Things Caches Do
An illustrated re-introduction to HTTP caching with a focus on gateway caches and their potential benefits within the context of modern, dynamic web applications.
Introducing Rack::Cache
Real HTTP caching for Ruby web apps.
Git Down!
I'll be doing a quick talk on git-sh(1) tomorrow night at the first ever
Git Down!, in San Francisco.
Mass Revocation
On taking the DRM authorization servers down.
New Gig: Songbird
2,484 miles later, I find myself in San Francisco working, for the first time, on something I really love.
Moving Past BlueCloth
Fast Markdown libraries for Ruby: two for the price of one.
The Thing About Git
It’s as though every other version control system I've ever used was created by people who were really into version control and Git was created by people who were really into hacking.
The Tech Press Has Come Along Way
That’s doodoo, baby.
JavaScript Based Code Prettification
As seen on Google Code’s new and improved source browser.
Administrative Debris
“I hold that simplicity is the most important attribute of design,” I say. To which Tufte would reply, “No, you don’t.”
So, What Does "HREF" Stand For, Anyway?
Today it occurred to me that, after a little over ten years of basic fluency in HTML, I have absolutely no idea why the href attribute is named “href”. Why not “url”, “link”, or even just “ref”?
On The Use of Code in Weblog Titles
So you've decided to start a weblog and have a really clever idea for titling it based on a snippet of code you find particularly novel. Rad!
GNU is killing Solaris
I can’t think of single piece (package?) of software I use, admire, and depend on more than GNU Coreutils. Maybe Firefox. Maybe OpenSSH. Some days rsync(1).
GitHub: My Kind of Social Software
Fork me!
PrinceXML Is Extremely Impressive
I didn’t know it was possible to build such nice closed-source programs.
Browser Usage
I've long thought that the percentage of visits going to Firefox in my site statistics were oddly high. It turns out it’s pretty much in line with numbers put out by both Bob Sutor and Joe Gregorio…
Firefox 3.0 Native Mac Theme Lands On Trunk
Firefox 3.0’s new default Mac theme showed up today in the current trunk nightly (Minefield). The theme is very similar to Safari’s.
Nigiri-zushi Hg
The Environmental Protection Agency are such alarmists.
IE8 To Make Tender Chickens
“The MIT guy did not like this solution because it was not the right thing.”
Full Page Zoom Is For Sissies
Did I ever tell you about the guy that spent the better part of a day making his site’s layout entirely em based …
Help! The WS-* vs. REST Debate Has Been Hijacked By People Who Want To Have Logical Discussions About Actual Real World Issues!
A call to arms.
Why I'm Pining for PDF Support in Firefox/Gecko
What I'd like to do is run Firefox/Gecko on the server. It would load up the report, render it with the print stylesheet and then output the PDF. The concept is not unlike khtml2png or webkit2png but instead of outputting a raster image, it would output a PDF: gecko2pdf, if you will.
Speaking of, "lying through their teeth..."
Sanjiva Weerawarana is such a tool.
Simplifying Web Framework Deployment on Shared Hosting
On Dreamhost freaking out because they can’t get Rails deployed reliably.
Google Docs Basically Sucks
The quality of the generated HTML is poor and we need to be able embed custom stylesheets … and do something about those nasty URLs!
Bazaar Project Templates
Cheap branches make for new uses.
Lesson #5
A long overdue request for maintainers on two potentially important Python projects.
Rails and Scaling with Multiple Databases
It’s not Rails’s problem.
Too much politics for programmers
Ian compares Pylons and TurboGears and makes a few interesting general observations along the way.
WS-* == Windows Services Dash Star?
It’s that bad.
Shysters
Talk about “close to home”
A Healthy Venus
On launching the Health Benefit News River.
"Helpful" Thumbnails
Wherein Snap.com impresses me a great deal by allowing their service to be centrally disabled.
This word - "Web" - I do not think it means what you think it means.
Somebody pinch me; this must be a nightmare.
Virtue
Some props for Mr. Governor.
JRuby w/ Full Rails Support in February... Of 2007?
Charles Nutter on the possibility of a Rails support announcement in February 2007.
Digg Scares Me (403 Go Away!)
403 Go Away!
The Pending Ruby/Java Co-op
A prediction piece on the possibility of a Ruby backed coup d'état on the JVM and what that might mean to the pragmatic web developer.
Five Things You Don't Know About Me
Another casualty in the war against blog games.
Parallels Makes IE Testing Suck Less, Melts Power Cord
A look at the new Coherence Mode feature in Parallels desktop.
Java in The Land of Make Believe
What the GPL could have accomplished (and may well still).
The REST Dialogues
The REST / Web Arch. crowd falls back to its secret weapon in the fight for mankind: The Dialogue.
