Simon Willison’s Weblog

Good Gifts

Some friends of the family have created a brilliant charitable solution to the problem of buying a gift for someone who already has everything. The Good Gifts Catalogue sells products such as a New leash of life for homeless dogs, Ropes for monkeys living in zoos and many other cleverly titled charitable packages. The full price of every item ordered is donated to the supported charity and the recipient of the gift gets a keepsake card describing the gift given on their behalf. My favourite item from the catalogue has to be this one:

A better definition of Metadata

Ned Batchelder: Metadata is nothing new. Ned includes a far better definition of metadata than the standard “data about data” phrase:

AdSense Backlash

I guess it really was too good to be true. The AdSense backlash has begun, with Eric Thauvin’s dismissal from the scheme for “invalid clicks” prompting Russell Beattie to take a good look at the AdSense terms and conditions—which have some pretty nasty twists in them. The plot has thickened today with Google adding a new term prohibiting users from issuing any press release or mak[ing] any public statement about the subject matter of this Agreement. What’s that about?

Alarm Bell Phrases

Alarm Bell Phrases on Ward’s Wiki are just great. As with all links to the Wiki though, be warned: click too many links and hours of your life will inexplicably vanish...

Designing for Colour Blindness

Dave Shea is running a series on designing for colour blindness: parts one and two are already available. I’ve found the Colorblind Web Page Filter useful in the past as a tool for understanding the problems faced by colour-blind users.

Balancing Act

Balancing visual and structural complexity in interaction design (via Column Two) is an interesting article that shows how over-simplifying a design can harm usability rather than helping it.

The Philosophy of Ruby

The Philosophy of Ruby is the first part of Artima’s interview with Yukihiro Matsumoto (aka Matz), creator of the Ruby language. The interview touches on the philosophical differences between Python and Ruby, in particular Python’s preference for having one obvious way of doing things:

Outlook not so good

Yesterday, the Half-Life 2 source code was leaked (all 100 MB of it). Today comes the news from Valve that the leaked version is indeed the real thing, and that the leak was almost certainly the result of keystroke recorders installed remotely on Valve machines using a buffer overflow in Outlook’s preview pane.

mod_python introduction

Introducing mod_python by Gregory Trubetskoy. One of my biggest problems with mod_python is that documentation outside of the mod_python manual is pretty hard to come by. This article is more of an executive overview than a tutorial, but anything that adds to the overall body of knowledge out there concerning mod_python has to be a good thing. I’m hoping to write some material on mod_python best practises at some point in the near future, but I have to work out what they are first. Luckily the project has an active and very helpful mailing list.

Master of Fine Arts in Software

Richard P. Gabriel’s proposal for a Master of Fine Arts in Software looks like it’s getting some serious consideration from the University of Illinois (via Sam Buchanan). The idea of programming as a creative art has been around for a long time, so teaching it in this way is in some ways a logical progression. Personally I’m intrigued by the focus on reading other people’s code—“the work of masters”. This is something that been sadly lacking in my BSc course at Bath. Aaron Swartz started a collection of links to Quality Software last year, but other than that I don’t know of any resources dedicated to highlighting “classic” code that deserves to be studied.

Magazine styles in CSS

Mimicking Magazines (via techno weenie) is a nice set of CSS styled paragraphs inspired by the design of Cosmopolitan. They resize well thanks to intelligent use of ems for sizing instead of pixels.

On CSS Remakes

I’m a bit late to the party on this one, but Paul Hammond’s open letter to “tableless” recoders caused quite a stir a few weeks back with its extensive list of reasons that recoding someone else’s site in CSS helps no one and can in fact have a negative affect on the CSS advocacy effort (the response to the article is summarised in his follow up post).

Interesting jobs at the BBC

Spotted on City of Sound, via Paul Hammond:

A better way of entering dates

The CreativityGoblin dropped in on me today, and as a result I’ve been tackling the challenge of entering dates in to a web application. In the past, I’ve used DHTML calendar widgets for this purpose (my favourite is Mishoo’s highly configurable, standards compliant JS Calendar) but while widgets like this have a great deal of “wow” factor I’m not convinced that they are the best entry mechanism when it comes to raw user speed. Today’s experiment was partially inspired by PHP’s strtotime function, which accepts a string in a wide variety of formats and converts it in to a time.

Infinite Python Data Structures

Hans Nowak has been churning out some really interesting Python stuff recently. He’s been experimenting with Self style objects in Python (similar in many respects to objects in Javascript), developing Wax, a coder friendly wrapper around wxPython, working on a Python framework for writing text adventure games and most recently experimenting with streams in Python using generators.

