Utterly brilliant.
(Via Jacob)
Perhaps the most unfortunate IATA airport code ever.
You learn something every day; time to go re-read RFCs 1738 and 2396 again…
(Via Simon Willison)
Spot-on profile of Jeff Croft by Jeff Croft’s notorious cousin. As someone who knows and formerly worked with Jeff Croft, I can attest to its accuracy in portraying Jeff Croft.
Google, are you picking up the suggested keyword here?
Interesting.
Nicely-dne visualization.
(Via information aesthetics)
This is the sort of thing we need more of.
Though, to be honest, my first thought when I read the title was of Rule 34 and the fact that, probably, this is somebody’s fetish.
I never knew there was a name for this.
If you’re manually installing MySQLdb on Solaris (e.g., on Joyent’s shared hosting or Accelerators), you’ll need this patch.
I’ve prepared a clean version with corrected indentation because the original patch posted to Sourceforge got screwed up. To apply, download MySQLdb and unpack it, then:
cd MySQL-python-1.2.2
wget http://media.b-list.org/files/setup_posix.diff
patch -p0 < setup_posix.diff
python setup.py build
python setup.py install
And you’ll be good to go.
The Reform library attempts to provide a solid set of functions for encoding output for the most common context targets in web applications (e.g. HTML, XML, JavaScript, etc). The library also takes a conservative view of what are allowable characters based on historical vulnerabilities, and current injection techniques.
Implemented for eight common web-development languages, including Python.
The problem isn’t the capabilities of the device, or standards, or even operators, as much as we’d like to blame them for being the root of all evil. The problem is context.
Isn’t it always?
Nice write-up of a few things that people — at first — expect to work but which, on further reflection, don’t and shouldn’t.
Ceiling Cat sayz, i can has light?
This meme may finally have jumped the shark.
(Via danah boyd)
An absolutely fascinating write-up of a community of virtual pilots and virtual air traffic controllers who’ve built their own collection of scrupulously-authentic add-ons to Microsoft Flight Simulator. Money quote:
The amazing thing about VATSIM is that it works at all, since it is a completely non-commercial operation. From administration of the servers, to writing the software, to running the various virtual air traffic control authorities around the world, the entire thing is operated by volunteer effort. I think the secret to its success lies in both the dedication and friendliness of the participants. The community consists of people from all ages and walks of life, brought together by a shared passion for aviation.
Linking this because the author of the post doesn’t allow comments, but hopefully checks referers, and because this is a common problem people are going to run into.
The solution is to do what django.contrib.markup does with its textile filter:
force_unicode(textile.textile(smart_str(value), encoding='utf-8', output='utf-8'))
This makes use of the smart_str and force_unicode functions from django.utils.encoding, both of which are mentioned in Django’s Unicode documentation, and which are provided for pretty much this exact purpose.
Obligatory self-plug: template_utils trunk has supported this for a while (I had to Unicode-ify it when I did the re-launch of this site).
Our own David Ryan is mingling with the news world’s élites, and incidentally picking up an AP “online convergence” award for our special feature on the legacy of coal mining in southeastern Kansas. Not to toot our own horns or anything, but I think it’s pretty cool :)
A good article (with a nice plug for Adrian), but the comments reiterate some important points which — having had a while to see and work with a number of news operations — match up with my experience:
Neither of these bodes well for the future of the industry; newspapers need to sit up and pay attention, or their worst fears of irrelevance are going to come true.
Teenager issued a speeding ticket has GPS in his car, which his parents use to ensure he’s obeying traffic laws. Result:
The family says, based on the data, that Malone was going the posted speed limit of 45 mph on Lakeville Highway the morning of July 4 at virtually the same time and location where a Petaluma motorcycle officer used radar to cite the teen for going 62 mph.
Bonus points: the teenager’s father is a retired sheriff’s lieutenant.
This sort of thing is probably going to become more and more common as GPS works its way further into daily life.
(Via Fark)
Nice example of what can be done with a little typographically-oriented CSS
(Via Matt Croydon)
Amazing music visualizations.
In logic there is a fallacy known as equivocation, where an argument relies on multiple different meanings of the same word in order to convince the listener that the conclusion is correct.
Here we have a live example: “refactoring” is used in multiple different ways, varying from “automatic renamings performed by an IDE” to “adaptations to changing client requirements”, and the result is to make the entire argument suspicious.
(Via reddit)