Lisa Simpson—crossword fan and ... Django developer?. The Django Pony strikes again.

Results from Hack Day at The Guardian. A full list of hacks from last week’s hack day.

Django 1.0.2 released. An update to last week’s 1.0.1 release, which I failed to link to. 1.0.2 mainly fixes some packaging issues, while 1.0.1 contains “over two hundred fixes to the original Django 1.0 codebase”. The team are holding up the promise to move to a regular release cycle after 1.0.

Dollarshort: The Definition of a Slow News Day. How to deal with Valleyway.

Heck, I practically invented the formula of “tell a funny story and then get all serious and show how this is amusing anecdote just goes to show that (one thing|the other) is a universal truth.” And everybody is like, oh yes! how true! and they link to it with approval, and it zooms to the top of Slashdot. And six years later, a new king arises who did not know Joel, and he writes up another amusing anecdote, really, it’s the same anecdote, and he uses it to prove the exact opposite, and everyone is like, oh yes! how true! and it zooms to the top of Reddit.

- Joel Spolsky

The March of Access Control. The W3C Access Control specification is set to become a key technology in enabling secure cross-domain APIs within browsers, and since it addresses a legitimate security issue on the web I hope and expect it will be rolled out a lot faster than most other specs.

Notes from Hack Day at The Guardian. Our first hack day was a ridiculous amount of fun. Matt’s write-up includes a 15 minute highlight video, which includes my 90 second presentation of my crowdsourcing SVG-powered parliamentary constituencies hack.

Amazon CloudFront. The Amazon CDN front end for S3 has launched. Traffic is 2 cents per GB more than S3. I’d like to see a price comparison with existing CDNs; I have a hunch it’s an order of magnitude less expensive.

The new Lawrence.com. The world’s best local entertainment website, relaunched on Django 1.0 with an accompanying substantial redesign.

On UI Quality (The Little Things): Client-side Image Resizing. Two neat tips for cleanly scaling down images in IE 6 and 7 from Flickr’s Scott Schiller.

lightningtimer.net. I’m fed up of having to dig out or knock up a timer script every time I manage lightning talks, so I’ve given one a domain name. You can use lightningtimer.net/#90 to set a different start time for the counter.

DRGBLZ. lolzeppelins?

It’s funny, when I sit down to write something for Phoenix I feel like I have to get into my “Phoenix character.” [...] I try to be the eternal optimist because people are getting so upset about the mission coming to an end, and I’m trying to lessen that grief.

- Veronica McGregor

Interview @MarsPhoenix (via). “For over a year, Veronica McGregor has been Twittering from Mars.”—an interview with the Twitter voice of the Mars Phoenix lander.

Worst. Bug. Ever.. Android phones were executing every keystroke typed in to the phone in an invisible root shell! Text “reboot” to a friend and your phone rebooted. Wow.

License Hacking. Wikipedia is making the switch to a CC license, by asking the Free Software Foundation to include that as an option in the latest version of the Free Documentation License which Wikipedia currently uses and which includes an auto-upgrade clause. Devious.

iPhone Backup Extractor possibilities (via). Nick Ludlam points out that iTunes backs up your iPhone call records by copying across a sqlite database—which means it wouldn’t be at all hard to extract the logs in to a larger database. Could make for a really cool addition to a private lifestreaming application.

Secrets of the Django ORM. An undocumented (and unsupported) method of poking a Django QuerySet’s internal query to add group_by and having clauses to a SQL query.

Clearing up inaccuracies about the Google OpenID IDP launch. Google took some undeserved flack when they launched their OpenID provider. For the record, whitelisting providers fits my definition of the “Open” in OpenID perfectly (providers and consumers are free to impose whatever policies they like).

The Tea Cosy. Our favourite Brighton tea room has redesigned their site—truly classy. Don’t forget to memorise the etiquette rules.