Shackled But Free
My best attempt at saying something nice about Sun’s GPLing of Java, even if a bit grudgingly.
XML Templating in Python Evolves
A brief history of the Kid templating language and an endorsement for the next generation of XML-based templating: Genshi.
Vox Populi
A paper by Sir Francis Galton first published in the March 7, 1907 issue of the scientific journal, NATURE. The paper provides what appears to be the first solid explanation for why Google’s ranking algorithm, not to mention the form of government we've come to know as “democracy”, are so capable.
Gosling v. Greenspun
On the relationship between the “Black Hole Theory of Design” and “Greenspun’s tenth Rule of Programming”.
Here's a Nickel, Kid
The Dilbert cartoon referenced in Neil Stephenson’s “In The Beginning was The Command Line”
Best 500 Page Eva!
Reddit Broke (Sorry).
Top.app
MacOS X: How to turn textmode tools into first class applications. Mutt.app, Vim.app, Irssi.app, Top.app, etc.
analogies.google.com
Need an analogy but don’t have the time to actually think of one your self?
Web Based Site Monitoring Tools
Some praise for Site24x7.
I Hate This Place
This place is everything a weblog should not be.
The Zen of Microformats
How to understand what those barbarians are doing over there and why your going to keep on hearing about it.
Wasting time in #ruby-lang
Time Travel vs. ESP
Motherhood and Apple Pie
The axioms of web architecture and an invitation for big vendors to understand them.
Announcing lesscode.org
lesscode.org goes live.
The Free Software Litmus Test
A quick test to see how hard-core you are.
Doh!
Adelphia blocks port 80.
IBM Poopheads: "LAMP Users Need to Grow Up"
That is to say, they don’t get it. This started out as a simple rant and turned into a decent sized essay on basic shared-nothing architecture and scaling down.
Cha-cha-cha-cha-changes...
A reflection of my time at Sterling Commerce, the value of boring, laws of the web, and more.
Who are they?
“… who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets…”
Why RedMonk Must Succeed
Praise for the anti-analyst firm analyst firm.
Roxio is Apple's Bitch
Software houses bowing to OS vendors never ceases to amaze me.
OS X Network Location Support From The Command Line
How to get command line apps to respect the OS X network location. A neat little hack exploiting symlinks and $0.
The Winer Decoder Ring
Dave missing Mark.
Turn HTML off completely in Mail.app
HTML mail is bad enough when it works – it’s intolerable when it’s as broken as in Apple’s Mail.app.
My last experience with amazon.com
For a little while anyway.
Such precision
Embracing brokeness.
Why I love Sean McGrath
“If you cannot think of 3 good reasons why dynamically typed programming languages have a role to play in this universe, you don’t want the job.”
On HTTP Abuse
And why we need more three-legged stools.
Not to bring up an old topic but..
Who Owns Your Browser revisited.
Python and Peak Oil
Everything has something in common on the blogosphere.
Insects and Entropy
How complexity killed the best bug ever created in the whole world.
The Battle of the Less Clueless
IronPython vs. JPython: who cares?
Web Services: what is "success" and how do we get there?
What I think success means with regards to “Web Services”.
What WS-* got wrong
It has nothing to do with the web.
Joshua's Rule
On the growing importance of del.icio.us.
Jonathon Schwartz on WS-Mess
The loyal opposition is growing in weird ways.
Kid 0.6
Template Inheritence, Match Templates (kind of like XSLT’s), cElementTree support, a refined Python API, documentation…
Netscape 8 - Setting the browser back two years
How to not understand the value of a web browser.
WS-Sandwich
Some thoughts on AMQ, the latest solution to all your problems.
Yahoo! Launches REST-based Web Services
Praise for Yahoo! as they launch an initial set of web style APIs.
Scary Rails vs Quixote Stats
Wherein we avoid a Python vs. Ruby flamewar by changing the subject to Object vs. RDMS persistence.
IBM redemption
I humbly retract my previous negative statements about IBM.
Fish, bad.
Just keep talking.
The Tool Vendor's Dilemma
A theory on why big vendors, big analyst houses, and the tech press want to sell you the worst possible solutions to your problems.
Web Dominated by J2EE?
The web as currently imagined by the tech. industry is quite different from the web that actually exists.
Tools for Democracy / Distributed Journalism
On using the web to co-ordinate massive grass-roots efforts quickly.
Cats
What the War In Iraq is really about.
Kid by Example
Kid 0.5 announcement with a couple of page fulls of example usage.
No Rails for Python?
What does Ruby on Rails have that we don’t and why?
Web Antipatterns Strikes Again
Video on the web stick sucks.
Getters/Setters/Fuxors
Python’s attributes are not Java’s getters/setters and why that’s a good thing.
Disproving Backward Time Travel (kind of)
If it is ever discovered, we would have known about it a long time ago.
