September 2007
Sept. 9, 2007
Building the Social Web with OpenID. Slides from my keynote at yesterday’s PyCon UK.
The Tale of the Mechanical Virus. “What I had discovered, in essence, was a mechanical virus. It infects Mac laptops and speads via the DVI adapters.”—I really hope this isn’t why my DVI adapter is on the blink.
Sept. 10, 2007
REST plays the same role as open source and open APIs: It eliminates tooling and vendoring as artificial barriers to adoption.
Styling File Inputs with CSS and the DOM. Clever hack to style the un-stylable: set the opacity of the file input to 0, then use a bit of JavaScript to make sure the (now invisible) browse button is always under the mouse.
Sept. 11, 2007
jQuery 1.2. Lots of neat new stuff; my favourite new feature is “Partial .load()” which lets you pull in HTML with Ajax and then use a CSS selector to grab a subset of that page and inject it in to the DOM.
Sept. 12, 2007
Ways in Which iTunes’s Just-Released Official Ringtone Support Is Weird, Rude, and/or Just Plain Buggy. I’ve long been saying that the existence of a ringtone “industry” is a bug, not a feature.
£5 app. Monthly Brighton meetup for people interested in building (and maybe selling) lightweight software with 1-2 man teams. Nat and I went along last night and really enjoyed it.
Paul Otlet described the “radiated library” in 1934. Beating Vannevar Bush in predicting something not unlike the Web by more than a decade.
A CouchDB GUI front end. Written in C# and .NET. It looks like writing frontends for CouchDB could make an excellent project for learning a new GUI environment.
Sept. 13, 2007
The Elements of JavaScript Style. Douglas Crockford illustrates better coding practises through refactoring of old code.
Silly MS-DOS 5 Promo Video. I can’t decide if this is better or worse than the Windows 386 rap.
Restructured Text to Anything. Slick set of online tools for converting Restructured Text (one of the more mature wiki-style markup languages) to HTML or PDF. Includes a nice looking API. Powered by Django.
Audio Fingerprinting for Clean Metadata. Last.fm have started using audio fingerprints to help clean up misspelled artists and duplicate track information.
An Introduction to Erlang. Erlang gets the ONLamp tutorial treatment from Gregory Brown.
Sept. 14, 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.
How should JSON strings be represented in Erlang? Erlang’s poor support for strings makes this a surprisingly tricky question.
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.
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).
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.
Zope3 for Djangoers. I prefer “Djangonauts”, personally. Useful overview of Zope 3 for people with Django experience (first of a multi-part series).
Sept. 15, 2007
My own favorites were Cuba voting "yes" to the fast-tracking of OOXML, even though Microsoft is prohibited by the US Government from selling any software on the island that might even be able to read and write the new format, and Azerbaijan's "yes" vote, even though OOXML as defined isn't able to express a Web URL address in Azeri, their official language.
virtualenv 0.8.1. Ian Bicking’s tool for creating isolated Python environments; designed to replace his earlier workingenv package. Does anyone have any experience using this? It looks fantastically useful.
Sept. 16, 2007
Opera 9.5 alpha, Kestrel, released. “With history search, Opera creates a full-text index of each and every page you visit, and when you go to the address bar, you can simply start entering words you know have been on pages you’ve visited before, and items matching your search show up.” I just tried this; it’s magic. I’m switching back to Opera from Camino.
Jottit. Aaron Swartz’s latest venture: a complete rethink of the Infogami concept. Well worth checking out for the extremely thoughtful way it introduces features, and the way account creation with a password remains optional until you want to add access control.
Sept. 18, 2007
Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site. The New York Times finally acknowledges that you can’t be the “paper of record” if no one can link to you.
Satisfaction signup page. Check out the box on the right: it lets you use hCard to instantly import your public profile data (including a user icon) from Flickr, Twitter, Upcoming and more.
Webstock 2008—New Zealand’s web conference. I’m speaking next year in New Zealand! Very excited, plan to spend most of February there to make the most of the flights.
OpenID event at the British Library. On the 8th of November. Sadly I’ll be in Berlin for the Web 2.0 Expo but it looks like a great lineup. Free to attend but limited to 50 people so book soon.
ActsAsUndoable. Lawrence Carvalho shows how robust undo functionality can be added to a JavaScript application through careful application of the Memento design pattern.
Sept. 19, 2007
Happy Talk Like A Pirate Day. What’s a pirate’s favourite cheese? Cornish Yaaaarg!