The B-List: Latest links

Aaron Sorkin Conjures a Meeting of Obama and Bartlet

2008-09-22T00:09:50Z

Because the idea of American exceptionalism doesn’t extend to Americans being exceptional. If you excelled academically and are able to casually use 690 SAT words then you might as well have the press shoot video of you giving the finger to the Statue of Liberty while the Dixie Chicks sing the University of the Taliban fight song. The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it.

Amen.

Via Maura

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AN IRRELEVANT LICENSE IS PRESENTED TO YOU FREE-OF-CHARGE ON STARTUP

2008-09-14T16:59:13Z

Let’s all sit around and compile a list of browsers which are more Free than Mozilla® Firefox®.

(“Mozilla” and “Firefox” are registered trademarks of the Mozilla Foundation. This site is not in any way affiliated with the Mozilla Foundation or the Mozilla Corporation.)

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1965 World Series

2008-08-18T00:25:16Z

Twins won the first two games, Dodgers came back to win the series in seven, on the strength of two shutouts from Sandy Koufax (who famously didn’t pitch Game 1 because it fell on Yom Kippur).

Suck it, trivia dude at the Bottleneck.

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Suggesting solutions we don't use ourselves

2008-08-17T06:31:45Z

Okay, color me clueless. Why do we think other people will be jumping up-and-down over the opportunity to use stuff that we personally find a total bore?

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Creating Social Networks Few Want

2008-08-17T06:27:26Z

By providing multiple levels at which our readers can engage, we create that noise that is seemingly so important in order to justify the worth of our spaces. What we’re finding, though, is that based on such activity, the noise level may increase, but it increases as noise, rather than the thoughtful comments that inspired our original interest, years ago.

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"Default" templates in Django

2008-08-05T17:12:57Z

We use this technique all the time at World Online to avoid what would otherwise be a cumbersome job of producing lots of templates over and over again, and I’m glad to finally have a good writeup to point people to.

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Automating tests in Django

2008-07-24T00:44:48Z

My co-worker Eric wrote a stupendously useful middleware that translates a live in-browser session of interacting with your application into a file whose contents are suitable for unit-testing the application’s behavior.

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Changeset 4673

2008-07-21T19:48:48Z

Bookmarking one of my (biased) all-time favorite Django commits, to go in my collection of “insanely scary problems solved by tiny patches”.

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Any lawful device: 40 years after the Carterfone decision

2008-06-26T00:49:52Z

The great enterprise of telecommunications is no better than our right to participate in it as individuals.

Amen.

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Alice's NNTP Server

2008-06-25T22:17:34Z

I went over to the Commissar, said “Commissar, you got a lotta damn gall to ask me if I’ve rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I’m just sittin’ here, sittin’ on the group H bench ‘cause you want to know if I’m *moral* enough to join a Company to grep mail, burn electronic books, and censor feeds after bein’ an NNTP hacker.” He looked at me, said “Kid, we don’t like your kind, and we’re gonna send your .newsrc down to California…”

Utterly brilliant.

Via reddit

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The basics of creating a tumblelog with Django

2008-06-24T03:51:25Z

Ryan explains the details of a popular (and, in my opinion, probably the most robust) pattern for doing tumblelog-style streams of content with Django.

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jiffy-web

2008-06-23T10:31:10Z

Speaking of performance…

Even comes with a Firebug extension. Too bad I can’t install it due to brain-dead Mozilla policies.

Via Ajaxian

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ssh-keygen, the web-based SSH Key Generator

2008-06-23T04:56:29Z

I really, truly thought this was a sick joke. And then I saw tutorials linking to it as an easy way to generate keys.

In all seriousness: how did the people who think this is a good idea manage to survive into adulthood?

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Django and Relativity

2008-06-20T19:06:07Z

Rob shares some useful tips on keeping hard-coded filesystem paths out of your settings, something I do all the time. A useful companion to this is the documentation for Python’s “os.path” module.

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Are you ready to celebrate?

2008-06-19T20:18:51Z

This is potentially the coolest use of Twitter EVAR.

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