Fast DOM Queries in Today’s Browsers: Alex of the Dojo framework suggests a ridiculously ugly hack for speeding up your JavaScript. Heavens.
Sugarplum, the spambot poisoner: I've seen references to spammers using the nonsense text Sugarplum creates to help seed their messages and sneak them past Bayesian filters. I blame Dixie Flatline.
"Pragma: No-cache" Tag May Not Prevent Page from Being Cached: The solution for this 2004 Internet Explorer bug is about the funniest thing I've seen today.
ridiculous_fish's geeked out spam prevention technique: Spam prevention via a computational cycle toll, a horribly inefficient method of approximating pi, and a sneaky math lesson about prime distributions. This is excellent.
The Daily Grind, a tiny time tracker: A minimalist time tracker in Dashboard widget form. Could be very useful next time I do some freelancing.
Save Clarus!: A little piece of Apple history has just gone to that Trash can in the sky.
Blue Jeans of Death: What happens when counterfeit jean manufacturers use buggy Microsoft macros to drive their operations.
Migrate apps from Internet Explorer to Mozilla: Incredibly handy guide to cross-browser webapp writing.
Nevow: Python web application framework: Looks like a non-Zope application framework trying to get in on some of the Rails juice, notably through tight integration between client-side scripting and server-side code.
AJAX Debugging with Greasemonkey: I really want to use this, but there's something horrifically wrong with the character set. Or something. It works only fitfully.
An interview with Scorched Earth creator Wendell Hicken: This game was a constant time-waster my junior year of high school.
NeoOffice/J leaves beta: The OS X-native port of OpenOffice.org is officially a stable release.
Freedfroid: Cross-platform clone of the C-64 game Paradroid.
Diff Algorithm in Javascript: Holy. Cow. (via delicious/phytar)
SHA-1 broken; paper now available: Bruce Schneier is making the paper available; it won't be published until after it's presented at a conference.
CITS - MD5 Collisions: The breaking of MD5 continues, as two meaningful documents have been generated with identical hashes. (via Bruce Schneier)
Customizing Movable Type's Interface with Application Templates: I might tackle this for a project at work.
magnetiX - a Magnetic Scrolls text adventure interpreter for Mac OS X: Play the adventure games from the British equivalent to Infocom. Awesome.
Knox - Secure backup for Macs: I'm horribly paranoid about using FileVault; maybe this will fit the bill.
Brad Choate's SpamLookup: Thank goodness. Now there will be another three month lag while the comment spammers regroup.
Xyle: A Webkit-based CSS inspector and editor for OS X.
Mesa for Mac OS X: An Excel-compatable spreadsheet program written in Cocoa.
Laura DiDio and the Yankee Group Linux survey: A Business Week column is, ah, -highly skeptical- of the survey methodology and DiDio's reporting. (via Groklaw.net)
Sidenote: An OS X stickies replacement: Small, attractive, and elegant! Quicksilver, Sidenote, and Jumpcut are slowly leading me to my text-munging nirvana.
Rails tips for OS X users: Ruby's breakpoint implementation is weird and fascinating
Installing Ruby/Rails/FastCGI on OS X: The time has come to buckle down and start playing with Rails.
Maciej Ceglowski beats the crap out of "Hackers and Painters": He's got a beef with the Paul Graham/Dave Winer/ESR style of "hackers are" essay, and calls bullshit on Graham's qualifications to even -talk- about painting. (via Waxy)
BoingBoing Butler: Using Greasemonkey to enhance weblog readability. This sort of thing will make Dave Winer's head burst like an overripe melon.
A reasonably large set of OS X menubar programs: My own Jumpcut isn't there (unsurprising), but neither is AdiumX, Virtue, or the Growl icons.
Instiki for OS X: The Ruby wiki becomes a double-clickable app, blurring the boundaries between web and desktop applications.
Taste for the Web: It doesn't mention Viaweb often enough, actually.
Two-Finger-Scrolling with pre-2005 PowerBooks and iBooks: I just wish it were compatable with Sidetrack.
OOP Is Much Better in Theory Than in Practice: "At this point, it's difficult to predict whether OOP will fade rapidly like some intellectual fads or persist like the long, bad dream of Aristotelianism."
Vim: Seven habits of effective text editing: I need to make a habit of using some of these vim-specific commands.
Converting Real Audio files to MP3 on OS X: Using LAME, rather than simply running Wiretap and hoping the system doesn't beep.
Top XML : XPath Visualizer: Seems like it would be a good learning device as well as a useful tool.
VI-bindings in Mozilla Firefox: Go ahead and make fun of me, emacs users.
Virtue, a desktop manager for OS X: Based on the excellent (if somewhat crashprone) DesktopManager; AppleScriptable and plugin-ready.
Google Scholar OpenURLs: A Firefox extension to provide OpenURL links withing Google Scholar; another nice example of what Firefox can do for individual sites.
TextExtras: A supercharged Cocoa bundle for text processing: Pipes, tab navigation, bracket selection. Oh my. It's like a dream for people who program using a Cocoa text editor.
