Simon Willison's Weblog: sam-ruby

Quoting Alan Storm

2009-07-04T12:51:15+00:00

Yes, it'd be nice if everyone kept up to date on the progress of the various W3C working groups. They don't. There are a lot of people who asked what professional markup looked like and were told (right or wrong) that XHTML was the future. So they went ahead and learned XHTML, built their websites and chose watching a DVD or spending time with their kids over watching Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby do battle over Postel's Law. Now all of a sudden they're told XHTML is dead. Some wailing and gnashing of teeth is to be expected. What's needed is less "boy aren't I smarter than them" snideness, and more Hey, here's what's up.

— Alan Storm

Tags: alan-storm, html5, mark-pilgrim, postelslaw, sam-ruby, w3c, web-standards, xhtml, xhtml2

Sunsetting Quirks Mode

2008-01-23T14:56:44+00:00

Sunsetting Quirks Mode

Apparently proper standards support in IE (or at least the IE8 renderer) will be triggered by the HTML5 doctype, providing an alternative to those who don’t wish to pollute their markup with an IE-specific meta tag.

Tags: browsers, doctypes, html5, ie8, internet-explorer, sam-ruby, xuacompatible

Sam Ruby: Ruby 1.9 Strings - Updated

2007-12-29T19:34:01+00:00

Sam Ruby: Ruby 1.9 Strings - Updated

A follow up to yesterday’s post: Sam’s principle complaints about Ruby 1.9’s character encoding support were down to a bug which has now been fixed.

Tags: ruby19, sam-ruby, unicode

Quoting Sam Ruby

2007-12-28T19:05:01+00:00

I definitely like Python 3K's Unicode support better [...] In fact, I think I prefer Ruby 1.8's non-support for Unicode over Ruby 1.9's "support". The problem is one that is all to familiar to Python programmers. You can have a fully unit tested library and have somebody pass you a bad string, and you will fall over.

— Sam Ruby

Tags: python, rubi18, ruby, ruby19, sam-ruby, testing, unicode

Email addresses your OpenID via DNS

2007-09-30T21:36:27+00:00

Email addresses your OpenID via DNS

Sam Ruby has warmed to the idea of making e-mail addresses usable as OpenIDs via a DNS SRV record.

Tags: dns, email, openid, sam-ruby, srv

calendar.timegm()

2007-09-03T01:54:35+00:00

calendar.timegm()

An “unrelated but handy function” that converts a time.gmtime() in to a corresponding Unix timestamp. I’ve been hand-rolling this one for years; never thought to look in calendar.

Via Sam Ruby

Tags: calendar, datetime, python, sam-ruby, time, timezones, unixtimestamp

Sam Ruby: 2to3

2007-09-03T01:38:34+00:00

Sam Ruby: 2to3

Sam’s report on an attempt to port the Universal Feed Parser to Python 3.0. The 2to3 tool does most of the work, but it seems the unicode changes can be pretty tricky.

Tags: 2to3, feedparser, python, python3, sam-ruby, unicode

Inline SVG in MSIE

2007-05-04T19:29:14+00:00

Inline SVG in MSIE

Sam Ruby has a neat proof of concept that converts inline SVG (currently only the path element) to the Silverlight equivalent.

Tags: sam-ruby, silverlight, svg

OpenID for non-SuperUsers

2007-01-07T22:21:29+00:00

OpenID for non-SuperUsers

Sam Ruby explains the key concepts of OpenID that many first-time users tend to miss.

Tags: openid, sam-ruby

Unobtrusive OpenID

2006-12-28T21:00:08+00:00

Unobtrusive OpenID

Sam’s implementation passes association data in the URL rather than using sessions. I need to do that here.

Tags: openid, sam-ruby

Sam Ruby: REXML on Expat

2006-07-30T21:59:00+00:00

Sam Ruby: REXML on Expat

Sam does something frighteningly clever with continuations.

