Peterbe.com

The Gmail user interface has a good way of dealing with file attachments that I would like to incorporate into the IssueTrackerProduct Add Issue page to make it easier and more flexible to use.

Unlike Gmail, the IssueTrackerProduct can't rely on Javascript so this has to work equally well in Lynx, IE or Firefox. The Lynx people will have to do with the existing interface where you get a list of file attachment inputs. The people with Javascript support will get a hyperlink that when clicked shows a file input box.

Without further ado, please have a test

It's not the first time we see this. A whole "serious" website that is 100% fake. The photos are retouched and the information is full of lies. I'm not even sure if it's possible to order the cool t-shirts they claim to sell. Maybe that's what it's all about: the t-shirts.

Some questions on ethics and moral should be asked. How far can you push a joke in a medium where people are already very sceptic. I guess it don't matter much because there's little that can be done. It will never be possible to tell people what they can and can't publish on their websites as long as it doesn't violate any legal boundaries.

Anyway, reading BaconWhores made me laugh and made me think: maybe it's not a joke. Maybe one can order a bacon whore???

What I did a long time ago was that I had a plugin in Winamp that transmitted all the music I played onto a server which I controlled. That server processed the information, got a thumbnail from Amazon.com with web services and uploaded it to this site onto MP3 I Play

To me it was very much an excuse to play around with the technology and familiarise myself with ID3 tagging in Python and the Amazon.com web services using pyAmazon.

With Audioscrobbler they've taken this whole thing seriously, done it much much better and opened it up to the public.

This might to some be old news but at least it's news to me. Sweden has the most Debian developers in the world. ...per capita. In the US they have 283 developers compared to Sweden's 26 only, but Sweden is a much smaller country.

What does this tell us? Nothing much probably, but as a big Debian fan I take great pride in that my fellow countrymen- and women have chosen to work on such a great operating system.

And by the way, have a look at the United States picture. Cool diagram!

If you do a speed report on Plone.org you notice that the three biggest files it services are plone.css, plone_javascripts.js and index.html. If you run these through my little slimmer whitespace optimizing program in Python you get the following results:

$ python slimmer.py --test http://plone.org/plone.css
Took 0.016 seconds
Bytes before: 29355
Bytes after:  20265
Bytes saved:  9090  (69.0% of original size)

$ python slimmer.py --test http://plone.org/plone_javascripts.js
Took 0.057 seconds
Bytes before: 27251
Bytes after:  19974
Bytes saved:  7277  (73.0% of original size)

$ python slimmer.py --test http://plone.org/ 
Took 0.029 seconds
Bytes before: 37186
Bytes after:  26466
Bytes saved:  10720 (10K)  (71.0% of original size)

I've learned something today. The cPickle module in Python can be boosted with very little effort. I've also learnt that there's something even faster than a hotted 'cPickle': marshal.

The code in question is the CheckoutableTemplates which saves information about the state of templates in Zope to a file on the file system. The first thing I did was to insert a little timer which looked something like this:

def write2config(...):
    t0=time()
    result = _write2configPickle(...)
    t1=time()-t0
    debug("_write2configPickle() took %s seconds"%t1)
    return result

I have 49 Gmail invites to give away. If you want one, just drop a comment here on this page.

UPDATE: Sorry, no more invites from me: Use: http://isnoop.net/gmail/

EconoAccount is an open source tool I wrote to keep track of my expenditures. It started as a Excel spreadsheet where I wrote down how much I spent on what and then grew into something much better.

MOBi is a mobile web service my company developed for the owners of MOBi (read more here). MOBi is to mobile phones and SMS as domain names are to www. On MOBi, I have registered the keyword peterbe (unsurprisingly) and set up the sub-word "ea *".

Now with a bit of tweaking I can write down all my expenses with my mobile phone when I don't have a computer with Internet available. Read on to find out how.

Great little resource for laughs and ideas on tele-marketing calls.

What is interesting isn't just the original blog post but all the following comments on that page. If you don't have the time to read them all you can at least read a handful.

I'm a fan of good web development ideas. At least different ones because they help us understand what works and what doesn't.

Then I found this website called HumanPosture.com which uses a documentation-like navigation to present all information on the website. From the front page there's a link in the bottom right hand corner that lures you into going to the next page. Before you know it you've clicked through on all 10 (or so) pages and finally returned back to the home page. These next links really work I think.

The whole navigation works like an online documentation site like for example this tutorial but the interesting thing is that the HumanPosture.com website isn't a documentation. It's a webpage filled with information like any other webpage. Notice also that there are no other distracting links anywhere. Unvisited links are blue, visited ones are purple and the logo is clearly located where it's supposed to be.

Well done HumanPosture.com! If I only had more time I'd read it too and not just focus on the web design :)