Longhand: "A calculator built from the ground up to facilitate calculation": "As your equation is entered, Longhand dynamically calculates the answer." (via rentzsch.com)
Gmail bug can be used to sniff for passwords and mail: I'm sure the problem -- based on Gmail's treatment of malformed headers -- will be fixed shortly.
The Command Line In 2004: Deconstructing Neal Stephenson's famous essay, with an eye towads actual current thought about OS design, software engineering, and that time-honored practice of illuminating gaps and contradictions in the text.
Fangs Screen Reader Emulator: Design for screen readers without shelling out hundreds of dollars for JAWS.
Firefox "undoclosetab" extension: On those few occasions I want this, I really really want this.
Rebooting from Within a Batch File: The blackest of MS-DOS magic.
Nethack turns 20: Happy birthday to the best computer game ever.
pySesame: REST-based wrappers for interacting with Sesame: If I ever want to work with those crazy RDF triples.
Tool Time at Pixar: Pixar's internal OS X sketching application
sIFR 2.0 release candidate 2: The next version of the Flash typography for headlines tool pioneered by ESPN
Aaron Hillegass: Cocoa Style: I'm not nearly good enough with Cocoa to worry about style yet, but it never hurts to have a good foundation.
Screenreader visibility and CSS: Hiding content from sighted users often hides it from users using talking browsers. Oops.
Del.icio.us search plugins for Firefox: Nicely done, and they've already proved handly.
SuperDuper: A backup utility for my Mac: Jeremy Zawodny recommends it, and I am cultivating paranoia.
XPath Core Function Library: For future reference, when I want to toss off a bon mot like .//FOO[starts-with(@BAR,"BAZ")]
Bruce Schneier on electronic voting: When Bruce Schneier speaks, I wish politicians would listen.
Ruler 1.2, a bookmarklet for measuring: This may be the nicest piece of JavaScript I've seen all year.
DropCopy: Rendezvous powered file-sharing for OSX: Oh boy, does this fill a need; I've thought about writing something like it myself, only now I don't have to. (via)
Single Window mode comes to Firefox for Linux and the Mac: Having to use frequently-buggy extensions to get this functionality blew.
Retroplayer X: Brimful of Asha on the 45.
"...and I suppose now we can all live happily ever after.": JWZ is present at the creation of the dot-com bubble (and a whole new industry, and the explosive growth of the Internet), ten years ago last night.
Tagging bookmarks: I've been thinking about hooking my sideblog into something much like this; look for it to happen if I ever get a few days of free coding time (i.e. never).
Mac emulation galore: MAME is the greatest, but sometimes you just need some Pitfall.
Bruce Schneier's security blog: Sure to become an indispensible resource for crypto wonks, privacy advocates, and people who want a good, clear explanation of the issues.
Photon, photoblogging from iPhoto: This will be useful for Redfox, although not so much for me. (via)
XKeymacs: Emacs binding on all your applications in Windows. (This shunning of vi-lovers will not stand!)
Zoom zoom zoom: Built-in zooming in OS X
O'Reilly's "Gaming Hacks": Featuring Andrew Plotkin and Adam Cadre on Inform, among other things. (via)
43 folders: Improving your workflow, electronically and in the real world. (via)
Bruce Schneier says SHA-1 needs to be put down: Schneier is both the world's best writer on computer security issues and a very smart man, so I take him seriously on this. The MD5 collision fallout has begun.
The Daily WTF: Even the most cryptic Perl hack you've ever written is nothing compared to these.
"There are six known different hyperspace library models or 'Omni Dimensional Networks', all of which can be used for data compression or different learning modes.": "Isn't 'Meaningless information' a contradiction in terms ?." Read about Autosophy's revolutionary technology and decide for yourself!
MD5 collisions generated!: This is potentially a huge development in practical cryptography (and very, very irritating for people who use MD5 as an authenticity check). (via)
Synthesis, a biological systems modeller: Build your own virtual slime mold!
Faking native widgets in Firefox on OSX: I think I've actually gotten used to the terrible-looking buttons, though.
Pagerank extension for Firefox: Find and comment-spam those PR8s without firing up IE! Hurrah!
AutoTrace: Convert your line art to vector graphics.
Danny O'Brien at O'Reilly's open source conference: There's some more neat presentations he sums up, but this one features my acquaintance Andy Lester describing Perl's "prove" tool.
How to rip RealAudio to MP3: RealPlayer for OSX is surprisingly non-craptacular, but I prefer more portable formats. (via)
The All Music Guide Firefox extension: Code to fix (or "fix") specific websites is both exciting and kind of disturbing.
Haiku, the open source BeOS clone: Even if I never install it anywhere, it's great to see that the fabulous thinking that went into BeOS attracted so many devoted fans.
New version of Jumpcut: My little clipboard app for OS X gets some bug fixin' love.
Malware exploits for browser UI and human reflexes: The people who think of this sort of exploit have a certain twisted genius that could probably cure cancer if it could be shown to earn them a quick buck. (via)
GCount: A menubar alert for new mail in your Gmail account (Panther only).
