September 2007
Sept. 19, 2007
All the big guns want an iPhone killer. Even I, mad for all things Apple as I am, want an iPhone killer. I want smart digital devices to be as good as mankind’s ingenuity can make them. I want us eternally to strive to improve and surprise. Bring on the iPhone killers. Bring them on.
Sept. 20, 2007
Flickr: [what was with the pirates?] Garrrrhhhh! (via) It’s fascinating reading all the complaints on this thread—partly due to different international senses of humour, and partly just because as Flickr became more mainstream it attracted users who never picked up the sense of fun at the center of the Flickr brand.
Apparently if you try to remove/destroy/trash a FORM dom node in IE6, it won't delete it, instead creating a bizarre orphaned node stuck sucking up memory until the browser window is refreshed.
Want To Learn Web Programming? Write A Blog Engine. I couldn’t agree more. Weblogs are an ideal starter project—simple enough to get your head around, complex enough to teach you a bunch of important lessons, ideally suited for eating your own dog food.
Six Apart: We Are Opening the Social Graph. Six Apart put their cards on the table with respect to the social graph problem—focusing on OpenID, XFN and FOAF as enabling technologies. Be sure to watch the screencast demo of their new social graph visualisation tool.
Sept. 21, 2007
We're not acting as a block. Our key aim is to offer a similar experience on the mobile Web as the PC-based Web. In doing that there is a white list which people can apply for.
Amazon guide to ripping your CDs. “Many of our customers have already figured out that one cheap way to get DRM-free MP3 files is to buy them on CD and rip them themselves.”
Google To “Out Open” Facebook On November 5. “Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.”
The Rubinius Sprint. Sun are throwing a ton of resources at Ruby, because as Tim Bray says, “it’s not fast enough”. Imagine where they’d be if they’d invested this kind of support in Jython five years ago...
OAuth: Your valet key for the Web. OAuth is a really important new specification that aims to solve the “give this application permission to do X on my behalf” problem once and for all.
Quechup: Another Social Network Enemy! This is why we need to stop teaching users that it’s OK to give their e-mail username and password to any site that asks for it.
Sept. 22, 2007
robots.txt Adventure. Interesting notes from crawling 4.6 million robots.txt, including 69 different ways in which the word “disallow” can be mis-spelled.
Django GridContainer. Media Temple’s virtualized Django hosting is now accepting applications for beta testers.
A typical phishing email will have a generic greeting, such as 'Dear User'. Note: All PayPal emails will greet you by your first and last name.
Sun OpenID IdP: protocol and implementation review. Sun employees are posting lots of useful insights gathered during the implementation of their OpenID provider.
Sun’s OpenID IdP: Data Governance. Lauren Wood explains the checklist used to ensure Sun’s OpenID provider adequately respected user privacy and data governance (what happens to the data that is stored).
Hello JS-CTYPES, Goodbye Binary Components. Mark Finkle is porting Python’s ctypes functionality to the Mozilla platform, to allow binary XPCOM components to be defined in pure JavaScript.
Sept. 23, 2007
7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails. After two years working on a Rails rewrite of CD Baby, Derek Sivers scrapped it and instead rewrote the PHP version using Rails-inspired design principles. Derek would still use Rails for a greenfield project though.
Team Fortress 2. I gave this a go today for old time’s sake. Nine years in development and all they could come up with was TFC without the grenades?
Sept. 24, 2007
gefingerpoken. Michal Migurski shows how to implement the algorithm for two-finger deforming drag using affine transformation matrices in Flash.
OLPC: Give 1 Get 1. The long rumoured “buy two OLPCs, donate one to the third world” scheme is actually happening. I plan to get one; the robustness, battery life and WiFi range should make for an excellent conference / outdoor machine.
IEContentLoaded. An alternative method of detecting DOMContentLoaded on IE; works by polling until the doScroll() method on an unattached element stops throwing errors.
Becoming PHP 6 Compatible. According to this article, I’ve been writing PHP 6 compatible code since about 2002.
mySociety Disruptive Technology Talks. Four great talks coming up in London this Autumn, courtesy of the lovely folk at mySociety.
lxml.cssselect (via) lxml includes an implementation of CSS 3 selectors, which compiles them to XPath expressions. Should be a useful tool for parsing Microformats from Python.
Sept. 25, 2007
France Telecom Supports OpenID! France Telecom is the parent company of Orange. Apparently all 40 million France Telecom subscribers now have an OpenID.
Your telco knows who you are, where you live and even your credit card number or bank account. It's their business to provide you physical access from a real location and identify you as a customer by sending you invoices and receiving money from you. This means that Orange OpenIDs are verified IDs of real people as a matter of principle.
Zimki is to shut down. I guess they were just too revolutionary for Canon Europe, the corporate mothership, to understand.
DRM-free MP3 downloads from Amazon. The good: they have what looks like the entire Universal and EMI catalogues in DRM-free 256bit MP3s. The bad: you need a US billing address! So close...