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A quote from James Surowiecki

November 09 2009

One way to establish that peace-preserving threat of mutual assured destruction is to commit yourself beforehand, which helps explain why so many retailers promise to match any competitor’s advertised price. Consumers view these guarantees as conducive to lower prices. But in fact offering a price-matching guarantee should make it less… read more

Multitouch on Unibody MacBooks

November 06 2009

Multitouch on Unibody MacBooks. FingerMgt is a lovely little app that illustrates quite how sensitive the touchpad on modern MacBooks is —it can track up to 11 touch points and measure pressure as well as location. read more

Python in the Scientific World

November 06 2009

Python in the Scientific World. Python continues to make strides in the scientific world—and the Hubble Space Telescope team have been using it for 10 years! read more

A quote from Alex Russell

November 06 2009

It’s interesting to me how much [Closure] feels like a more advanced version of Dojo in many ways. There’s a familiar package system, the widgets are significantly more mature, and Julie and Ojan’s Editor component rocks. The APIs will feel familiar (if verbose) to Dojo users, the class hierarchies seem… read more

Introducing Closure Tools

November 06 2009

Introducing Closure Tools. Google have released the pure-JavaScript library, apparently used for Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps. It comes with a powerful JavaScript optimiser tool with linting built in and an accompanying Firebug extension to ensure the obfuscated code it produces can still be debugged. There’s also a template… read more

A quote from Bruce Tognazzini

November 05 2009

If you are demanding registration before checkout, you need to cease this practice immediately. It is costing you a fortune. - Bruce Tognazzini read more

Cross-domain policy file usage recommendations for Flash Player

November 05 2009

Cross-domain policy file usage recommendations for Flash Player. One of the best explanations of the security implications of crossdomain.xml files I’ve seen. If you host a crossdomain.xml file with allow-access-from domain=“*” and don’t understand all of the points described here, you probably have a nasty security vulnerability. read more

Google Dashboard

November 05 2009

Google Dashboard. New Google product which shows exactly how much information Google have stored against your account, all on one page. This is a really useful tool, and hopefully will help set a powerful precedent for other sites to follow. read more

Facebook and MySpace security: backdoor wide open, millions of accounts exploitable

November 05 2009

Facebook and MySpace security: backdoor wide open, millions of accounts exploitable (via). Amazingly, both services had wide open holes in their crossdomain.xml files. Facebook were serving allow-access-from-domain=“*” in the crossdomain.xml file on one of their subdomains (a subdomain that still had access to the user’s profile information) while MySpace were… read more

Introducing the YUI 3 Gallery

November 04 2009

Introducing the YUI 3 Gallery. Write a plugin for YUI3, BSD license it and sign a CLA and Yahoo! will push your module out to their CDN and make it loadable using the YUI().use() statement. They’re coordinating the submissions using GitHub. read more

UK Scale Camp

November 04 2009

UK Scale Camp. We’re hosting a one day web performance and scalability unconference at the Guardian on the 4th of December. If you’re involved in running a high-scale website in the UK (or abroad) we’d love you to come along. Spaces are going fast. read more

clarity

November 04 2009

clarity. A web interface for tailing and grepping the log files in /var/log, written in Ruby and EventMachine. read more

Frank Wierzbicki: Leaving Sun

November 04 2009

Frank Wierzbicki: Leaving Sun. Frank performed miracles at Sun and before, helping bring the Jython project out of stasis and turning it in to an active, community maintained modern Python implementation. If you’re looking for an expert Python/Java/Dynamic languages guy you should snap him up. read more

Introducing Resque

November 04 2009

Introducing Resque. A new background worker management queue developed at GitHub, using Redis for the persistence layer. The blog post explains both the design and the shortcomings of previous solutions at length. Within 24 hours of the release code an external developer, Adam Cooke, has completely reskinned the UI. read more

Using Graphics Card Memory as Swap

November 03 2009

Using Graphics Card Memory as Swap (via). Interesting idea: “Graphic cards contain a lot of very fast RAM, typically between 64 and 512 MB. With Linux, it’s possible to use it as swap space, or even as RAM disk.” read more