Dispatches

From Jessamyn: “don’t toss up a bunch of bibliographic citations when a decent URL will do. You’re online, act like you’re online.”

Those kwazy kids will quack anything now. Stream ciphers may never have been expected to be that secure, but Adi Shamir’s cube attack breaks them like so many, um, bits of data.

Josh Bush’s Masked Input Plugin and Paulo P. Marinas’ AlphaNumeric are both jQuery plugins to prevent input of invalid data in web forms.

JSONLint, a JSON validator, was the tool I needed a while ago to be able to play with JSON as format for exchanging data in some APIs I was working on a while ago. And now I like JSON well enough that I’m thinking of using it as an internal data format in one of my applications, especially because it’s relatively easy to work with in JavaScript. Or, at least that’s the promise.

What I’ll need is an easy way to manipulate the contents of a simple array, and these JSON editors may give me a start.

The Braincast JSON editor was the first I found, but it doesn’t allow creation/expansion of the JSON. Katamari‘s JSON editor seems to work and has a lot of features and a post 2005-looking interface, but that doesn’t make it simple. Worse, I don’t think it’s available for me to re-use, modify, or extend in my projects. Thomas Frank‘s JSON editor, on the other hand, does have the features I need and a GPL license. That’s the place to start.

Extra: a JSON diff.

WordPress.com VIP hosts some high-traffic sites, including Gizmodo’s live coverage of the iPhone 3g introduction. Now that the NFL has selected the service for their blogging we’ll get a chance to see how they handle the Superbowl rush.

I’m not sure exactly what I’ll do with it, but thanks to this tip about webkit2png, I now know how to get screen captures of websites. Maybe useful for archiving. Who knows.

Hearing Steve Souders at WordCamp last week got me thinking about website performance, so I went looking for more. The slides from his WordCamp talk are online, but he gave a similar talk at Google I/O which got videotaped and posted richer detail than his slides alone will ever reveal.

Also on his blog: Use the Google AJAX Libraries API when you don’t have a CDN, and a post that asks why make users wait to download all your javascript before they see the page if you’re only going to use 25% of it at first?

Google turned this up, but i have no idea how old it is: How to Monitor MySQL’s performance.

Elliott C. Back points to his use of object caching, WP-Cache, and MySQL query caching among the reasons why his site “is so much faster that yours.”

I just realized OAuth support is slated for inclusion in WordPress 2.7. It’s not in trunk yet, but that’s no reason not to get up to speed. Scott Gilbertson says OAuth and OpenID are foundations to the open social web, giving apps like WordPress a “secure, centralized means of identifying yourself and a way to control who knows what about you.”

Chris Messina, who says we currently treat user credentials “like confetti,” is more than a little excited and is building a series of WordPress Plugins to take advantage of these formats. Stephane Daury is excited too.

I’ve got a PHP script that sometimes just dies with no errors to the browser and no messages in the error log. I’ve seen this in the past with scripts that consumed too much memory (yeah, it should have issued an error, but it didn’t, and increasing the memory limit fixed it), but now the memory limit is set pretty high and I’m not sure I want to increase it further. I certainly don’t want to increase it without seeing where it’s going wrong, anyway.

To do that, IBM developerWorks says the memory_get_usage() and memory_get_peak_usage() functions are for me. And they offer some other interesting tips as well.

John McCain thinks fuel efficiency is for sissies. I guess he figures our oil supply is infinite, or that fossile fuel consumption has no effect on climate change. He probably also thinks the Holocaust was a hoax — somebody should ask him.

For now let’s call him a “drill and burn Republican.”

Mike Figgis‘ Fig Rig works equally well for guys in sneakers and guys in suits, but they’re not free, which is why you have to love Keith Lewis’ DIY version. PVC is sexy!

Ozh’s tutorial explains the details, but the short story is that we’ll soon get WP_CONTENT_URL and WP_CONTENT_DIR constants. And this is more than just convenience, 2.6 allows site admins to put those directories anywhere they want, so the constants will be the only reliable way of finding that info.

This site and a number of other projects are hosted on a Mac Mini that normally sits on my desk. Thing is…my desk moved. And, unfortunately, I didn’t confirm the firewall rules for the network in my new office before bringing the machine over. Thankfully Chris was happy to put the Mini on a different VLAN, and that solved everything (my other machines remain on the new “secure” network…ugh).

In the no too distant future, however, I’ll be moving the site again. This time to a private server somewhere. Varnish, the HTTPd accelerator, is a big part of my plans for that, though. So if I’m lucky (or smart, but better to bet on lucky), I’ll be able to do it without any additional downtime. Hopefully. And even if there is some downtime, it won’t be 24 hours again.