by Peter Seibel
-- A fantastic collection of interviews with 15 famous programmers. Contains some great history and insights on the field of "computer science."
-- Geeks, drugs, and deception. An entertaining look into the (fictional) lives of techno con artists, and how a recently-fired comic book artist get pulled into their inner circle.
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-- Particularly useful reference when trying to eek out a few extra milliseconds of load times in older browsers.
-- Interesting tech, and somewhat engaging, but disappointing ending (or lack thereof.)
, by Neil Strauss
-- An engaging, first-person account on transforming from an urban writer into "Jason Bourne."
, by Cory Doctrow
-- A high school hacker fights the 'Department of Homeland Security' to reclaim American civil liberties after anti-terror tactics are taken to a new level.
-- Techniques-for, and the value-of sketching interactivity before developing products. Good ideas. OK book.
" -- About finding untapped opportunities in your market and repositioning yourself to capitalize on them. Easy to grasp; Longer then it needed to be.
" -- A thin book with some good best-practices, but a little disappointing. Perhaps it's JavaScript's fault, not the author's ;-)
" -- Good overview of usability issues in designing HTML forms, backed by examples and eye-tracking research. I bought the digital edition, which was slightly cheaper. (You can use code: WFDDE to get an extra 10% off any purchase on the publisher's site.)
" by Marshall Goldsmith
-- Discusses interpersonal skills (and how to identify and fix them) that most commonly hold executives back in their career advancement.
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-- Lesson: Cut the corporate B.S. and stop wasting your time. Focus only on what matters most.
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-- Lessons on handling tough conversations: firing people, relationship problems, hostage negotiations (well, maybe not that last one.) Wasn't an exciting read, but I've been paying more attention to "turning points" in conversations since reading it.
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-- Lessons in building reusable ("pluggable") Django applications. Assumes you know the basics of Django and Python.
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-- I really enjoyed this one. Lots of suggestions and strategies for negotiating.
my Bus Pirate v2 finally arrived from Seeed yesterday! http://code.google.com/p/the-bus-pirate/
I have an odd fascination with Visual Programming languages, and while I’ve gotten so far as sketching out some UI concepts and object models for a text-processing focused, web-mashing, visual programming environment, I’m a long way from having anything that works. Much to my surprise then when David Ascher dropped a link to the Lily project on his blog today. Holy cow this is sweet. Think PD or Max/MSP written in JavaScript, running in a browser, with modules for popular Web API’s and JavaScript frameworks (ex., “Amazon, Flickr, Wikipedia, Yahoo; UI modules that wrap widgets from YUI, Scriptaculous, JQuery, Google Maps….”)
Check out one of the demo’s here:
For anyone else who needs it, I found a user script (http://userstyles.org/style/show/1711">here) that re-enables the metadata on Google Image Search. (The “redesign” of Google Image Search no longer includes the image size, format, and dimensions.) The script requires the Stylish Firefox extension.
There’s a lesson in there that I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.
Just the other day I had a friend mention a desire to scrape tour schedules in MySpace so that he can find out when artists he’s interested in are in town. (He eventually decided it was too much hassle and would like someone else to do it, which is why I’m able to mention it here.) It’s a cool idea, though the OnTour Dashboard Widget takes it to perhaps another level.
The Widget monitors tour information in OnTour.net and compares it to the music you have in your iTunes library. The downside being, of course, that you have to hit F12 to get a notification. But otherwise, the interaction model is perfect — meaning that you don’t need to change your behavior at all, yet you gain new value and information. Brilliant.
(Via Lifehacker)
Found another mobile-python hacking gem: The PaperKeyboard project is attempting to use an S60 phone’s camera to recognize character input on a printed, paper keyboard. The project includes proof-of-concept code using Python for S60. The author has opened a discussion on the PyS60 boards.
While we’re on the subject, the Guardian posted an opinion piece yesterday titled “Python: the full monty for mobile applications” which suggests that Python might be just what the mobile market needs to attract hobbyist hackers to mobile phones.
I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this before today:
“Numbers stations are shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin. They generally broadcast people reading streams of numbers, words, or letters (sometimes using a phonetic alphabet)…” (Via wikipedia.)
I was pleasantly surprised that Google offered an API to Google Calendar, but I’m much more eager to hear whether an API will be available for Google Spreadsheet. The potential there seems huge! The “Hello World’s” could be “Web servers that upload traffic summaries nightly”, or “Screen scrapers that build price-comparison spreadsheets.” This is Grade-A mashup material!
Once you have an API you can also take this thing MUCH further by writing a database driver library or ORM that can map queries to rows and build spreadsheets per-table for your database. Obviously you’re not going to be replacing a large, loaded database with this, but think about swapping out “Google Spreadsheet Storage” for small tasks that you might otherwise use sqlite for. Especially if there’s a driver that integrates right into your web framework. For example, let’s say your new “In Private Beta” web app has a “Sign up to be notified about our launch” form on the front page. Where do you want those email address to go? You probably want it in a spreadsheet anyway, so why not have the web app just post it into a private Google Spreadsheet automagically? Having the web-based spreadsheet UI also means you can review, edit, and export the data in a slick, phpmyadmin-like way!
It’ll take you 20 minutes to get through all of these, but Ray Ozzie’s Live Clipboard Screencasts are worth taking a look at if you’re interested in syndication, microformats, and mashup’s.
