Entries
Filters: Sorted by date
Prolog links
For my future reference, here are some useful Prolog sites I found over the past few days while working on my (now complete) Prolog coursework:
Vampire ecologies
Via Stuart’s latest catchup, a scientific explanation of the Vampire Population Ecology of Sunnydale.
Java interfaces explained
While browsing through Kasia’s Java Archives I came across this gem explaining why interfaces are such a useful feature of Java:
[... 133 words]YAML
I forget quite how I got there, but the other day I found myself reading about YAML—YAML Ain’t Markup Language. It looks really interesting. YAML aims to be an easily human readable format for storing and transferring structured data—so far, so XML. Where it differs from the IT world’s favourite buzzword is that YAML is specifically designed to handle the three most common data structures—scalars (single values), lists and dictionaries. Here’s a sample (taken from the official specification):
[... 288 words]Remembering passwords
Via Scott, an article with some great tips on remembering your passwords. It includes the following vitally important tip:
[... 273 words]Mark goes XFML
Mark Pilgrim has discovered XFML. He provides an excellent description of the standard, but fails to mention XFML’s most powerful ability; sharing metadata. Here’s how it works:
[... 225 words]Coursework complete
Coursework finished. It still has some niggling bugs but, as a group, we have agreed to stick them in a “known issues” list and forget about them.
Taking a break
Coursework continues, but I’m taking a quick break to blog the fact that Tony Bowden has changed the CSS style for blockquotes on Understanding Nothing. This may not be earth shattering news, but considering Tony’s blogging technique (entries frequently consist of large blockquotes) and previous blockquote style (grey italic text) the new format makes an excellent blog a great deal more readable.
No updates for a while
It’s coursework crunch time. Deadline is Thursday, we have an application that works but doesn’t work (if you get what I mean) and it looks like I will be spending the next few days immersed in Java. Fun fun fun.
This year’s Demotivators
This year’s collection of Demotivators are out (via Doc Searls). I think my favourite is Motivation.
XML security on SitePoint
Getting Started with XML Security is a SitePoint article of epic proportions. I had never really looked at any of the XML security applications but this article appears to cover the lot.
Why computer books suck
Why Computer Books Suck. The principle argument seems to be that most authors get burned by their first experience and avoid writing further books, leading to the bulk of computer books being written by newbies. One of my long term ambitions is to write a book on a geeky topic—I haven’t been put off yet, but the prospect does seem slightly less appealing.
The evolution of PHP
Via ReadingEd, an interesting article on the Object Oriented Evolution of PHP by Zeev Suraski (the Ze in Zend). As well as a history of PHP’s OO support, the article provides some tasty snippets of information as to improvement to look forward to in PHP 5. Personally I can’t wait for the objects to default to passing by reference, but the exception handling is going to be very nice as well:
[... 209 words]PostgreSQL 7.3
PostgreSQL Global Development Group Announces Version 7.3. I still haven’t had a play with PostgreSQL yet but everything I’ve heard has been positive. I’m sure PostgreSQL’s popularity would skyrocket if they made a Windows binary available—the ability to test scripts written in PHP and MySQL on a Windows desktop PC is the main reason I have stuck with MySQL rather than exploring PostgreSQL.
Blogdex spammed
Uh oh, looks like Blogdex has been spammed. At the time of writing a whole bunch of the links positioned at "12" were "PremiumDomains—www.somedomainhere.com—DOMAINS FOR SALE". This is a worrying precedent—many of the services we bloggers thrive upon such as weblogs.com, blogdex and others are easy targets for spammers thanks to the open nature of the service they provide.
rel=“bookmark”
Mental note: add the rel="bookmark" attribute to my permalinks, as recommended by Tantek. I’d never realised the rel attribute could be applied to normal hyperlinks.
OSAF hire Robin Dunn
If you weren’t already exited about the OSAF, maybe it’s time you were. I just spotted on Mitch Kapor’s blog that they’ve hired Robin Dunn (of wxPython fame, and winner of the ActiveState 2002 Python award) on a 6 month contract to work on improvements to wxWindows and wxPython. They’ve also hired Mitchell Baker, Mozilla.org’s “Chief Lizard Wrangler” on a part time contract that helps fund her work on Mozilla while letting OSAF take advantage of her extensive experience of co-ordinating community open source efforts. Hiring Robin Dunn makes very good sense, seeing as the bulk of Chandler’s code will be written in Python with wxPython used for the front end. Any worries that Chandler might turn out to be vapourware have vanished from my mind—I can’t wait to see what they come up with.
XFML for Radio
Spotted on Guide to ease: Bill Kearney has written an XFML tool for Radio Userland. This sounds great—I’d love to see an example of a Radio blog that is using this.
Syndication is not publication
Mark Pilgrim pretty much single handedly killed the discussion thread on syndicating weblog content with XHTML started a few days ago by Anil Dash. Stuart’s reply to Mark’s post is definitely worth a read though.
Python as middleware
OpenEnterpriseTrends.com: Python Power: Growing Respect for an Open Source Integration Tool. Another excellent piece of Python advocacy, this time highlighting Python’s power and flexibility as a middleware tool to glue together varous large enterprise systems.
PHP training update
The aforementioned PHP training system was a mixed success. On the one hand, I discovered that trying to teach a room full of people is a lot tougher than I had expected (to cut a long story short, I stumbled through about five minutes of reiterating the same few points before all present agreed that the session would be best run using the ask-questions-when-you-get-stuck format). Luckily I had prepared some pretty comprehensive support material the night before. I’m chalking that one down to experience.
Coursework coursework...
No, I’m not dead—I’m just weighed under with coursework. Two large group projects and a whole bunch of personal pieces are conspiring to make me feel gulity whenever I load up a browser window. It’ll all be over by December the 17th thank Goodness. For the moment though I’m taking a well earned break to catch up on the goings on in the blogosphere over the past few days.
Nervous
No time to update tonight. I’m frantically putting together a 2 hour training course on HTML, PHP and mySQL which I shall be presenting tomorrow as my first ever experience of teaching a large(ish) group. Should be interesting.
[... 79 words]Validator documentation
It seems the W3C have made some changes to their beta validator’s XML output option. The bad news is that this has (temporarily) broken my web service interface, but the good news is that the feature is now documented on the W3C’s site. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to fix the web service interface in the near future, but it will remain a toy rather than a tool for as long as the validator’s interface has not been frozen.
CSS filter guide
Spotted on the Web Manager’s Weblog, centricle : css filters is a list of all of the current CSS browser hiding techniques (all 17 of them!) along with a table showing which hack will hide things from which browser. Best of all, the name of each workaround is a link which will pop open a new window testing the hack in your browser.
Syndicating blogs with XHTML
Anil Dash suggests using structured XHTML as a blog syndication format. Scott Andrew points out that this has semantic problems in that it would mean using the class attribute to add additional meaning to a document. I was going to say that this would be an ideal opportunity to mix different namespaces in one XML document (as described by Lachlan Cannon) but techno-weenie beat me to it.
Taxomita
XFMLManager, Peter Van Dijck’s XFML construction and navigation tool to which I have contributed various chunks of XML related code, has been renamed Taxomita and given a brand new site. Peter hopes to have a public beta out within the next few weeks. It also has a mailing list. Meanwhile, XFML has been cropping up all over the place even despite the current lack of software, with the most recent sighting occurring over at Bill Kearney’s Syndication News.
OWASP Security guide
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) have a free guide to building secure web applications, which covers a large range of common problems such as cross site scripting and SQL injection vulnerabilities. The report is a 60 page PDF and although I haven’t had time to go through it yet it looks like an excellent read.