October 2008
Oct. 15, 2008
FOWA sketchnotes. Kai Chan Vong’s sketch notes from this year’s Future of Web Apps.
Are we so deranged here in the twenty-first century that we’re going to re-enact, wide-eyed, the twin tragedies of the great desktop-suite lock-in and the great proprietary-SQL lock-in? You know, the ones where you give a platform vendor control over your IT budget? Gimme a break.
— Tim Bray
Page Inlink Analyzer (via) Here’s why I’m so keen on JSONP APIs—Eric Miraglia’s tool fires off dozens of cross-domain JSON requests to pull together information about inbound links to your site from Yahoo! Site Explorer and del.icio.us. I imagine it would have been uneconomic for him to provide the tool if it had to proxy every request through his own server.
Oct. 16, 2008
View your FriendFeed in real-time. FriendFeed become the latest site to enable real-time updates using the long-polling variant of Comet. The real-time Web was something of a theme at this year’s FOWA, with talks on message queues, XMPP and scaling Comet at Meebo.
Private Messages with cometD Chat. cometd-java (a Java servlet reference implementation of the Bayeux protocol) can be extended with BayeuxService subclasses that run within the server itself.
A Million-user Comet Application with Mochiweb, Part 1. Richard Jones explores Mochiweb, Erlang and linux kernel tuning for building a high performance comet server. Does this mean real-time web features are coming to last.fm?
Data Scraping Wikipedia with Google Spreadsheets. I hadn’t played with =importHTML in Google spreadsheets, which lets you suck in data from an HTML table or list somewhere on the web. This tutorial takes it further, bringing Wikipedia, Yahoo! Pipes and KML in to the mix.
Soviet diribles. Pictures of Soviet dirigibles.
Go Get Yer Shiny New Yahoo Profile... And Make Some Connections! I’m surprised to see Yahoo! going with mutual friendships as the core of their new social platform—I’ve personally found social sites which support a one-way “follow” relationship far more useful.
Best Practices for OAuth with Fire Eagle. “We insist that you must NOT use embedded rendering controls to present the OAuth process with Yahoo! and Fire Eagle”—that’s a clear nod towards the iPhone development community.
US shifts Visa Waiver Program authorization to Internet—Yahoo! News (via) If you’re a European travelling to the US from January 2009 you’ll need to fill out the online equivalent of an I-94W (the green form you get given on the plane) in advance. This is going to catch out a lot of people.
Oct. 17, 2008
Conditional classnames. Yahoo!’s internal coding standards still recommend CSS hacks over conditional comments because a separate stylesheet for IE imposes an additional HTTP request. Paul Hammond points out that you can use conditional comments to write out an extra class=“ie” attribute on the body element and use that to target the IE specific fixes in your stylesheets.
FOWA London—Beyond GoogleMaps. Andrew Turner’s talk at FOWA was the most information dense presentation I’ve ever seen, and discussed a huge number of cool geo projects that I’d never previously heard of. Andrew links to the full slides and video, well worth a watch.
Oct. 19, 2008
Bloom Filter Resources. A continuation of the discussion about how to transfer information about a large number of recently updated resources around in an efficient way, Joe provides working code illustrating a simple approach using bloom filters.
Magnificent Seven—the value of Atom. The seven core things that Atom solves so that you don’t have to.
Response Splitting Risk. Important reminder that you should always ensure strings used in HTTP headers don’t contain newlines.
Oct. 20, 2008
The Universal Design Pattern. Steve Yegge presents a small book on key/value pairs and prototypal inheritance. “I call it the Universal design pattern because it is (by far) the best known solution to the problem of designing open-ended systems, which in turn translates to long-lived systems.”
Beanstalkd / Python Basic Tutorial. How to get up and running quickly with my favourite light-weight queue server. If only it had persistence...
lns (via) “a friendly program for making symbolic links”—it’s ln -s but it does the right thing no matter what order you put the arguments in. Love it.
From Scandinavia with Love. Finnish security company F-Secure conduct testing of wireless cell phone viruses in a walk-in Faraday cage.
Oct. 21, 2008
Animated Sorting Algorithms (via) JavaScript animations of various sorting algorithms, running against four different initial conditions (random, nearly ordered, reversed and few unique). I wish I’d had this during my computer science degree.
Government in the UK once lead the world in it's own information systems, breaking Enigma, documenting an empire's worth of trade. And then it fired everyone who could do those things, or employed them only via horribly expensive consultancies. It is time to start bringing them back into the corridors of power.
Oct. 22, 2008
FriendFeed launch a real-time API. This is huge: JSONP plus long polling Comet, with “everything since X” tokens to ensure you don’t miss anything. This is the first open Comet API I’ve seen anywhere. Combine this with FriendFeed’s regular API (which allows arbitrary message posting) and you’ve got a really powerful tool for hackers who want to experiment with Comet without rigging up their own infrastructure.
Oct. 23, 2008
Windows Server and SQL Server on EC2 (via) Launched today, the pricing includes rental of the Windows license. Regular Windows is 25% to 50% more expensive than Linux, but SQL Server comes in at a hefty $1.10 per hour, which is $9636 per year (nearly three times as much as a Linux server running an open source database).
Learning to Fear the Semantic Web. Paul Ford raises the liability issue with regards to building sites around other people’s metadata, pointing out that OpenCalais is owned by Thomson Reuters who have a bad track record with regards to intellectual property lawsuits elsewhere in the organisation.
CSSHttpRequest (via) Devious cross-domain Ajax hack that uses CSS for transport (@import rules with data URIs, but it still works in IE). Similar to JSONP but safer, since JSONP can cause arbitrary JavaScript to execute.
Oct. 24, 2008
Freebase Hack Day. I’m finding Freebase increasingly interesting at the moment, and their public hack day on the 8th November in San Francisco looks like it could be a lot of fun. They’ll be previewing Acre, a new server-side JavaScript application platform targeted at building Freebase powered applications. Hit “view source” at the bottom of the hack day site to see what an Acre app looks like.
Trying out Windows on EC2. Phillip Pearson provides the missing documentation.
Inside guardian.co.uk: Upgrading our RSS feeds. The Guardian now offers full-content RSS feeds of pretty much everything for which we have the necessary rights (no ads yet, but they’ll be added soon). Adding “/rss” to the URL in various places on the site will get you feeds for sections, subjects, contributors and more.
The key thing to remember is that REST is about building software that scales to usage on the World Wide Web by being a good participant of the Web ecosystem. Ideally a RESTful API should be designed to be implementable by thousands of websites and consumed by hundreds of applications running on dozens of platforms with zero coupling between the client applications and the Web services.