December 2008
Dec. 1, 2008
Magic/Replace. More inspirational magic from the team at Dabble DB. Be sure to watch the (short) demo video.
Live Piracy Map. That’s a heck of a lot of (real, nasty, sea-faring) pirates.
Dopplr: New city pages, with public tips and Creative-Commons-licenced, Flickr-powered goodness. Explains why I’ve been unable to convince any of the Dopplr crew to come out and do fun things for the past month.
Dec. 2, 2008
Amazon SimpleDB a complete flop? Terry asks if anyone is actually using SimpleDB (related Google searches indicate not, and I’ve personally not heard of anyone using it despite plenty of usage of S3 and EC2). One factor might be that lock-in to EC2 and S3 is pretty small, but if you rely on SimpleDB you’ll need to rewrite your entire application to escape.
Dec. 3, 2008
Internet explorer mystery #1376. IE executes function definitions inside an “if (0)” block. That frightens me.
24 ways: User Styling. The web geek advent calendar is up and running again this year, with a striking new design.
Getting OpenID Into the Browser. David Recordon makes the case for online identity management as a key browser feature (I like the “your browser is currently locked” concept), and argues that Gears is in a great position to deliver it.
Secret Geek A-Team Hacks Back, Defends Worldwide Web. Wired’s take on the story of Dan Kaminsky’s breaking-the-internet DNS vulnerability. Horrible headline.
Dec. 4, 2008
Python 3.0. “We are pleased to announce the release of Python 3.0 (final), a new production-ready release, on December 3rd, 2008.”
What’s New In Python 3.0. Lots.
Dec. 6, 2008
Warcraft account security. Apparently Blizzard have been selling two factor authentication key fobs for World of Warcraft for about six months.
pyquery. “A jQuery-like library for Python”—implemented on top of lxml, providing jQuery style methods for manipulating an HTML or XML document.
I don't think that Python 3.0 is a bad thing. But that it's displayed so prominently on the Python web site, without any kind of warning that it's not going to work with 99% of the Python code out there, scares the hell out of me. People are going to download and install 3.0 by default, and nothing's going to work. They're going to complain, and many are going to simply walk away.
How I Use TextMate. “Ack in Project” is a brilliant replacement for TextMate’s disappointing single threaded “Find in Project” feature.
Dec. 8, 2008
OurDelta Builds for MySQL (via) A community supported “alternative distro” of MySQL, incorporating new features from Google and other sources by maintaining a clean set of patches against the MySQL source tree (which I guess is why it’s not considered a fork). I recognise some of the patches from the excellent “High Performance MySQL, 2nd Edition”.
Kapow SMS Gateway. Looks like a solid provider for sending and receiving SMS messages, with APIs provided over both e-mail and HTTP in both directions.
ptth (Reverse HTTP) implementation in a browser using Long Poll COMET. Donovan Preston experiments with the cleverly named idea of ptth, where servers send HTTP requests to clients.
Noncontiguous area cartograms. a.k.a. really funky data visualisation maps. Includes lots of examples, plus ActionScript 3 source code.
Ubuntu and Debian AMIs for Amazon EC2. Exactly what it says on the tin.
BBC Programmes iPhone webapp experiment. More clever BBC hackery from Duncan Robertson, a really classy iPhone web app for viewing the BBC’s TV schedules, built against the BBC Programmes API with source code available.
Dec. 9, 2008
[In Mali...] The outcome of this rampant illegal software copying is that Windows is seen as "the first world standard" and any attempt to push a cheaper alternative is strongly resisted. They consider it trying to cheat local people out of getting the same quality of software that is used in the developed world, even though it's a legal way of getting quality software for free.
Conern over London parks vote. London is allocating 4 million pounds to improve parks around the city based on the results of an internet vote. Tom Steinberg: “Anyone in my team could knock up a script to vote with plausible looking data thousands of times, in about 30 minutes.”
Responders will tell you that broadcasters are condescending talking heads who think they're too good for the community. Broadcasters wish responders would take their nonsensical patter to a chat room, where they could natter on in privacy. Everyone agrees that members of the other group are total jackasses who don't know how to use Twitter.
Dec. 10, 2008
Visual Event. External code loading bookmarklet that visualises the JavaScript events hooked up to the current page, and lets you view the source code of the event handling function for each one. Only works for events added by jQuery, YUI or MooTools since those libraries maintain a cache of event handlers that they add, to work around the standard DOM’s omission of handler introspection.
How could the major players have left a gap in the market so wide that a complete novice in mobile telephony could so instantly shame them?
Dec. 11, 2008
Spock Proxy. A MySQL Proxy fork (no Lua) that concentrates solely on sharding, by parsing incoming SQL statements and redirecting them across multiple databases. There are some limitations on the SQL that can be handled (no nested queries, joins across a maximum of two tables) but generally it looks pretty impressive.
lxml: an underappreciated web scraping library. I just wish I could get the wretched thing to install on OS X Leopard without resorting to MacPorts.
Dec. 12, 2008
Facebook’s new signup process. It looks like they’ve dropped the “enter your password twice” pattern. Is this really a good idea? I suppose if people mis-type it they can always use forgotten password to set a new one.
Extending jQuery’s selector capabilities. I already knew this was possible, but the examples James Padolsey provides are eye-opening—I especially like his clever :data selector extension which lets you write CSS selectors that query against jQuery’s custom “data” DOM element storage in a manner similar to CSS2 attribute selectors.
Dec. 13, 2008
Freebase Sets (via) Give it some topics and it will tell you what they have in common and show further topics matching the same rules. Kind of like the old Google Labs sets tool but this one shows its workings.