Simon Willison’s Weblog

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January 2005

Jan. 20, 2005

GreaseMonkeyUserScripts. There are quite a few already.

# 12:16 am

Getters/Setters/Fuxors. The oddly titled definitive guide to getters and setters in Python.

# 8:27 am

New eclipse downloads page

Back in November I had a bit of a whinge about how hard it was to find the right file on the Eclipse download page. The Eclipse project have unveiled a prototype of a new, friendlier page and it’s an enormous improvement, thanks mainly to the invaluable new “Looking for Eclipse?” box:

[... 95 words]

SpellBound 0.7.3 (via) Spellchecker extension for Firefox.

# 9:23 pm

Free Software Magazine (via) A magazine that practices what it preaches.

# 9:41 pm

Jan. 21, 2005

Rolling with Ruby on Rails. Extensive Rails tutorial on ONLamp.com.

# 7:50 am

The Emerging Economics of Open Source Software. The latest essay from Bruce Perens.

# 7:52 am

Jan. 22, 2005

PyCon DC 2005 Preliminary Program (via) Looks like a great lineup.

# 2:51 pm

Guardian style guide. Interesting to poke around in.

# 11:19 pm

Jan. 23, 2005

Tiger Pics (via) Screenshots from a development build of OS X Tiger.

# 1:12 am

Gamma correction—Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Mac users: activate expose on this page for some trippy alisaing effects.

# 4:36 pm

Jan. 24, 2005

THE FLICKR SONG. Oh Dear God...

# 10:01 pm

Jan. 25, 2005

Google Video Search: firefox. Recent mentions of Firefox on American TV.

# 9:52 am

BBC re-launches internet radio—everything in one place (via) Listen Again is fantastically useful.

# 11:22 am

BBC Radio mp3 takes off. It seems the podcasting trial has been going pretty well.

# 11:23 am

Where was desktop search when we needed it? Did you know Win XP and 2000 have a half-decent full text indexer built in?

# 4:11 pm

Burns supper. Happy Burns night!

# 9:24 pm

Tags != folksonomies && Tags != Flat name spaces. Clay Shirky’s latest thoughts on tags.

# 10:54 pm / clay-shirky, tagging

A Plan for Spam Folders. Some people actually buy stuff from spam filtered to their spam folders.

# 10:56 pm

Jan. 26, 2005

Don’t build web apps that only work in IE

This is a rant, for which I will make no apologies. The wonderful thing about web applications is that they free you from being tied down to a specific platform. A well written web application is accessible from any platform that can run a web browser. Netscape and Microsoft both realised this back in the mid-90s, which is why Microsoft pulled out all the stops in winning the browser wars; they knew that the browser as an open application platform was a direct threat to their Windows lock-in. It’s not inconceivable to argue that this was the main reason they added so many weird little proprietary DHTML extensions to IE in the following years—and it’s those that are the root of the problem.

[... 311 words]

Kid by Example. It’s Yet Another Python Templating Language, but I have to admit it does look very cool.

# 10:23 am

Sound Studio. Nice shareware sound editing app for OS X.

# 10:57 am

Iraq and cynicism. .

# 6:50 pm

Why Your Pointy Haired Boss Is A Mathematical Certainty. There’s a graph and everything.

# 6:56 pm

Copyright vs Community with Cory Doctorow (via) If you haven’t seen Cory speaking before, watch this.

# 9:43 pm

Jan. 27, 2005

Ruby On Rails + XUL Experiment. States that Wiki is Hawaiian for “can’t find shit.”

# 3:16 am

Darin Fisher joins Ben Goodger at Google. Maybe they’re interested in XUL and Mozilla’s other cross-platform tools.

# 3:30 pm

NSLog() has a funky new design. I don’t know how long it’s looked like this, but I love it.

# 11:20 pm

Jan. 28, 2005

Hacker or Lynx user? That is the question.

# 12:10 am

Baghdad Girl (via) 13 year old Iraqi cat blogger.

# 2:07 pm

2005 » January

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