Recent Articles

Saturday, July 5 2008

• Some Rad Pics For You

  From Whalesalad.

  Found this one from a great blog, Trackosaurus Rex, it’s a chick with no pants and her fixie on the subway. Definitely some intense radness going on there. With this next one, I was a bit nervous about posting this due to the anti-semitic nature of it, but she’s totally got her bitchy “I’ll kill you, [...]

Friday, July 4 2008

• Easier Static Pages for CakePHP 1.2 Update

  From Snook.ca.

  So it seems that the old code I had didn't work in debug mode, although on the current CakePHP 1.2 RC2, I'm not even sure it works at all. However, I decided to take some time to revisit the code. Last time, I simply hacked up the missingAction and missingController calls and it felt kludgy. It looked kludgy. This time I took a closer look at how the dispatch was being handled. Daniel Hofstetter made mentioned how using the error handler seemed inappropriate since it's for handling errors. Unfortunately, the Dispatcher looks for a missing action or controller and if it can't find them, it sends it off to the AppError class well before anything else. As a result, it seems that overriding the AppError is really the approach that I want to take. I think you'll see, though, that the new code is more straightforward. It uses the constructor ...

• Yay! Fireworks!

  From cabel.name.

  Howdy, folks who somehow still read my blog!It's been a while! Let me tell you: a whole lot has happened since we last spoke, and I hope to catch you up with all of it.But first, it's the 4th of July. And you know what that means, right? Fireworks.Some Make It Pretty Clear Exactly What the Chinese Designer Thinks America Is LikeSome of Them Seem to Have... "Additional Meanings"Some Indicate the Designer Is Seriously Getting Hostile Towards the ConsumerSome Capitalize on the Hot Hot Internet Trend of 2008What Could Be More Unforgettable Than Dollar Bill Albert EinsteinFinally, Let's Celebrate Our Freedom the Traditional Way: Babies on TomatoesPostscript: On CompetitionWhen I was a kid, the mythical fireworks destination was spoken only in hushed tones behind the shadowiest of schoolyard simulated tugboat play-structures: Blackjack Fireworks. Located up in Vancouver, WA (where, like, anything is illegal, even, like, this firecracker that can blow ...

• Queue everything and delight everyone

  From Simon Willison.

  Queue everything and delight everyone. Les Orchard explains why I’ve been getting interested in queues recently: “One of the problems it seems most modern web apps face is the tendency to want to do everything all at once, and all in the same code that responds directly to a user.”

• A Look at the Presidential Candidates

  From Simon Willison.

  A Look at the Presidential Candidates. The Big Picture (the Boston Globe’s fantastic photojournalism blog) presents a fascinating collection of historical photos of Senators Barack Obama and John McCain.

• quipt

  From Simon Willison.

  quipt (via). Extremely clever idea: Cache JavaScript in window.name (which persists between page views and can hold several MB of data), but use document.referrer to check that an external domain hasn’t loaded the cache with malicious code for an XSS attack.

• Table Drag and Drop jQuery plugin

  From Simon Willison.

  Table Drag and Drop jQuery plugin. Drag and drop of table rows is a special case (jQuery UI doesn’t seem to support it)—this plugin works pretty well though.

• Independence Day: HTML5 WebSocket Liberates Comet From Hacks

  From Simon Willison.

  Independence Day: HTML5 WebSocket Liberates Comet From Hacks. The HTML5 spec now includes WebSocket, a TCP-style persistent socket mechanism between client and server using an HTTP handshake to work around firewalls. The Orbited comet implementation provides a WebSocket compatible API to existing browsers today, and can also act as a firewall/proxy between WebSocket and regular TCP sockets, allowing browsers to talk to things like XMPP servers using Orbited to bridge the gap.

• Show Us a Better Way

  From Simon Willison.

  Show Us a Better Way. The UK Government’s Power of Information Taskforce are running a mashup competition (a.k.a. “ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated”) with a £20,000 prize fund and gigabytes of brand new data and APIs. This is a great opportunity for the software community to demonstrate how important this kind of open data really is.

• Phasing out support for IE 6 across all 37signals products on August 15, 2008

  From Simon Willison.

  Phasing out support for IE 6 across all 37signals products on August 15, 2008. Interesting move considering BaseCamp is used for communicating with (often corporate) clients. It would be nice to see the browser stats behind the decision.

The Sites

• 456 Berea Street

• A List Apart

• April Zero

• Avalonstar

• BrokenLogic

• cabel.name

• Firewheel Design

• GarrettDimon.com

• Hicksdesign

• If..Else

• Jason Santa Maria

• JeffCroft.com

• JeffCroft.com Links

• My Django Code Snippets

• Ordered List

• Playground Blues (Nathan Borror)

• Rob Goodlatte

• ShaunInman.com

• Simon Willison

• SimpleBits

• Snook.ca

• Stuff I've Dugg

• Subtraction

• The Apple Blog

• The B-List

• Veerle's Blog

• Whalesalad

• Wilson Miner Live

• Wilson Miner's Bookmarks

Recent Links

• Sidebar Creative redesigns, too!

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  ‘Tis the season to redesign it seems. Again, lovely work (fantastic colour scheme + attention to detail) — but, what else would I expect from such a talented set of developers?

• Engadget

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  Engadget redesigns — much fresher and cleaner, I must say.

• Django Plugables

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  Yet another one of Bryan‘s astoundingly cool sites that “brings all of Django’s pluggable applications under one roof”. django-geo is on there too (as well as on github as of today, too) :D

• Archer

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  The one font I’ve been wanting literally forever — it’s here! I’ve so bought it.

• Everyblock — About our maps

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  Really interesting (and, thankfully, techie) post about how Everyblock put together their fantastic maps. I’ll certainly be checking out some of the stuff on there (I had no idea that there was this kind of stuff freely available as open-source — I was under the impression I would have to roll-my-own in future projects!)

• Datejs

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  A super-sexy looking Javascript library for handling dates (and times) in all sorts of nifty ways. I’ll certainly be using this soon.

• Django People

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  Simon Willison’s blog entry alerted me to this nice ‘village pump’ for the Django community. Very nice indeed.

• Flickr: Places

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  Wow. What a stunning piece of web-apperry. I know I haven’t been posting a terrible lot in the past 6 months, but I just had to post this. Some may know that Flickr is probably my only web-site-addiction; I thought it was cool when they added geotagging, but this is just… an über-sick mashup of all the data around a place. Oh, and check out how heavily my photos feature where I used to live!