simonb.com: a 35mm comedic short about a man

If you get the error “AttributeError: ‘module’ object has no attribute ‘xyz’” in Django. It probably means you’ve added a new app but forgot to put the __init__.py file in the app’s directory.

Interesting talk by Bryan Cantrill on DTrace. At the beginning he rips into Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg. Scott’s talk at Google is here.

Yahoo Pipes is very cool. Proof at last that the Internet is a series of tubes.

Baseline Mag has an overview of how MySpace coped with rapid growth. Basically a good lesson in how not to build a dynamic database backed website. 

Here’s a list of some JavaScript books:

• Pro Javascript Techniques by John Resig - amazon.com
• PPK on JavaScript by Peter-Paul Koch - amazon.com
• JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 5th edition by David Flanagan - amazon.com
• The JavaScript Anthology by James Edwards and Cameron Adams - amazon.com
• Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax by Christian Heilmann - amazon.com
• DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith - amazon.com
• Bulletproof Ajax by Jeremy Keith - amazon.com

Personally I spend a lot of time with The Definitive Guide.

Note to self: for the following to work on a Mac with fink’s python

xml = urllib2.urlopen("https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/recent").read()

Your python needs ssl support.

fink install python24-socket-ssl

Phew!

Sparkle is a programmers tool that automates application updates.

The audited 2005 financial statements for the Mozilla foundation are online. Income from search kick-backs was USD 50 M. Profits after tax where about USD 26 M. Wonder if any of this money will find its way back to the unpaid volunteers… See also Mitchell’s blog.

find and grep are the programmers friend. But when using Subversion find will also decend into .svn directories. Generally we don’t want this to happen. The following find command will skip .svn directories. For more type ‘man find’ at your favorite prompt.

 find . \( -type d -and -name .svn -and -prune \) -or -type f -print

Firebug 1.0 beta is out. If you’re a web developer you need Firebug. It makes a lot of things easy that used to be a pain. It is marv.

Coding Horror has an excellent summary of software project postmortem resources.

One of the first things I purchased when starting university was a Casio fx-580 calculator. At the time this was an amazing machine because it did complex numbers - something engineers spend a lot of time pondering. I still have it on my desk and use it every day. Over the years, though, the screen had started to fade. That is, at least, until five minutes ago when it was cleaned for the first time in twenty years. And underneath? A shiny - non-faded - screen. Here’s to another twenty years of muck. They don’t make ‘em like they used to.

Here’s a link to another Spore video from E3. In this demo Will Wright brings on Robin Williams towards the end to build a creature. Funny.

Will Wright gave a demo of Spore at E3 2006. Here’s a direct link to the video (200M mov). Also YouTube has a short demo piece here.

I last blogged about Spore a year ago.

It is inspiring.

Official Spore Page

Another Spore site

SGI has filed for chapter 11 Not unexpected. Surprising it took so long to take some action… Back in the days when I could get my hands on a SGI machine they were a joy to program. IRIX is a great OS - it was one of the few that actually met the POSIX specs for threads. Great APIs. I wish they would just sell or give away IRIX for the PC x86 platform. Lots of people with fond memories of SGI workstations from the past would glady install IRIX in favor of Linux I think.