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Targetting CSS at IE5
Tantek has created/discovered a new CSS hack, the Mid Pass Filter. This filter allows you to write CSS rules that will only be applied by IE 5 and IE 5.5 for Windows. This is great news, as those are the browsers with the broken box model (provided you trigger standards mode in IE 6).
[... 104 words]Infinite Python Data Structures
Hans Nowak has been churning out some really interesting Python stuff recently. He’s been experimenting with Self style objects in Python (similar in many respects to objects in Javascript), developing Wax, a coder friendly wrapper around wxPython, working on a Python framework for writing text adventure games and most recently experimenting with streams in Python using generators.
[... 168 words]A better way of entering dates
The CreativityGoblin dropped in on me today, and as a result I’ve been tackling the challenge of entering dates in to a web application. In the past, I’ve used DHTML calendar widgets for this purpose (my favourite is Mishoo’s highly configurable, standards compliant JS Calendar) but while widgets like this have a great deal of “wow” factor I’m not convinced that they are the best entry mechanism when it comes to raw user speed. Today’s experiment was partially inspired by PHP’s strtotime function, which accepts a string in a wide variety of formats and converts it in to a time.
On CSS Remakes
I’m a bit late to the party on this one, but Paul Hammond’s open letter to “tableless” recoders caused quite a stir a few weeks back with its extensive list of reasons that recoding someone else’s site in CSS helps no one and can in fact have a negative affect on the CSS advocacy effort (the response to the article is summarised in his follow up post).
[... 356 words]Magazine styles in CSS
Mimicking Magazines (via techno weenie) is a nice set of CSS styled paragraphs inspired by the design of Cosmopolitan. They resize well thanks to intelligent use of ems for sizing instead of pixels.
Master of Fine Arts in Software
Richard P. Gabriel’s proposal for a Master of Fine Arts in Software looks like it’s getting some serious consideration from the University of Illinois (via Sam Buchanan). The idea of programming as a creative art has been around for a long time, so teaching it in this way is in some ways a logical progression. Personally I’m intrigued by the focus on reading other people’s code—“the work of masters”. This is something that been sadly lacking in my BSc course at Bath. Aaron Swartz started a collection of links to Quality Software last year, but other than that I don’t know of any resources dedicated to highlighting “classic” code that deserves to be studied.
mod_python introduction
Introducing mod_python by Gregory Trubetskoy. One of my biggest problems with mod_python is that documentation outside of the mod_python manual is pretty hard to come by. This article is more of an executive overview than a tutorial, but anything that adds to the overall body of knowledge out there concerning mod_python has to be a good thing. I’m hoping to write some material on mod_python best practises at some point in the near future, but I have to work out what they are first. Luckily the project has an active and very helpful mailing list.
Outlook not so good
Yesterday, the Half-Life 2 source code was leaked (all 100 MB of it). Today comes the news from Valve that the leaked version is indeed the real thing, and that the leak was almost certainly the result of keystroke recorders installed remotely on Valve machines using a buffer overflow in Outlook’s preview pane.
[... 225 words]The Philosophy of Ruby
The Philosophy of Ruby is the first part of Artima’s interview with Yukihiro Matsumoto (aka Matz), creator of the Ruby language. The interview touches on the philosophical differences between Python and Ruby, in particular Python’s preference for having one obvious way of doing things:
[... 245 words]Balancing Act
Balancing visual and structural complexity in interaction design (via Column Two) is an interesting article that shows how over-simplifying a design can harm usability rather than helping it.
[... 151 words]Designing for Colour Blindness
Dave Shea is running a series on designing for colour blindness: parts one and two are already available. I’ve found the Colorblind Web Page Filter useful in the past as a tool for understanding the problems faced by colour-blind users.
Alarm Bell Phrases
Alarm Bell Phrases on Ward’s Wiki are just great. As with all links to the Wiki though, be warned: click too many links and hours of your life will inexplicably vanish...
AdSense Backlash
I guess it really was too good to be true. The AdSense backlash has begun, with Eric Thauvin’s dismissal from the scheme for “invalid clicks” prompting Russell Beattie to take a good look at the AdSense terms and conditions—which have some pretty nasty twists in them. The plot has thickened today with Google adding a new term prohibiting users from issuing any press release or mak[ing] any public statement about the subject matter of this Agreement
. What’s that about?
