret underground cinema in the Paris catacombs) strikes again.
Nov. 27, 2007
Using django.newforms with Pylons. It’s always good to see Django components used outside of the framework itself. For the record, you can avoid the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable entirely using django.conf.settings.configure (search for it).
Jetty WebServer. Jetty 6.1 was the only cometd / Bayeux implementation I tried which worked out of the box.
I can't help feel that BDD is a case of a bad idea spreading; the motivations for BDD are fine (a change in developer testing workflow), but the technique they use to try to reach the desired workflow is totally bizarre.
sorl-thumbnail. This looks like a decent attempt at a generic Django thumbnailing service, but I’m always wary of code that allows URL hackers to create large numbers of files that will be cached to disk. UPDATE: My mistake, thumbnail creation can only be caused by template authors.
Oxford Geek Night 4. Tomorrow night, usual venue. Topics include mySociety, Pylons, MythTV and more.
What do we call personal information management when it moves into shared online spaces? I asked myself that question, and the answer that came back was: social information management.
Nov. 30, 2007
Blogger: OpenID commenting (via) I may be wrong, but I think this is the first Google property to support OpenID in any way.
The Rissington Podcast. Resize the browser window and marvel at the way the various background images seamlessly overlay each other—Nat and I cooed at it for about five minutes.
Simply put, free and open-source software is just the scientific model applied to programming: free sharing of work open collaboration; open publication; peer review; recognition of the best work, with priority given to the first to do a meaningful new piece of work; and so forth. As a programmer, it is the best arena in which to work. There are no secrets; the work must stand on its own.