Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Friday, 4th January 2008

Django on Jython (via) Outstanding work from Jim Baker and the Jython team: Django now runs on the modern branch of Jython, with a couple of patches and some failed doctests due to dictionary order (a problem with Django’s test suite).

# 12:35 pm / django, doctest, jython, unittests

The Dark Side Of The Moon (via) Robert O’Callahan believes that Moonlight is a strategic mistake, because it gives credibility to Microsoft’s entry to a new market which they will use to “keep the competition on a treadmill”; Moonlight can also never be entirely free due to the need for a proprietary codec (VC-1) available only as a binary blob.

# 12:41 pm / binaryblob, codecs, microsoft, migueldeicaza, moonlight, open-source, roberto-callahan, silverlight, video, wc1

From my perspective, it is crucial for Linux to have good support for Silverlight because I do not want Linux on the desktop to become a second class citizen ever again. [...] The core of the debate is whether Microsoft will succeed in establishing Silverlight as a RIA platform or not. You believe that without Moonlight they would not have a chance of success, and I believe that they would have regardless of us.

Miguel de Icaza

# 12:42 pm / linux, microsoft, migueldeicaza, moonlight, open-source, ria, roberto-callahan, silverlight

HTTP Cache Channels (via) Interesting extension to the HTTP caching model by Mark Nottingham: caches can be told to subscribe to an Atom feed which alerts them to cached data that has gone stale. Group invalidation is also supported.

# 12:48 pm / atom, cachechannels, caching, http, mark-nottingham, squid

The data portability folks want to make it easy for you to jump from service to service. I want to make it easy for users of one service to talk to people on another service.

Dare Obasanjo

# 2:56 pm / dare-obasanjo, data-portability, portablesocialnetworks

Encoded Polyline Algorithm Format. Google Maps does some pretty crazy bit mangling to create compressed versions of lat/long pairs.

# 4:12 pm / encoding, google-maps, latlong, polyline