Targetting CSS at IE5

Tantek has created/discovered a new CSS hack, the Mid Pass Filter. This filter allows you to write CSS rules that will only be applied by IE 5 and IE 5.5 for Windows. This is great news, as those are the browsers with the broken box model (provided you trigger standards mode in IE 6).

Opening times for online forums?

Here’s something I’ve never seen before. The BBC’s Neighbours messageboard currently has a note up saying “This messageboard is currently closed”, with a link to the opening times: 9am until 10pm weekdays, opening 10am at weekends. You can still read the forums but you can’t post anything. This is obviously a moderation tactic to ensure there is always an administrator available to delete offensive material should any be posted—I’m writing about it here because I’ve never seen this approach used before.

How I obtained my US Visa

I received my J-1 Visa for 11 months in the US this morning, accompanied by my certificate of eligibility for J-1 status. I promptly cut the certificate in half with a pair of scissors while opening the envelope, but a call to the Embassy has confirmed that it’s still valid and will still get me in to the country.

PHP’s date() function in Python

In switching from PHP to Python I’m discovering an increasing number of PHP functions that I’ve learnt to rely on but have no direct equivalent in the Python standard library. Often Python simply provides a different way of approaching the problem, but old habits die hard and I’ve been replicating some of PHP’s functionality in Python for my own personal use.

There goes the neighbourhood

Blogs just stopped being cool.

Unstructured linkage

• Tom Gilder: Absolutely fucking nuts
• Get ready for IE changes
• Score Higher in Google Search Engine (and why Google is saving the web)
• High performance XML-RPC
• Juggling with packets: floating data storage (via Ned)
• Taking the Pulse of XML Editing
• Beware the dangers of generic Exceptions
• Blogging for Dollars
• Resign Patterns: Ailments of Unsuitable Project-Disoriented Software
• PatchDayReview.com—Explaining Microsoft’s Weekly Patches in Non-Technical Terms
• XML Application Objects (via the SitePoint Forums)
• Chapter 17 of the XML Bible: XSL Transformations
• Radiohead, as drawn by 5th graders
• Telephone Preference Service, the UK Do Not Call list

Yahoo News Search RSS feeds

It’s not a new idea (Feedster has been doing it for a while) but it’s a first for a major search engine: Yahoo are now offering RSS feeds of the results of searches within Yahoo news. The feeds are advertisement free, probably because you have to click through to the news stories to read them in full. I wonder how long it will be before someone starts offering custom feeds like this with advertising in the feed itself? As RSS is an XML format parsing out adverts before they get to the user is a much more obviosu step than ad-blockers in web browsers.

Python snippet: ordinalth(n)

Blogged so I don’t lose it (blogging as external memory):

“Getting” Python

David Brown: Python is a time bomb (in a good way):

Firebird URL shortcut tips

I’ve been using these for ages, but in case you haven’t heard about them here are some handy shortcuts involving Firebird’s URL bar:

New anti-comment-spam measure

I’ve added a new anti-comment-spam measure to this site. The majority of comment spam exists for one reason and one reason only to increase the Google PageRank of the site linked from the spam and specifically to increase its ranking for the term used in the link. This is why so many comment spams include links like this: Cheap Viagra.

Practical Unicode, please!

Joel Spolsky has joined Tim Bray in the quest to educate the masses as to the importance of Unicode. Dan Sugalski kicks in as well with What the heck is: A string, a lengthy essay about string handling and why it really is a lot more complicated than you think it is.

Learning to use Floats

Russ Weakley’s latest offering, Floatutorial, is probably the single most valuable CSS tutorial I’ve seen to date. Floats are one of the most powerful constructs offered by CSS, but they are also the hardest to master. Floatutorial provides a clear introduction to the theory behind floats, then dives straight in with a series of 9 tutorials that take you from using simple floats to align images right up to building a liquid 3 column layout using floated divs. If you haven’t yet mastered floats you owe it to yourself to read this tutorial; if you feel you have mastered them its worth looking through to pick up some ideas. The more tutorials like this the better.

Kansas Blog

I’ve set up a new blog, A Year in Kansas, to chronicle my adventures during my 11 months in the States. I’m going to keep my two blogs pretty much separate; my Kansas blog is going to be squarely targetted at friends and family who want to know how I’m getting on, while this blog will remain focused on my geekier interests.

CSS border art and other treats

Chris Hester’s 3D Border Demo 2 (via Web Graphics) is an impressive demo of just how much you can achieve with CSS borders. His Tips & Demos collection is worth browsing through as well; I particularly liked this Shadow Demo, although markup purists may be distressed by the number of nested divs. The sooner we can use the CSS3 ::outside pseudo element to achieve effects like this without the surplus divs the better.