NVu for OS X (experimental build): The open source HTML layout program comes to the Mac. Kind of.
gExodus: Import your mbox mail files to Gmail.
TeXShop: A native TeX editor for OS X
WhiteSmoke, "a revolutionary new language enrichment tool": "WhiteSmoke™ is capable, for the first time, to overcome word ambiguity problems. As soon as the text is understood, new adjectives, adverbs, phrases and replacements are suggested." Oh man.
Pike's Mozilla Firefox extensions: These little guys -- particularly Show Failed URL and Session Saver -- make a huge difference in how Firefox feels. Show Failed URL is up there with Tab Warning in the "best tiny fix ever" category.
Paramiko: SSH in Python: Not a line of C or Java in it. Impressive.
Classical inheritance in JavaScript: Pushing a toy language to do way more than was intended. Neat.
Periodic Table of Perl Operators: But it's not really a periodic table!
Happiest dancing triangle ever: It's just a little Flash toy, but it seems so sweet and eager to please!
The Volity gaming framework: Communicates using Jabber and XML-RPC; the goal is to make it easy to throw together a turn-based multiplayer game in Perl.
IXI experimental music toys: "The idea was to try to use the 2 dimentional flat surface with boxes as parametre space for granular synthesis, rather than using sliders." And so forth. (via)
Scribe Firefox extension: Save form fields as you go. A simple and brilliant idea.
Hardened PHP: I suspect that good coding practices are still much more useful, but this might grow into something great.
Camino 0.8 is around the corner: I'll be interested in seeing if it feels more Mac-like than Pinstripe-themed Firefox.
Open Source CMS buffet: Try out an open source CMS package before installing it; brilliant idea.
Unredacting a PDF: Low-tech meets high-tech; it was a simple matter of counting the pixels in possible words.
Hercules System/370 emulator: It's like having a mainframe on your desk, if your desk lived in 1975!
Autotracer: Vectorize your PNG graphics
Tim Bray on Jython: Filed away for when I have more time to spend on Java, Python, or both.
The rsync thesis: Andrew Tridgell is a good writer, and rsync is an amazing thing. (Warning: PDF!)
Expression 3.3: The wizbangy graphics program, formerly published by Fractal Design/Creature House, has been let loose by Microsoft as a free download for the Mac.
Holding Pattern: The view outside your airplane window -- screensaver for Mac and PC.
Hotel Magritte: Some nice looking engravings-styled Mac screensavers from Japan
Linux girds to fight back against Avalon: A strategy piece by Miguel de Icaza of GNOME and Mono fame. (via)
viWord: Make Word respond to vi keystrokes. This is the greatest hack ever.
XRA: Dashboard for the Mac?: I'm really curious to see if this develops into something good, because Dashboard is just a -neat- concept.
City of Heroes MMRPG: My legion of informers reports that it resembles "Top 10".
Mistakes of the Mac dev team: They're largely the result of not realizing how long the Mac was going to survive. (via)
GUI obituary posters: Happy Mac, we hardly knew ye.
Vonage Softphone for OS X and Linux: The idea of being free of Verizon is terribly appealing. (via)
Securing XML: I need to start thinking more about these sorts of issues.
Your Literary Masterpiece Was Delicious: Maciej explores the world of brute force textual analysis (via)
Dave Winer has a plan: Atom's problems aside, I can't imagine that -anyone- would see -anything- self-serving in an offer to mege a pseudo-proprietary standard with a community-developed one, because Winer is famous for loving competition.
Edlund, a font for Scandanavian scholars: When Þ just won't do.
Mac Outliners: A Historical Survey: Wow, the ecosystem for these used to be really diverse.
Gentium: A universal typeface. (via)
Talkr, a proposed Flickr/MT bridge: I'd been thinking about this myself, and I suspect that the Six Apart and Ludicorp people have as well. Let a thousand flowrs bloom! (via)
Movable Type TidyText: I rolled my own entity encoder, but this does many, many other things as well.
JunkMatcher for Mail.app: Holy cow, does this look useful. (via)
Computational Complexity weblog: Like I said, I'm a sucker for single-focus weblogs.
Nasty phishing/keylogger trick: These sorts of attacks are getting more and more sophisticated.
ATI's Radeon screensavers: Those are some pretty impressive cycle-burners there. For newer Macs than mine only. (via)
Clotho, a Mac LISP IDE: Maybe it's time to try to learn that scary lambda calculus.
Zapping iChat's smileys: I guess it's now theoretically possible that I'd stop using Adium.
Complexification: Proce55ing and Flash art by Jared Tarbell (see also)
The Combinatorial Engine: An old hack -- still fun years later!
Zelda: History or Myth?: On the internal consistancy and temporal progression of Link versus Ganon (via)
Bruce Horn and iFile: Old-school Mac guy Bruce Horn has been imagining the Finder for the next twenty years (via)
A. Stepanov, father of the Standard Library: "I have yet to see an interesting piece of code that comes from these OO people..."