A better definition of Metadata
Ned Batchelder: Metadata is nothing new. Ned includes a far better definition of metadata than the standard “data about data” phrase:
[... 77 words]Good Gifts
Some friends of the family have created a brilliant charitable solution to the problem of buying a gift for someone who already has everything. The Good Gifts Catalogue sells products such as a New leash of life for homeless dogs, Ropes for monkeys living in zoos and many other cleverly titled charitable packages. The full price of every item ordered is donated to the supported charity and the recipient of the gift gets a keepsake card describing the gift given on their behalf. My favourite item from the catalogue has to be this one:
[... 160 words]Battling comment spam
It’s a sad state of affairs when you come back to your blog after a week elsewhere and have to add another 56 domains to your blacklist. I’m actually getting more comment spam than legitimate comments now—this is becoming more than just a minor nuisance. I’m considering a number of improvements, including adding a moderation queue to comments on entries posted more than a month ago, disabling the comment form if the referral is a search engine (as per Russell Beattie’s suggestion) and adding some kind of wildcard support to the blacklist file.
[... 114 words]“Interactive Tabular Data”
Just spotted in a comment by Drew McLellan on Russell Beattie’s Notebook:
[... 147 words]Auto-complete text boxes
There’s a great new article up on Sitepoint describing a technique for adding auto-complete functionality to normal HTML text input fields using Javascript. The code uses a whole bunch of browser-specific code, but it has to thanks to the unconsistent ways in which different browsers handle text selection ranges. Unfortunately the article doesn’t actually provide a demo of the code in action, so I’ve posted one here. It’s a very nice effect.
The pirate’s code
So, now that “talk like a pirate” day has sadly come to an end, it’s time to reveal the five minute code hack that rendered my front page semi-legible for the best part of a day. It was actually pretty simple:
[... 260 words]New virus?
I don’t usually get more than 5 or 6 spams a day, but today I’ve been hammered with an additional 7 emails with executable attachments claiming to be the “latest critical patch” from Microsoft. The emails are HTML formatted and make a pretty convincing rendition of a Microsoft.com page, so I can see how less savvy internet users could easily fall for them. Is this yet another virus outbreak? I make that the third in as many weeks.
Aaaaarr
It be International Pirate Day, ya scurvy landlubbers. Avast and be merry, for the day is young and the wenches plentiful. And remember t’chat up line of the day: Prepare to be boarded!
[... 45 words]Dive Into Python reborn
Sweet. Mark Pilgrim is working on Dive Into Python again, funded by a dead tree publisher for publication in 2004 (hopefully). The free version will stay available as well. I’ve always preferred reading paper to reading a screen so I’m definitely down for a copy.
[... 135 words]“sexeger”[::-1]
Via Ned Batchelder, an article on Reversing Regular Expressions from Perl.com. Otherwise known as Sexeger, these offer a performance boost over normal regular expressions for certain tasks. The basic idea is pretty simple: searching backwards through a string using a regular expression can be a messy business, but by reversing both the string and the expression, running it, then reversing the result far better performance can be achieved (reversing a string is a relatively inexpensive operation). The example code is in Perl, but I couldn’t resist trying it in Python. The challenge is to find the last number occurring in a string.
[... 384 words]Google conspiracy theories
Microdoc News have a poorly researched story suggesting that Google have been engineering their search results to favour their own properties:
[... 582 words]Interactive Python
I adore the Python interactive interpreter. I use it for development (it’s amazing how many bugs you can skip by testing your code line by line in the interactive environment), I use it for calculations, but recently I’ve also found myself using it just as a general tool for answering questions.
[... 983 words]Don’t delete.me
Paul Sowden is the blogger who inspired me to start my own blog over a year ago. He’s restarted his blog at a new domain: delete.me.uk. Let’s hope the new site doesn’t live up to its name. Oh, and be sure to view source for Paul’s own special brand of minimalist valid HTML 4.
New content management blog
Ideas in Technology and Publishing is a great new blog covering content management, XML and other publishing related technologies. It’s less than a month old so it’s still possible to read through the archives in full, which I’ve just done and recommend to anyone with an interest in content management.
Curious emails
There follow two of the weirdest emails I have ever received through my contact form. The first is a fascinating rant against standards compliant client side scripting:
[... 288 words]Python for teaching mathematics
Kirby Urner provides some great examples of how Python can be used as an aid to understanding mathematics on the marketing-python mailing list. I particularly liked this demonstration of Pascal’s triangle using Python generators:
[... 139 words]