Interesting applications of phone technology here; see also this article on the iTunes/Starbucks integration in today’s New York Times, which touches on similar issues but shows that American companies haven’t yet managed to pull it off successfully:
Mr. Entner said the sticking point on the growth of the phone as a full-service payment device had less to do with technology, which is adequate, and more to do with business questions. He said that all the potential participants — phone carriers, retailers, credit card companies, music labels — wanted a cut of the action, and it was not clear how the money for over-the-air payments would be divided.
User account breaches are inevitable. We should take that in to account when designing our applications.
Amen.
The initial creation of another language-specific Django user group; if you’re a Catalan speaker, or live in Catalonia, go join up :)
(Via Mark Garcia)
I’ve run up against this a couple times now, without much luck from some of the suggestions. Fairly annoying because iTunes doesn’t have this issue, and so far the only way I’ve been able to clear it is with a full wipe and re-sync of the iPod.
Who would have thought that you could create a beautiful fugue from a Britney Spears song?
Who, indeed?
Jeff explores the tricky idea of expanding the discussion of web standards to include acknowledgment of things that happen before any pointy brackets get involved, and so raises the question of what exactly the “structure” of the data is; as someone who daily develops applications which use a whole lot more output formats than just HTML, I really appreciate this sort of holistic view of how the web works.
Also be sure to read Wilson’s comment. It’d be great if he had a blog or something where he could regularly write such insightful stuff ;)
This is pretty much the gold standard for hyphenation by computers.
(Via reddit)
A well-considered look at a (debatably too-) ubiquitous typeface.
(Via John Gruber)
In the United States, various government agencies follow private activities in outer space, but the bulk of the oversight comes through the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Space Transportation.
It makes me incredibly happy that we have such a thing. Now if somebody would just finish inventing my personal rocket pack…
Whoever’s behind this wins the Internets. Wondering if “LOL of Cthulhu” would have been a better name, though.
If the “advanced” pole of your threat model is “rainbow tables”, stop working on your social shopping cart calendar application right now: I can’t trust you with my Reddit karma score, let alone my credit card number.
(Via Jeff Atwood)
Static typing guarantees that you’re using consistent types throughout your program. It does not guarantee that this consistent code isn’t doing something entirely braindead.
That’s how they sprint on the other side of the pond…
Django tickets for the “documentation” component. Trying to knock off as many of these as I can during the sprint today.
I’d always wondered why lftp, which is hands-down the best FTP/SFTP client I’ve ever used, always chewed up so many cycles even when idle. Now I know, and — a quick reconfigure/recompile later — now it doesn’t do that anymore.
Middleware and template tags for using the Babel internationalization system in Django; Babel offers a number of great enhancements to the basic gettext system, so this will come in awfully handy.
While Matt’s ability to discover useful data sources never ceases to amaze me, I can’t help wondering whether he really prefers watching the JSON feed over, oh, watching the actual game on his big fancy TV… ;)
It’s been coming for a long time, but it’s still sad to see it finally happen. I basically lived on k5 the first part of this decade, and I’m not sure that would have happened under the new scheme (though, to be fair, I did pony up for a Metafilter account when those opened up again).
Nice write-up of the process of finding a browser bug.
(Via reddit)
Can’t think of much more to add to this; I didn’t buy an iPhone when it first came on the market (and don’t plan to buy one anytime soon), but if I had this is about how I’d be feeling.
convicting someone on the basis of faulty software is a travesty that should not be allowed.
Amen.
Nice little improvement to the ever-popular paginator tag.
Jonathan responds to criticisms of Elixir by giving the people what they want. Well done.
Nice write-up of a couple classes for modeling SMS gateways/subscribers and sending messages. Storing a format string in the SMSGateway model and using that to generate the correct address is a neat trick.
(Via reddit)
A constructive writeup of why you’d want something other than the default Django ORM, and how to use SQLAlchemy instead. Amazingly for this debate, it appears to be free of any unnecessary name-calling.
But the slashing anecdote is from March 2006, which you recall is a period of greater girl-on-girl assaults than 2007, which makes it a horrible data point from which to project an increasing trend of vicious assaults.
I’m still extremely skeptical of the notion of a “portable” social network, but it’s nice to see people working on it.
Support for SQLAlchemy and Django is planned. Assuming the various folks working on MS-SQL support wrap up soon, this would give Django a pretty nice foothold in terms of supporting popular “enterprise” database solutions.
Why is it that the 19th century African villager will pick the right solution (you picked #2, right?) and the 21st century software developer will often go for something akin to solution #1?
Worth reading all the way through.
Already people have gotten as far as having Django initialized on Jython and serving the default page; that’s pretty impressive.
That’s “Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, KCB, DSO, JP, DL” to you.
If that’s not an impressive name, I don’t know what is.
(Via Garth T. Kidd)
This was incredibly handy for providing a commented SMF manifest and an SMF-integrated shell script.
AKA “how I got Apache, mod_python, PostgreSQL, and most of the other stuff I needed”.
Coolest. Poem. Ever
Luke’s work on forms is a must-read for anyone who cares about web usability.
Nice use of a custom auth backend; they’re one of my favorite little-known features of Django.