Well, I didn't know that existed.

"Sick of popping open a link to the original item in Google Reader and seeing people's dumb feedburner parameters on the end of the link? Automatically removes those." I know you don't care, but I use IRC. Also, I like URL hashes to actually be useful. Shame Chrome's not my primary, though.

New in Google App Engine: "Datastore Query Cursors / No more 1000 result limit / Reduced error rate with Automatic Datastore Retries / AppStats RPC instrumentation library." Good stuff. Should let me fix some things with docent too...

Google App Engine gets prototype OAuth support. One to look at, I suspect.

Paul Hammond points out why Flickr prefer API joins to database joins. "while adding more "extras" would reduce the

"The New York Times, via its reporters acting as proxies, steals documents. It violates laws that everyone else must follow. It uses the information in these documents to sell newspapers, and profits by it. And most important, it uses this process to exercise political power [..] The fact that the Times may commit this class of crime with impunity, while I can't and you can't, enables it (with the true press, of course, as a whole) to act as almost a sovereign force. [..] This is considered a normal and ethical practice in early 21st-century journalism. It is actually a criminal practice, which any other century would recognize as such." (Title shortened for space.)

A nice way of displaying machine tags, including reclaiming HTML tables (and with a nod to the Flickr machine tag browser; thanks). I'm not sure if I could make this work for the Flickr version; there are possibly too many namespaces. Still, maybe I'll try for the most popular ones.

"gae2django is a Django helper application that provides an implementation of Google's App Engine API based on pure Django. The helper makes it easier to re-use applications originally designed for Google's App Engine environment in a Django environment." Handy for avoiding lockin (which seems to be attracting folk to Heroku).

"You can now set a daily budget for your app that represents the maximum amount you're willing to pay for computing resources each day." "In 90 days we will be reducing the free quota resources. We believe these new levels will continue to support a reasonably efficient application serving around 5 million page views per month, completely free." Win some, lose some...

'No more "High CPU Requests"! App Engine Apps were once allowed no more than 2 CPU-intensive requests per minute. We've made some adjustments to the way we handle requests, and have eliminated this limitation altogether.' More on the GAE-becoming-production-ready front, then.

ClickToFlash is a plugin (not an input manager) that stops Flash loading until the user approves it in Safari (and other WebKit browsers). It started life on code.google.com but that's now 403ing; this has some nice patches (such as option-click to whitelist), and I trust the repository owner. Well worth installing.

Well, that's a bit of a surprise. The tiny server-side JavaScript + git startup has been acquired by Joyent; as the article says, "With Reasonably Smart, Joyent can strike a balance between infrastructure and service" in their cloud computing (with a product that's more like GAE than EC2).

"If you've ever needed to produce PDF documents before, in Ruby or another language, you probably know how much it can suck. Prawn takes the pain out of generating beautiful printable documents" If Tom and mattb recommend this, I think I can trust it to work.

I complained about this a while ago, so it's good to see that it is in Apple's official bug tracker (mirrored here to the Open Radar GAE web app).

Some nice documentation on how Apple's iPhone applications use abilities not open to third parties to appear faster. (This also explains why Maps sometimes shows a useful screen when I start it up on the iPod touch without wireless on.)

'Sebastian Przygodzki took a photograph with his camera, which upset Rebecca Smith and her friends called police ... Sheriff Kenneth Hogg said the matter "could be best described as exceptionally unchivalrous"'. Hence a £100 fine for "breach of the peace", one of those handy UK "anything can be illegal" laws.

Tom on permanent links. "Of course, delicious just changed their hostname and thus broke all meta-commentary. Sigh."

"Feed Maps is a new API from Map Channels that lets users create Google Maps mash-ups from a number of different data sources." Aaron implies this might be useful with Flickr feeds. Hm.

I'm not convinced that the gameplay's up to much, but technically this is pretty damned impressive stuff. Each cube has different faces, and the computer recognises them and places the game environment inside. Just watch the video; you'll get the idea quickly enough.

"98.2 percent of American households have a television. By some measures, that even beats the penetration rate of basic adult literacy skills, which was last pegged in 2003 at 86 percent"

By Tom, after talking about NY state stopping the city's proposed congestion charge. "The positive network externalities generated by cities depend on density." "Suburban settlements tend to lose value as they grow denser, however."

Thanks to Tom for finding this evidence of self-referential automated posting going badly wrong (or, as he put it, "retwittering twitterings"). I sort of think I should write about this, but then I suspect nobody else cares much.

Everyone wanted the Korg DS-10 even though they're not Japanese, and the good news is there'll be an international release. Hurrah! No dates or prices yet though.

"As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website" up to three times, but still. Interesting

Interesting. UPnP contains a sharing component that's a competitor of sorts to the iTunes sharing protocol, as well as a Bonjour-alike service discovery component. I assume those are now included in the ISO standard too.

Might be nice to compare with Zimki.

"So what's it going to be? JavaScript on steroids? Or a secure, small, robust Cocoa-light?" Wil's overly hard on JavaScript ("thrown together by some dudes a couple years ago"?) but then his alternative does sound a lot better.

"An attempt to improve text rasterization algorithms using only publicly available information" Follows on from the Safari 3 for Windows rendering debate, apparently.

"The results suggest that all the years of arguments over the relative merits of the Mac and Windows user interfaces were a waste of time: we're generally convinced that whatever we're familiar with is the best." Remember, "intuitive" is a bad word.

Tom pulls it off again, this time with a way of packaging Django-based web apps as a Mac desktop app.

"Having seen which way the wind is blowing, Mr Jobs now wants to be seen not as DRM’s defender, but as a consumer champion who helped in its downfall." He's reacting, but quickly enough to be seen as leading. Cunning.

I got the survey. And took screenshots. I shall attempt to post them to one of those "blog things" this evening, assuming I don't get carried away by something less boring instead.

"Tangerine is an application that allows you to publish music over the local network, using DAAP. ... Music files can be specified either by a directory, or can be automatically discovered using Beagle." Good idea, this. Doubt it'll displace mt-daapd for

Looks like it'd be useful

If Tom's scared I'm scared. Having said that, what Brad says makes sense to me. Down with UUIDs!