Small Initiatives

Processing.js. John Resig’s outstanding port of the Processing visualisation language to JavaScript and Canvas. Runs amazingly well in Firefox 3. One hell of a hack.

Opera Dragonfly. Opera’s new Firebug-style developer console. Out in alpha and it shows (slow to load and the interactive console leaves a lot to be desired) but still looks incredibly promising,...

Unobtrusive JavaScript with jQuery. The online handout for the tutorial I gave this morning at XTech.

What amazes me is how close Ruby 1.9 bytecode and Python 2.5 bytecode are. Some things translate almost directly. [...] And, really, if that’s true (and I vouch that it is truly, truly true,) then...

Sneaking Ruby Through Google App Engine (and Other Strictly Python Places). In a characteristic stroke of genius, _why makes a solid initial attempt at compiling Ruby 1.9 source to Python 2.5...

Making Time Machine work with the ReadyNAS. Finally, a decent set of instructions on using a ReadyNAS with Time Machine. The trick is to create a local sparse disk image with a magic name (based on...

twistori. Lovely implementation of a neat idea for a Twitter app from Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs.

James B. on Pownce (via). James Bennett has started using Pownce for sort of medium-format blog entries, longer than a tweet but shorter than a blog essay and delivered with a healthy dose of snark.

How one site dealt with SQL injection attack (via). Horrifying story of developer incompetence from Autoweb: “The contractor had no idea how to find and fix the Web page vulnerability that allowed...

Django Users Group London meetup, 19th of May. The inaugural meeting of DJUGL will be on the 19th of May at the Capital Radio building in Leicester Square, sponsored by GCap Media. Three...

SourceForge Allows OpenID Logins. Excellent—SourceForge is the kind of site that I log in to infrequently enough to always forget my password (and indeed username) making OpenID a great fit.

Consumption is also about choice. Tom Armitage’s thoughtful response to Clay Shirky’s Web 2.0 talk on television as “cognitive surplus”.

Django’s ORM is, in my opinion, the unsung gem of the framework. For the subset of SQL that’s used in most web applications it’s very hard to beat. It’s a beautiful piece of API design, and I...

so-you-wanna-see-an-image (via). WordPress.com use Amazon S3 to store images (presumably to save having to create a massive scalable redundant filesystem themselves) but the images are served via a...

Load Balancer Update. WordPress.com has switched from Pound to nginx for load balancing, resulting in a significant drop in CPU usage. I’ve been using nginx on my little VPS for over a year now...

Adobe and Industry Leaders Establish Open Screen Project (via). Talk about burying the lede... the real story is that Adobe are going to drop the license restriction that prevents other people from...

It’s Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can’t stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time. - Joel Spolsky

Core Techniques and Algorithms in Game Programming. Scarily detailed online book on games programming, including 2D and 3D graphics, AI, multiplayer network code, indoor and outdoor rendering,...

The Sea Forts (via). History and stunning photos of British World War II sea forts (kind of steel castles on stilts) seven and a half miles off the coast of Kent.

The Sea Forts (via). History and stunning photos of British World War II sea forts (kind of steel castles on stilts) seven and a half miles off the coast of Kent.