Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Friday, 14th September 2007

For any song you already own on CD, Apple is asking you to pay three times for it in order to use it as a ringtone on your iPhone: once for the CD you’ve already purchased, again to buy a needless duplicate of the track from the iTunes Store, and a third time to generate the ringtone.

John Gruber

# 8:15 am / apple, iphone, john-gruber, music, ringtones, ripoff

How should JSON strings be represented in Erlang? Erlang’s poor support for strings makes this a surprisingly tricky question.

# 8:17 am / erlang, json, strings, tonygarnockjones

TechShop: Geek Heaven. Like a fitness club for people who make stuff: a ridiculous amount of exciting hardware (including laser etchers, robotic milling machines and a 3D printer) and trainers on hand to show you how to use it all. Sadly it’s in Menlo Park which is a bit of a trek from Brighton.

# 9:55 am / hardware, hardware-hacking, menlopark, techshop

html4all. New mailing list / advocacy group focusing on accessibility issues relevant to HTML 5. This is something that the core HTML 5 group have taken a lot of criticism for, although it’s unfair to say that they don’t care about accessibility (they are however challenging a lot of sacred cows).

# 11:35 am / accessibility, html, html4all, html5, whatwg

The longdesc lottery. Mark Pilgrim is now writing for the WHATWG blog. Here he makes the case for replacing the longdesc attribute with a better solution, based on ten years of developer ignorance and misuse. As always with that site, check the comments for a microcosm of the larger debate.

# 11:44 am / accessibility, html, html5, longdesc, mark-pilgrim, whatwg

Zope3 for Djangoers. I prefer “Djangonauts”, personally. Useful overview of Zope 3 for people with Django experience (first of a multi-part series).

# 3:20 pm / django, djangonauts, python, zope, zope3