Staffan Malmgrens blogg

Not much time for interesting posts of my own these days, busy studying history for my final oral exam on Wednesday. Meanwhile, here’s what interested me in the blogosphere today.

• Interesting blog entry from Frederik Lundh on the role of Trackers in the Widget Construction Set for Python. I might need to write some GUI code soon, maybe this would be the way to go.
• Aaron Wormus worries about the embedded database SQLite and bad security practises (Hint: Keep the SQLite database file OUT of the web root)
• Brad Adams posts slides and demos from his BorCon presentation. I think Borland might have a winner on its hand with the next version of Delphi, since it seems it will allow both classic Win32 programming and .Net programming, filling the niche that VB left with VB.Net. There’s a lot of people that wants to write code that runs on machines without the .Net runtime, and currently the only Microsoft option for that is C++. At the same time, people want to have the opportunity to do .Net development as well. Delphi’s might be the best option for these people.
• Sam Ruby notices some character set mismatch in a blog post from Cory Doctorow, and dissects it in great detail. Almost as required a reading as Joel Spolsky’s much linked developers guide to Unicode.
• David Warnock suggests that python is a good language for teaching kids how to code. I’m wondering how good Squeak works for this, seemingly as it’s designed for this and similar purposes?
• Edward W. Felten suggests, like Lessig did a few weeks ago, that online porn shold be labeled with an “adultsonly” or “porn” tag. I said it then, and I’ll say it again: Take a look at PICS, the w3c standard that’s designed precisely for this and similar problems. Maybe the problem is that there is no “standard” rating vocabulary with definitions for “porn” or “adultsonly”. Or maybe it’s the fact that only XML standard geeks can understand that last document. I think PICS need an evangelist quick, or others will reimplement it, badly.