June 2008
June 10, 2008
Shortcutting render_to_response. I tend to use a simple wrapper function, but the other options described here are worth exploring. This is why I’m so keen on Django’s “take a request object, return a response object” philosophy—it makes it trivial to extend the framework in the direction you want.
the tls report (via) Clever service that analyses a web server’s SSL implementation and grades it based on things like the protocols, certificates, ciphers and key lengths it supports. Includes public reports on the top and bottom 20 sites.
June 11, 2008
Static typing in OO languages isn't the solution to software complexity, rather it's an enabler of it. Static typing is like giving a drunk a bunch of breath mints and saying "Don't drive drunk. But if you must, use these breath mints in case you get pulled over."
June 12, 2008
Saturday Mornings: Going Live! Some 1980s/1990s British nostalgia. I pinched a video of the theme tune from here for my talk on Comet at Brighton SkillSwap.
RFC: Django 1.0 roadmap and timeline. Jacob’s proposed target is “early September” for the final 1.0 release.
June 13, 2008
Censoring the Internet at Paraguay. The state owned telecommunication company DNS hijacked the opposition party’s domain to point at a porn site during the election back in April. Maybe we don’t want a django.py vanity domain after all...
June 14, 2008
DebugFooter middleware with Pygments sql syntax highlighting. Andreas Marr has enhanced my Django DebugFooter middleware with proper syntax highlighting for the logged SQL.
Trebuchets, Geohashes, and Richmond, VA. I love how Randall Munroe lives his life in the spirit of XKCD.
June 15, 2008
Spicing Up Embedded JavaScript. John Resig collects the various ways in which a JavaScript interpreter can be hosted by Python, PHP, Perl, Ruby and Java. There are full JS implementations in PHP, Perl and Java; Ruby and Python both have modules that use an embedded SpiderMonkey.
Minimal. James Bennett follows Ryan Tomayko’s example and experiments with the minimalist school of blog design.
XML is better if you have more text and fewer tags. And JSON is better if you have more tags and less text. Argh! I mean, come on, it's that easy. But you know, there's a big debate about it.
Caffeine. I’ve been using this for several months and I love it: it’s a simple OS X menu bar icon that lets you prevent your Mac from dimming the screen, going to sleep or starting a screen saver. Perfect for giving presentations and watching Flash movies full screen.
Camouflage. My other key piece of OS X presenting software—hides all of the icons on the desktop (no need to drag them all in to an “Archive” folder every time I give talk).
June 16, 2008
There are two [Wikipedias]: One is the public-facing reliable-enough-on-average encyclopedia that people read every day, which makes for nice fluff pieces in the media about "these new Web thingamajigs that the kids are building, aren't they neat?". The other is the insular behind-the-scenes bureaucracy, which reads like an improvised performance of the collected writings of Clay Shirky.
Wikipedia:Canvassing (via) Apparently it’s considered bad form to tell people about debates occurring on Wikipedia (such as votes for deletion). Looks like a policy designed to discourage the participation of subject experts in favour of the participation of Wikipedia process gnomes.
The fatal flaw of deletionism is the mindset of deciding what someone else should find interesting
Comet (programming) on Wikipedia on 4th June 2008 (via) The last useful version (which I had pointed many people to) before it was gutted down to just a couple of paragraphs by infuriating deletionists.
Deep Profiling jQuery Apps. Neat plugin from John Resig that monkey-patches most (all?) of the jQuery methods to build up a detailed profile of which methods are being used by a given page.
There is a reason why Flickr eventually killed Yahoo! Photos and why it was decided that Google Video be relegated to being a search brand while YouTube would be the social sharing brand. The brand baggage and the accompanying culture made them road kill.
June 17, 2008
PEP 372—Adding an ordered dictionary to collections. Yes please!
How not to apply for a job. Quite reasonably, 37signals care if job applicants get their wordmark right. Having worked for Yahoo! I know how important that ! is. What really winds me up is companies that aren’t consistent with name capitalisation across their own sites—many startups are guilty of this.
New foundation for Django. Django now has its own nonprofit software foundation (courtesy of a bunch of tough paperwork by Jacob Kaplan-Moss), and fittingly the Lawrence-Journal World get the exclusive.
Scaling your website with the Perlbal web server (PDF) (via) Perlbal documentation is pretty thin on the ground; this is a really useful introduction from Frank Wiles.
June 18, 2008
James Bennett: Why HTML. Finally, somewhere to point people when they ask why I avoid XHTML that’s a bit more up to date than Hixie’s rant from 2002.
Reddit release their codebase. Under the same Common Public Attribution License used by Facebook for their recent source release.
ncache. A squid-style caching system built on top of nginx. Supports the HTTP PURGE method for cache invalidation.
June 19, 2008
Kellogg’s™ Lego® Fruit Flavored Snacks (via) On the one hand, from a child safety point of view this is clearly one of most stupid product ideas in recent history. On the other hand, I really, really want some.
PortingDjangoTo3k. Martin von Loewis has started assembling a patch. His write-up illustrates some key differences between Python 2.X and Python 3—it looks like Django’s unicode handling is going to require the most work.
When Bugs Collide: Fixing Text Dimming in Firefox 2. Handy tips from Drew on fixing the glitchy text rendering in Firefox 2 when you animate opacity without breaking alpha-transparent PNGs in IE6.
June 20, 2008
What is it like to write a technical book? Plenty of food for thought from the lead author of the new edition of High Performance MySQL. It’s amazing how Word is still an integral part of most technical book projects despite its obvious inadequacies compared to a toolchain based on plain text files and Subversion (the Django Book used ReST and Subversion to great effect).