March 2008
March 22, 2008
fireeagle_api.py. Steve Marshall’s Fire Eagle python binding on GitHub.
March 25, 2008
An OpenSocial Foundation. “Today we are pleased to announce that Google is joining together with Yahoo! and MySpace in the creation of a non-profit foundation for the open and transparent governance of the OpenSocial specifications and intellectual property.” Good move; I’d personally love to see this happen with Google Gears.
Better Use of Newforms. Two really neat techniques: using an inclusion tag template to DRY your custom form templates, and adding what-to-do-next methods to the form class itself to cut down on the application code in your views.
March 26, 2008
getElementsByClassName pre Prototype 1.6. Older releases of Prototype break in Firefox 3 and Safari 3.1 due to unsafe namespace management—getElementsByClassName is now a browser built-in but with different semantics to the Prototype method of the same name. Prototype 1.6 is fine.
Djangofriendly (via) Ryan Berg’s attractive new site collecting ratings and reviews for web hosts that support Django. I’m still happily hosted on a bytemark VPS, which isn’t currently listed on the site.
The Principles Of Project Management (via) Meri’s book has been published by SitePoint.
FormWizard: multiple-step forms in Django. Available in recent trunk versions.
Setup mod_wsgi for Django and Shared Hosting. Tutorial by David Cramer; attached are useful comments from mod_wsgi author Graham Dumpleton.
The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks. A bunch of smart questions posed by Facebook’s Dave Morin. This is why I think data portability is the wrong framing—moving data between sites is really hard. Importing social relationships between sites is much more viable (hence my interest in social network portability). Also, the complaints about systems sharing e-mail addresses are neatly addressed by using OpenID as the GUID for a user instead. OpenIDs can’t be spammed.
Opera and the Acid3 Test. Screenshot shows 100/100 (live code or it didn’t happen!)—Opera’s codebase must be in extremely good shape to fix so many issues so quickly.
March 27, 2008
EC2: Introducing Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones. Big news from Amazon: EC2 can now provide static IP addresses which you can dynamically map to one of your instances, along with “availability zones” so you can specify that instances run in different data centres. Hosting an entire application on EC2 just got a whole lot more practical.
xPyUnit: Uniting in Python with XML reporting. Should be just the ticket for integrating Django’s testing framework with Cruise Control.
Ian's Acid 3, unlike its predecessors, is not about establishing a baseline of useful web capabilities. It's quite explicitly about making browser developers jump - Ian specifically sought out tests that were broken in WebKit, Opera, and Gecko, perhaps out of a twisted attempt at fairness. But the Acid tests shouldn't be fair to browsers, they should be fair to the web; they should be based on how good the web will be as a platform if all browsers conform, not about how far any given browser has to stretch to get there.
March 29, 2008
god—process and task monitoring done right. I have a long running animosity towards every process monitoring tool currently in existence; I’ll have to put this one through its paces and see if it sucks less.
March 30, 2008
Google’s excanvas only works in quirks mode for IE8. IE8 in act-as-IE8 mode disables VML but doesn’t implement canvas, so there’s currently no 2D drawing method for that browser. UPDATE: The problem is Google’s excanvas library, not IE8 disabling VML; see comments.
Exposing calendar events using iCalendar in Django. A simple abstraction around the vobject Python library.
hash. Douglas Crockford: “Any HTML tag that accepts a src= or href= attribute should also be allowed to take a hash= attribute”—to protect against file tampering and (more importantly) provide a truly robust caching mechanism.
Interviewing Simon Willison about OpenID. I sat down with Vikram Kumar at Webstock to talk about OpenID, and the video is now online.
The Carbon Account. The carbon calculator project I contributed to at Torchbox last year has launched, and they’ve made the code available as open source.
Graphication. Andrew Godwin’s Python graphing library, based on Cairo. Responsible for the very handsome graphs on The Carbon Account.
March 31, 2008
Django Development with Djblets. The Review Board team have extracted a library of useful Django utilities from their application. The first to be documented are helpers for reducing boilerplate in custom template tags.
Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day! jwz has recreated home.mcom.com, the original home of the Mosaic Communications Corporation, using a snapshot from 21st October 1994 and a domain borrowed from current owner AOL. Also includes instructions on running 1994 Mosaic Netscape binaries under a modern Linux distro.
Sharing My Location Just the Way I Like It. Fire Eagle gets a great write-up from Brady Forrest over on the O’Reilly Radar.