Links published in June 2008

23 links published in this month. See also: all links published in 2008, latest links.

Any lawful device: 40 years after the Carterfone decision

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

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

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

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

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

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?

This is potentially the coolest use of Twitter EVAR.

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The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond

Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed supreme importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or whole author of it.

Interesting to see this considering what I’m reading right now.

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Deletionist Morons

What got me involved was word that the Deletionist undead were shambling in the direction of _why’s entry. Oh, and by the way, apparently it’s somehow uncool that I entered the debate because I heard about it somewhere.

Remember, Tim: an AfD is for “Wikipedians”, not for people who actually know anything about the subject at hand.

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E-Media Tidbits

I have to ask: Why would anyone want this? Let alone pay any amount of money whatsoever for it? I’ve seen several similar efforts, and they all seem to fundamentally miss the point of online media.

Much as I applaud prominent online-news people saying this, I have to ask in reply: why is it taking you so long to figure this out?

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About — James Duncan Davidson

That’s a pretty interesting use of Twitter that I hadn’t thought of.

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Advertise One Feed Format

These days I don’t even bother with any word other than “feed”; people who have the requisite knowledge will understand, and people who don’t can get a nice explanation.

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Introducing IE=EmulateIE7

Quoth The Zen of Python:

If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.

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Epiphany

Static typing works best when there is lots of complexity, but like breath mints for a drunk, we are just making it easier to get away with what we know to be a mistake anyway.

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International Address Fields in Web Forms

Have I mentioned I’m a huge Luke Wroblewski fanboy?

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Why HTML

Machines that want to interpret HTML need to act like humans, and not the other way around.

Amen.

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django-oembed

Eric has turned out an awfully useful-looking little app, and it follows a design aesthetic that I very much like :)

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Building a local news site from scratch

We have a paper that recently went from weekly print editions to online-only. Should be interesting to see how it plays out.

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Administrative Debris

Thinking about doing something very similar here in the near future.

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KDE 4 UI critique

The new KDE launcher is a gynecologist interface: There you are, sitting in front of a 20” screen, but the programmer has dictated that you have to do everything by poking around in a small box.

This phrase is an instant classic.

(Via reddit)

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Facebook Apps: The Facebook Trap

It might make a lot of sense to leverage social networking applications for business purposes, but it definitely doesn’t make a lot of sense to do so in a way that locks you into any one particular social network.

Old, but bears repeating in this modern age.

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Do you own trees?

Many businesses act as if they have a stake in their suppliers and other vendors. Instead of scaling the part of their business that can move quickly and well, they defend the part they don’t even own.

Listen to this man. Please.

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See No Evil: How Internet Filters Affect the Search for Online Health Information

As filters are set at higher levels they block access to a substantial amount of health information, with only a minimal increase in blocked pornographic content.

Which comes as a surprise to absolutely no one who actually knows how these things work.

(Via danah boyd)

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ponybadge