Posts tagged: WEB DEVELOPMENT

On July 4th, which in America is a holiday involving even less attention paid to international events than usual, a wonderful thing happened to Django. On that day the Unicode branch, whose goal was to make it easier to work with non-ASCII character data in Django, was merged into the main development version (or “trunk” in svn-speak). There’s an application porting guide on the Django wiki.

The main reason I’m making this post, though, is because while Malcolm Tredinnick’s blog doesn’t allow comments (nudge) I wanted to make sure he was publicly thanked for all his hard work on this project. While he notes that the project “was in no way a solo effort”, there’s no question that Malcolm deserves a huge round of applause, or many pints of beer, or some other international sign of gratititude. The evidence is hard to refute.

Back in January I posted about the idea of having a get-together of Django programmers here in Northampton in June, playing on the Django (Reinhardt) in June music festival happening at the same time.

I finally found time to put a page together, and people are beginning to sign up. So if you’re a Django person and you’re within range of Northampton, check it out!

First we had Shockwave, which begat Flash which begat Flex and Apollo, while meanwhile people have been busy doing Ajax.

Of course Microsoft wants to get in on the action, and Sun does too — announcing JavaFX today.

The name “JavaFX Script” is brilliant – now instead of just confusing Java and Javascript, people can confuse them with JavaFX too! Plus it sounds a little like “Flex” and has two As, a J and an X in it. Maybe Microsoft will rebrand Silverlight as “JFlex.NET” to help things along.

I’m an inveterate side-project starter. I spent some time tonight deleting old web projects from the server, and it felt great. I did come across a couple things I wanted to save or pass on though; one of them was this quaint list of named web colors (the “Netscape color names”).

I still use these in my web classes when I first introduce the idea of colors in HTML, because it’s a lot more fun for students to type in “lemonchiffon” and see the result than it is for them to learn hexadecimal.

If you tried to reach this blog or anything else on this server this afternoon, you may not have had much luck.

A computer in Korea was hammering my server so hard (aka Denial of Service attack) that my hosting provider temporarily disabled Apache so that my instance didn’t bog down the whole VPS. I was busy at work when this happened and am not sure exactly how long it was out, but this was one of the most severe outages I’ve had in the last three and a half years.

Thanks to the helpful folks on the #svn IRC channel I learned that it is possible to turn a directory into a svn checkout in-place, i.e. without having to replace the directory itself with a fresh checkout after you svn import. This is very handy for things like /etc files and other stuff that you’d rather not be shuffling around unnecessarily.

The key nugget of info is here in the svn FAQ.

1. W3C Relaunches HTML Activity
2. The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group Notices W3C Relaunching HTML Activity, Seems Pleased