(via: Dave’s Wordpress Blog)
Along with adding Chat to Google Mail, the engineers seem to have gone a little pop-up crazy with the latest GMail updates. Those who’s accounts have chat activated know what I’m talking about — the pop-up’s on every person’s name are driving me mad! Thankfully I’m not the only one, and a solution has been found via a simple Greasemonkey script: “Solution to annoying GMail Talk popup“
The Nokia Research Center just announced a Mobile Web Server project that has ported Apache and mod_python (using Python for S60) to the S60 platform. At ETech 2005, my Python in your Pocket presentation alluded to this idea that mobile application development could become a lot like web development in the future, as web servers, middleware, databases, and powerful rendering engines make their way onto mobile devices. I’m glad to see this project finally making a public announcement — it’s very cool work!
In somewhat related news, a friend sent this link as well: “The Mobile Wi-fi Access Point“. If you’re interested in patching together mobile and wi-fi networks, it’s worth a peek.
I’ve been spending a little time lately brushing up my web-fu by tinkering with A-j-a-x and greasemonkey. The Ajax stuff is SO much nicer to use then the old school IFRAME hacks for dynamic content. It brings a little web-developer tear to my eye to remember the mountains of code I once wrote to make this work cross-platform back in the NN/IE 4.x days. Now it’s a method call and a callback. Beautiful.
Greasemonkey, on the other hand, is a whole different animal. I first heard about greasemonkey at ETech, which prompted a huge light-bulb to appear overhead. Unfortunately it wasn’t shining very bright, and it took a little while for the gears to crunch over why I’d want to modify the pages I was surfing (probably because I get most of my content via RSS feeds.) There’s the obvious task of stripping ad-banners and such, but that can be done with other tools already. The other problem is that I bounce back and forth between Firefox and Safari, and for the past couple months I’ve been on a Safari kick (which has no greasemonkey.)
So there I was debating switching back to Firefox to get greasemonkey when I had two thoughts: first, JavaScript wouldn’t be my language of choice for something like this, and second, there’s an obscure feature in PithHelmet (a Safari plugin/hack) that can already do this.
In the revision history notes for PithHelmet, there’s an entry on 2004-08-12 that reads “Machete allows you to clean up or remix web sites with small scripts.” Oh yeah. Once you figure out how to use the extremely obtuse user interface, you’ll find that PithHelmet has the ability to pipe incoming HTML to a shell script as stdin data, then route the stdout from the script back to the browser. The choice of which scripts to pipe to is decided based on pattern matching the URL.
To get started I picked something simple — nuking ‘target=”_blank”‘ attributes from hyperlinks. Why? Because I hate it when sites assume that I want to open a link in a new window, and this is a pretty simple pattern to match. The script looks something like this:
#!/usr/local/bin/python
import re, sys
# Compile a regex pattern to match 'target="_blank"' in hyperlinks
re_pattern = re.compile("(\<a )(.*?)(target[\ ]*=[\ ]*[\"\']_blank[\"\'])(.*?)(\%gt;)")
if __name__ == '__main__':
# Loop over each line in stdin
for line in sys.stdin.readlines():
# Write the line back to stdout after dropping any 'target="_blank"' matches
sys.stdout.write(re_pattern.sub(lambda mo:"%s%s%s%s" % (mo.group(1), mo.group(2), mo.group(4), mo.group(5)), line))
With the script saved somewhere convenient and chmod u+x‘d, I made a new rule in PithHelmet using “Regex URL Match” with the pattern: ^http:\/\/. And just like that… ‘target=”_blank”‘ was gone.
For more info and fodder on Greasemonkey, check out the following links:
Came across an interesting project called PyMusique that claims to be “the fair interface to the iTunes Music Store”. It probably won’t last long (ie., Apple’s pretty aggressive in shutting down projects like this), but the interesting detail to note is that the iTunes music store is actually selling non-DRM tracks — it’s iTunes that applies the DRM after the song is downloaded. Using PyMusique, you’re able to purchase tracks from iTMS (ie., actually pay for them and download them), but you skip the DRM encoding and end up with unlocked AAC files (which is probably what you wanted to buy in the first place.)
As always, redistributing music that you do not own the copyrights for is illegal, but the ability for consumers to choose how and where they listen to music they purchase is a welcome feature.
(via MacRumors.com)
There’s a great academic paper up at http://rfidanalysis.org/ describing the successful attack on the RFID system used by ExxonMobil SpeedPass and millions of “Vehicle Immobilizer” systems (ie., vehicles who’s keys communicate with the car to prevent hot-wiring.) The attack took some smart people and custom computing, but was very inexpensive considering it’s potential for abuse.
The success of the attack is in part due to the weak, proprietary encryption algorithm developed by Texas Instruments 10 years ago. It relies on a 40-bit key, which is simply too small for critical security now.
The implications of this are very interesting, especially as businesses push to increase the use of RFID tags. Don’t get me wrong, I love RFID, but they way it’s being used here could stand a little more security thought. Take this scenario: a trouble youth packs a similar exploit system into a portable computer in her backpack. She could walk around supermarkets and shopping malls with a high-powered RFID reader in her bag, quietly collecting SpeedPass keys from the dongle’s in people’s pockets and purses. This is even easier then stealing credit card numbers, being a completely passive action. No more dumpster diving — just hang out around people and ping RFID chips! The cracked keys become black-market commodities, much like stolen credit card numbers or digital cable codes.
Mind you, using stolen RFID keys to buy fuel is just as dumb as using a stolen credit card. Modern gas stations have video cameras, and your license plate will be captured. In other words, it’s a cool hack… but don’t try this at home unless you’d like to see a little jail time.