Tags: sam-ruby

Sam Ruby: Sincerest Form Of Flattery

2005-05-09T00:21:07+00:00

Sam Ruby: Sincerest Form Of Flattery

How Sam’s funky referral tracking works. I talked to Ping about a similar system at SxSW.

Tags: sam-ruby

Wiki Spam Update

2005-02-27T17:18:14+00:00

Wiki Spam Update

Sam Ruby suggests blocking changes that add 10 or more new links.

Tags: sam-ruby

Sam Ruby: Copy and Paste

2004-09-23T22:22:53+00:00

Sam Ruby: Copy and Paste

This character encoding glitch has bitten me more times than I care to say.

Tags: sam-ruby

Sam Ruby: Electronic Forgery

2004-08-23T14:54:38+00:00

Sam Ruby: Electronic Forgery

A nice, simple explanation of the collision in MD5.

Tags: sam-ruby

Sam Ruby: DÃ©tente

2004-05-29T19:53:02+00:00

Sam Ruby: DÃ©tente

Absolute required reading for anyone with an interest in syndication.

Tags: sam-ruby

Sam Ruby: Learning to Rest

2003-12-11T00:52:22+00:00

Sam Ruby: Learning to Rest

Every time Sam talks about Rest my eyes begin to cross over

Tags: sam-ruby

The Verbosity of Echo

2003-07-02T16:24:10+00:00

Sam Ruby has called for people to start experimenting with the current (very early) Echo example feeds, and the response has been pretty impressive; check out these feeds from Joel Spolsky, Phil Ringnalda and Mark Pilgrim. Now that Echo has progressed to a stage where there are concrete feeds to examine, I have some serious concerns over the verbosity of the format. As they stand, Echo feeds contain a lot of duplicated information. Considering that the default behaviour of aggregators is to poll a feed for updates once an hour, any unnecessary information in the feed itself is going to have a very real monetary cost in terms of burnt bandwidth.

I've posted some further thoughts on this subject in Sam Ruby's comments, but I think the Echo development community need to spare some thought for the size of the feed. I've seen the justification before that requiring elements rather than making them optional makes it easier to write Echo implementations and I agree that this is a worthwhile consideration, but I think the trade-off in terms of additional bandwidth costs needs to be given a higher priority.

To that end I've proposed a small alteration to Echo to remove redundant author information from entries. If you are following the development of Echo I encourage you to take a look.

On a related note, this Java blogger has some interesting thoughts on the WikiNature (or lack there-of) of the Echo Wiki.

Tags: sam-ruby

Lively discussion on SOAP

2003-04-04T14:54:21+00:00

If you get the basic idea of web services but are still looking to get your head around SOAP (I know I am) the lively discussion currently taking place in Sam Ruby's comment section looks like a great place to start.

Tags: sam-ruby, soap

Spell check in web applications

2003-03-08T17:23:17+00:00

Sam Ruby has enabled spell checking for the preview comment tool on his blog. I wonder how it works... I've lost track of the scripting language Sam uses for Intertwingly (PHP? Python? Perl?) but I know PHP can be compiled with support for the Pspell module.

Sam's user interface is pretty neat - misspelled words are marked up with a span, underlined in dashed red and have suggested spellings listed in the span's title attribute. Theoretically, it should be possible to build a javascript right-click menu offering alternatives instead (preferably dynamically generated from the list of words in the title attribute using the DOM). Actually modifying the preview textarea text based on the menu selection would be quite a lot harder - it could be done with a simple search-and-replace operation, but doing so might change other words with the same "incorrect" spelling without the user realising.

It would be fun to integrate something like this with a rich text editor, such as the recently announced htmlArea 3.0 that works with Mozilla 1.3b as well as IE (more information here).

Tags: sam-ruby

Python power

2003-03-06T02:39:05+00:00

Sam Ruby's ultra-simple 3-paned aggregator is a great example of the power of high level scripting languages. Using the wxPython cross-platform GUI toolkit and Mark Pilgrim's ultra-liberal RSS Parser it provides a full application in a mere 107 lines of (highly readable and maintainable) code.