IBM to Free Java - Next Week?
Coverage of an odd mailing list thread suggesting that IBM is gearing up to slap an F/OSS license on their Java compiler and runtime.
Experimental del.icio.us Posting Interface Thing Generator
Bringing gems from the del.icio.us mailing list to the masses.
ElementTree on the come-up
Why I prefer ElementTree to “standard” DOM APIs and why it’s sometimes better than libxml2.
Ross' Taint.. I mean, Tate.. I mean, Rawke!
Ross Burton builds the first real-world application using Kid Templates.
Kid 0.4
On changing from GPL to MIT, going after web-framework support, and simplifying as much as possible.
Knowledge and Power
They have more in common than I thought.
Watching people watch stuff at the Magic Kingdom
One of the many interesting anecdotes waiting for you in Neil Stephenson’s “In The Beginning Was The Command Line”
The Static Method Thing
A comparison of Java’s static methods and Python’s class methods.
Fedora Project Shaping Up
A report on what seems to be real forward progress in the Fedora project.
How I Explained REST to My Wife
It’s not a robot thing.
Blasphemy!
Alan Turing would sooo beat Linus Torvalds in arm wrestling and technologies no different.
But the world doesn't work that way
I miss Mark Pilgrim.
Transformation Templates in Kid
Trying to figure out a way of providing XSLT-like template matching in Kid.
Why isn't there a simple XSLT?
Why not extend XSLT to be easier instead of building a new template language?
The Day Tim Bray Saved Java
Tim seems to be working miracles over at Sun.
FC2 to FC3 upgrade with Yum
My notes on upgrading Fedora Core from 2 to 3 using the Yum package manager.
XML Pull-chaining with Python
Applying a chain of Python generators to achieve transformation of the XML infoset.
Is BoingBoing a Legal Honeypot?
BoingBoing as tractor-beam for litigation. Xeni says I'm on crack.
Kid 0.2 and a note on Template Design
This release is all about documentation.
In search of a Pythonic, XML-based Templating Language
How I decided to build Kid – the simple, pythonic, XML-based template language.
Hello Pythonosphere
How to get syndicated in Python-oriented news communities.
The factors that led them to choose IE..
Microsoft is so completely out of touch with reality it hurts.
Adam Bosworth, Sloppy KISSes, and WS-Mess
Adam Bosworth joins the Loyal WS-Opposition – minus the loyal part, perhaps.
Splice
A Python based weblog thing or something.
Java and Open Source
Why Java won’t even be considered for most types of F/OSS applications until they ease up on the license.
Got a gun
“I love God.”
Weapons and Coding
Wherein we predict that whoever decides to take dynamic languages seriously will win the interpreted bytecode market.
Web Antipatterns
A look at various ways people misunderstand the value of the web. If it’s not useful, don’t use it.
Dynamic Superclassing in Python
Danger’s my middle name.
Bosworth on WS-Mess
Adam Bosworth dumps on WSDL and hints at simple REST/HTTP interactions as being superior to WS-* in many ways.
Guido's 10-line Python Scripts
How they're different from mine.
How the other half lives
A report on meeting real life evil people.
Culture War
Some notes on Dan Hunter’s excellent work on Free Culture.
Cleanest Python find-in-list function?
There has to be a place for this in the standard library.
30 Pixels, 30 Lines
How Emacs is extremely productive and horribly slow at the same time.
Quick OS X (and Emacs) Keystroke Reference
Getting a feel for Emacs on OS X.
Python Inner Classes
Why are they there?
Del.icio.us Address-barlets
Using the address bar as a quick del.icio.us lookup tool
Persistent NFS Automounting Under OS X 10.3 (Panther)
… are possible with a little work and a lot of patience.
Who Owns Your Browser?
Are there restrictions on how local content can be modified (e.g. user stylesheets)? Should there be?
A Chat with ALICE
How I failed the Turing test.
Per Site User Stylesheets
A Firefox hack for styling specific sites using user stylesheets.
Why You Should Not Use Markdown
It’s too good to be true. Avoid anything this simple and elegant.
Things I Regret Saying
I am my own worst enemy.
Gmail as Mailing List Aggregator
A report on my experience using GMail for mailing list activity.
URLGrabber Project Page Up
URLGrabber is a file fetcher in Python that works with HTTP and FTP.
My First Yum Commit
Rock on.
IP Costs Millions of Information
How protecting “intellectual property” ends up destroying it.
Learning Python As You Go
I never would have imagined a language with so much power could be so easy to pick up.
Meet The Prez
Bush makes a complete ass of himself on Meet the Press.
Minimal System Backups with rdiff-backup and Yum
Some thoughts about a simple backup system that takes advantage of a package management system.
Firebird Extension / Theme RPMs
First post!