Links from 2010

Excellent notes on URL design.

Nice.

LX5 optional extras.

"A lightweight [JavaScript] 3D engine with a very low level of abstraction". Mental.

The snark is amusing and this is also a pretty decent list of things to do when building an app.

Back to basics; handy.

A highly scalable real-time graphing system

Experimental fork of Pieter's nice git GUI for OS X. Includes: sidebar, fetch, pull, push, add remote, merge, cherry-pick, rebase, clone, clone to.

This is why I’m saying that most of the time, creating a separate mobile website is simply a cop-out. It’s a tacit acknowledgement that the regular “desktop” site is beyond help. The cop-out is creating an optimised experience for one subset of users while abandoning others to their bloated fate.

Gamification is the wrong word for the right idea. The word for what’s happening at the moment is pointsification. There are things that should be pointsified. There are things that should be gamified. There are things that should be both. There are many, many things that should be neither.

This is a list of groups, organizations and festivals that recognize achievements in cinema, usually by awarding various prizes

A rather large list of film festivals requesting submissions.

The new HTML5 History API (which really has nothing to do with HTML — it's a JavaScript API) allows us to manage the URL changes while CSS3 transitions handle the sliding. Permalinks are always maintained, your back button works as expected, and it's much faster than waiting for a full page load.

The world's largest independent film community

The entertainment industry's leading aggregator of movie and TV trailers, game previews, and music videos. With 500,000 unique video assets from over 1000 content providers, IVA has established a reputation as the archive of record for audio visual samples.

Indexing and tagging films for clip retrieval.

Google's list of performance tools.

Soho! is a game of skill and judgement for 2-6 players of all ages inspired by the two things for which this small, historic patch of London is famous around the globe: its pubs, and its one-way system.

Without the rondo, no Daft Punk, no Justice.

What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.

Reusable apps, sites, tools, and more for your Django projects

While it's frustrating to think of any hosting provider cutting services to a website because it considers the content too politically volatile or controversial, it's especially disheartening to see Amazon knuckle under to pressure from a single senator. Other Internet intermediaries should now expect to receive a phone call when some other member of Congress is unhappy with speech they are hosting. After all, it worked on Amazon.

Politicians should be aware that these are the stakes. They either get used operating in the open, where the people they're governing are in on everything they do, or they go totalitarian, around the globe, now.

A power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase.

As travellers who wanted a journey more than a destination – and craved the room to work, read and relax on the way – the train seemed an obvious solution. And it was surprisingly affordable: $389 covers you for two weeks of train riding. Or, more specifically, it covers you for eight separate segments of travel within 15 days.

In the longer term the odds are stacked against secrecy, particularly in countries that practise openness in other areas. One reason is that though individual jurisdictions often prevent a specific libel, privacy breach or copyright infringement, a story with a global reach will get out somewhere. Short of imposing Chinese-style firewalls and censorship, free countries cannot consistently stop their citizens finding out what their enemies tell them, including tales of the shadowy, sordid or sensational deeds done in their names.

"Let's Gamify The World!"<br /> <br /> No, let's not.

All hail the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

While 2% of U.S. visitors may not seem like a lot, keep in mind that over 300 million users visit the Yahoo! homepage each month. That means 6 million users visit each month without the benefit of JavaScript. So even though it’s worth spending your time on the JavaScript-enabled version of the site, there are still a non-trivial amount of users out there who won’t be able to use it. While the percentage of visitors with JavaScript disabled seems like a low number, keep in mind that small percentages of big numbers are also big numbers.

"What we can do is push the evolution of font makers and services. Next time you’re shopping for type, don’t just look for your favorite face as a webfont. Ask for more"...

Another OS X git client.

200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes – The Joy of Stats – BBC Four (via BBC)

Ranting, some purpose.

This white paper, It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw it Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology, examines how intellectual property (IP) law impacts the rapidly maturing technology of 3D printing, and how incumbents who feel threatened by its growth might try to use IP law to stop it.

Hurrah.

Wooden blocks with magnets inside.

Firefox only at present. "Ever wanted to use fallback fonts on your CSS with different aspect ratios without them looking huge (or tiny)? The sparkling new CSS3 font-size-adjust property could do just that, maybe."