Linked to from Sam's comments are Mark Pilgrim's thoughts on OPML from April last year. I'm not too keen on OPML's "invent attributes as you need them" attitude but I am intrigued by Dave Winer's thoughts on using OPML as the basis for a massive, distributed directory of the web - a sort of decentralised dmoz.

Tags: mark-pilgrim, opml, python, rss, sam-ruby

You know me

2003-01-20T23:19:36+00:00

Dave Winer: The "You Know Me" Button. Dave hates posting comments on blogs and then having to check back constantly to see if anyone has replied (I do too). Sam Ruby's solution is to provide the comments as a separate RSS feed for each of his entries, but Dave wants something more automatic that won't clog up his aggregator. Dave's new proposal is intruiging to say the least. When you sign up for an account with a discussion forum you have the option of configuring a link to an "identity server" able to respond to a specific protocol. Once this has been done, the discussion software "pings" your identity server with your username and a message whenever someone responds to one of your posts.

The idea as it stands is great, but at the moment it fails to address discussion forums that do not require the user to create an account (many blog comment systems for example). These could probably be served by a single text field asking for your optional You-Know-Me address. The problem that arises then is that of authentication - what's to stop someone maliciously signing you up for comment threads without your consent? The spectre of spam can't be too far over the horizon.

Maybe a solution would be to turn subscription in to a two-step process - first you tell the comment thread your details and have it ping your identity server, then later on you visit the web application running on the identity server and "approve" that subscription. That should defend against unwanted subscriptions, but it also adds another layer of complexity to what should be an automatic process. You would also have to do this for every unauthenticated thread you subscribed to (I imagine that authenticated account based subscriptions such as the ones Dave describes in his initial article would handl auto-subscribing you to all threads you participate in).

I have no doubt that someone will come up with solutions to any issues with Dave's system, and I look forward to seeing the spec develop. Once a basic protocol has been laid down the possibilities are huge - I-Know-You to RSS/email/Jabber gateways are an obvious extension that could be great fun to hack around with. It's been a while since I've messed around with web services and my XML-RPC library could do with an update.

Tags: dave-winer, sam-ruby

PythonCard scriptlets

2002-10-27T10:58:01+00:00

Kevin Altis on scripting applications written in PythonCard:

The entire object model of a PythonCard application is exposed, so if an app doesn't have the feature you want, you can probably extend it with a short "macro" in Python. All scripts are run in the shell, so they share the shell namespace and thus scripts can share variables since the namespace doesn't go away until the application is closed.

Kevin calls these scripts "scriptlets" and has posted an example scriptlet that can insert the current date and time straight in to any text file opened with the PythonCard codeEditor.

Sam Ruby was recently quoted as stating the following over on Jon Udell's blog:

While Java and C# battle over who is the rightful successor to C++, it is quite possible that a language like Python (or, dare I say it, Ruby) will ultimately be the one that wins out.

This is an interesting train of thought. Scripting languages such as Python undeniably lead to faster development times (no compile cycle, less book keeping syntax to worry about) and as computers continue to get faster and cheaper the overhead associated with these languages becomes less and less important. Kevin's concept of an application with an exposed object model that can be tweaked by the user is a powerful idea, and one that could bring real benefits; Python is not a difficult language to program in, and applications which can be scripted easily can become very popular (just look at the mIRC community for an example of that). Unfortunately the ability to script an application also leads to inherent security flaws, as have been seen with VBScript and Microsoft Office - although in the case of Office most of the problems stem from the ability to add macros to individual documents (there are surprisingly few mIRC security alerts despite the in built scripting engine).

Tags: jon-udell, python, sam-ruby, pythoncard

Sam Ruby joins up

2002-10-03T20:16:10+00:00

Sam Ruby has pingback. Ping!

Tags: pingback, sam-ruby