Jon AtkinsonI'm a web developer and system administrator

http://1.2.3.8/bmi-int-js/bmi.js

Posted on 26th December 2007. Tagged as web, javascript, mobile

I'm currently using my T-Mobile 3G connection to do most of my web browsing, what with it being Christmas, and that I've been travelling around a lot without reliable WiFi.

In contrast to a few years ago, when the hardware support for laptop to phone connections was terrible, that is now incredibly simple. I paired my phone and my laptop, then chose 'Connect to network' from the Bluetooth menu. My phone asked if this was okay, and everything worked pretty much flawlessly (and incidentally, I get a better upload speed over 3G than I do over my DSL at home).

So, I was happily doing some lazy Boxing day web development,and I started to notice errors in my Javascript. Not errors because I'd had a few beers, or errors because I was using a library incorrectly, but errors appearing in functions which I hadn't even written.

I checked the source of my pages, and noticed that someone or something was inserting Javascript into my pages. Specifically, a script from http://1.2.3.8/bmi-int-js/bmi.js. The 'Oh shit, my server has been cracked' alarm went off pretty loudly, and after some peer-review, that changed to the 'Oh shit, someone has released a trojan for OSX for which I am very under prepared' alarm.

It turns out that T-Mobile (and Vodafone UK) think it is appropriate to insert their own Javascript into each page which I visit, which pipes all images through a proxy to degrade their quality. However, due to an improperly terminated newline, this script cannot be parsed by Firefox or Opera in conjunction with any XHTML 1.1 or XML documents.

This causes the sort of errors which break all subsequent Javascript. For sites with lots of Javascript, that is kind of a big deal. It isn't behaviour which I asked for, and clearly it hasn't been appropriately tested. Interestingly, script isn't even inserted when using Safari (come on, T-Mobile, browser sniffing is so very Nineties). In addition, it maps key events to Shift-R, which can cause problems with other web applications (for example, GMail), and access keys in Firefox.

This is a terrible solution to a problem which didn't really exist in the first place. I've paid for a data connection, so I expect the data I requested to be delivered to me as requested, not as T-Mobile think I should recieve it. If I download large images, then I'm happy to take responsibility for what I've done and pay the cost of those downloads. Very disappointing.

Django Project Base

Posted on 22nd January 2010. Tagged as django, python, javascript

"This is my project base. There are many like it, but this one is mine."

Today I finally got around to putting my Django project base on Github. I've been using this base for about six months now, and after a lot of rewrites and different approaches, it's now reasonably stable. I've been starting a lot of new projects recently, and repeatedly fixing the same small bugs in this project template, so I decided to spend a few hours this afternoon cleaning it up and making it public.

I'm not totally satisfied with my use of shell scripts to do some of the bootstrap actions (ideally I'd use Fabric for all of these tasks), and longer-term I want to make it easier to rename the django project rather than using search/replace in TextMate.

I know there are a lot of similar projects to this on Github, but none of them worked exactly like I wanted (I think too many depend on zc.buildout and similar), and while I'm not crazy about re-inventing the wheel, I hope there are enough other people out there who share my preferences who will find this useful.