July 2008
July 7, 2008
It looks like the first ever Django conference will take place in early September in the San Francisco bay area.
— Me, on Twitter
Growing the ORG community. The Open Rights Group want a fiver a month from 750 new people to support their excellent work fighting for digital civil liberties in the UK political arena. Going by their past performance this is a very worthwhile investment.
July 8, 2008
Protocol Buffers: Google’s Data Interchange Format. Open sourced today. Highly efficient binary protocol for storing and transmitting structured data between C++, Java and Python. Uses a .proto file describing the data structure which is compiled to classes in those languages for serializing and deserializing. 3-10 times smaller and 20-100 times faster than XML.
Question: how do you upgrade servers when you need to pass new information between them? It's a fool's game to try to upgrade both servers at the same time. So you need a communication protocol that is not only backward compatible (a new server can speak the old protocol) but also forward compatible (an old server can speak the new protocol). Protocol Buffers provide that because new additions to the protocol can be ignored by the old server.
Apple just gave out my Apple ID password because someone asked. “am forget my password of mac,did you give me password on new email marko.[redacted] @yahoo.com”. Classy.
Opera Web Standards Curriculum. Opera commissioned an impressive sequence of articles from a bunch of very talented people to help address the monstrous learning curve for modern client-side development.
July 9, 2008
ftputil. Python’s built-in ftplib is ridiculously low level, requiring you to send RETR commands and even assemble downloaded chunks yourself using a callback. ftputil looks like a really solid high-level interface to that module with file-like objects and plenty of convenient methods.
July 13, 2008
DjangoCon 2008. Venue: Gooleplex, San Francisco Bay Area. Dates: 6th and 7th Sept. Official post will be on djangoproject.com soon.
July 19, 2008
php: rfc: closures (via) I never thought I’d see the day, but a patch adding closures to PHP has been both proposed and accepted! Looks like a solid implementation—the syntax is similar to JavaScript but makes explicit which variables are to be captured. As with much of PHP, values are copied in to the closure by default but you can use an ampersand to specify JavaScript-style pass-by-reference instead.
Simple Top-Down Parsing in Python. Eye-opening tutorial on building a recursive descent parser for Python, in Python that uses top-down operator precedence.
The Truth about Web Navigation. Jeremy Zawodny on regular users understanding the browser address bar: “They don’t. And they never will.” Then they’re going to get phished, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do to help them.
HeatMapAPI (via) Cool (or should that be hot?) API for adding heat maps to any Google Maps application.
We’re added some iCal views to BBC Programmes. BBC /programmes is one of the most exciting public facing parts of the BBC’s online offerings.
Jinja2 Final aka Jinjavitus Released. The Jinja template engine now has auto-escaping as an optional feature, disabled by default. Worth considering as an almost drop-in replacement for Django’s template language if features such as macros and compilation to Python code appeal to you.
July 20, 2008
If we want people to have the same degree of user autonomy as we've come to expect from the world, we may have to sit down and code alternatives to Google Docs, Twitter, and EC2 that can live with us on the edge, not be run by third parties.
A Leopard attacking and killing a Crocodile. Amazing sequence of photos by Hal Brindley.
DjangoCon 2008. The official DjangoCon site is up, along with a mostly complete schedule.
newforms-admin branch has been merged into trunk. Congrats to Brian Rosner for the merge. django.newforms has been renamed to django.forms as well—1.0 grows ever closer.
July 21, 2008
MySpace To Join OpenID, Bringing Total Enabled Accounts to Over A Half Billion. Another 200 million OpenIDs—but the important difference between this and the Yahoo! and AOL announcements is that MySpace users know what their profile URL is. Whenever people have told me OpenID is flawed because people don’t understand URLs I’ve answered “sure they don’t, but they know their MySpace page”.
New feeds for Project hosting on Google Code. Finally! I’ve been wanting these ever since Google Code launched. Should make it much easier to integrate personal projects hosted on Google Code in to tumblelog style sites.
July 22, 2008
What the Heck is the Open Web? Brad Neuberg is seeking a two sentence definition. Bonus points for answering the following: “If Adobe were to open source Flex/Flash, or Microsoft Silverlight, would that be the Open Web? If so, why? If not, why not?”
Django 1.0 alpha released! Not meant for production use, but a pretty solid preview of what’s coming in 1.0 proper. The beta is scheduled for August 5th.
Django 1.0 alpha release notes. The big features are newforms-admin, unicode everywhere, the queryset-refactor ORM improvements and auto-escaping in templates.
GiantBomb.com. Launched today, powered by Django—a combination of (mostly ex-Gamespot) quality editorial content and a massive structured wiki of every computer game ever released. This is going to be a lot of fun—all of the crazy detailed content that Wikipedia tends to reject.
ComicVine.com. Also powered by Django, Whiskey Media’s comic book encyclopedia and community. 43,000 characters and 94,000 issues and counting.
Replacing Django’s Template Language With Jinja2. Part of Will Larson’s series on taking advantage of Django’s loose coupling.
Python BoF and Django Drinkup (via) At OSCON? Come along to the Jax Bar tonight (Tuesday 22nd) from 7pm to 10pm to hang out with fellow Pythoneers and Djangonaughts.
Email Address to URL Transformation (EAUT) specification now available! Allows OpenID users to login using their E-mail address, which is converted in to an OpenID URL based on rules specified in an XRDS document attached to the root domain. Seems like a good idea to me.
July 23, 2008
Drizzle, Clouds, “What If?”. Exciting news in the world of MySQL: Drizzle is a new project to produce a massively stripped down version of the database server—InnoDB/UTF8 only, no permissions, views, stored procedures or triggers, simplified field types, optimised for the common subset of functionality used by web apps. MySQL’s Firefox?
(It's probably just me, but every time I stumble upon some thread involving people from the so-called "security community", it's like watching a Jerry Springer episode.)