Simon Willison’s Weblog

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March 2005

March 1, 2005

Iceberg 1.1.4 (via) Free application for creating OS X installation packages.

# 12:54 am

JavaScript and domain specific languages. My latest musings on SitePoint.

# 4:31 pm

Penny Arcade on kottke.org. The differences between the web comic and weblog communities are fascinating.

# 5:44 pm

LugRadio Live

The guys over at LugRadio (nice new site, see Stuart’s blog for gnarly implementation details) have announced the details of their long hinted-at Linux event, LugRadio Live. I’m pretty excited about it; word on the grape vine is that they’re booking some really cool speakers, but they’re completely committed to keeping a grassroots feel to things. The 15 minute lightning talks should be a lot of fun (I’ve tentatively offered one on Firefox extensions) and it sounds like the atmosphere will reflect that of the show—irreverent, fun and with a trip to the pub afterwards.

[... 128 words]

Scratch Weblogging Software (via) Who needs HTML? Post by MetaWeblogAPI, read by RSS.

# 11:18 pm

March 2, 2005

Again, a newspaper PDF experiment is fatally flawed. Adrian nails the reason PDF editions will always play second fiddle to the real web.

# 11:25 am / adrian-holovaty

Wired: The Book Stops Here. Truly excellent, in-depth article on Wikipedia from Wired.

# 12:04 pm

blo.gs: for sale. Rats. blo.gs powers my blogroll. I hope the API doesn’t go away.

# 12:06 pm

Adding Persistent Searches to Gmail (via) Brilliant greasemonkey hack.

# 12:21 pm / gmail, greasemonkey

Relaxation Ranking Passage Retrieval. Steve Green explains Sun’s passage search technology.

# 1:20 pm

March 3, 2005

Magic Quotes Headaches. A nice roundup of why magic quotes is the worst PHP feature ever.

# 8:40 am

Providing Application Access to SQL Data in Apple Remote Desktop 2 (via) Interesting—Apple’s Remote Desktop 2 runs off a PostgreSQL database.

# 10:28 am / apple, postgresql

Flying Meat: FlySketch. Really neat OS X application—lets you draw over part of your screen, then save the drawing.

# 10:44 am

Photos of assorted baby animals. My favourite is the Tern.

# 9:53 pm

March 4, 2005

Problems with Trac? Switch to FSFS

I’m head over heels in love with Trac, and have been for about 6 months now. It really is best-of-breed software: it neatly integrates a wiki, a simple bug tracker and a Subversion repository browser with clean markup, a nice default design and a learning curve for new users that can be measured in minutes. No wonder it’s started to show up all over the place.

[... 350 words]

Eric Meyer gets spammed in person. Just too funny.

# 6:36 pm

March 5, 2005

Don’t Talk To Me Anymore! The BBC are closing some of their message boards. Unsurprisingly, the associated communities are very upset.

# 2:03 pm

March 6, 2005

Controlling iTunes by rocking your PowerBook (via) Cunning Python/AppleScript hack that interfaces with the new motion detector.

# 2:35 am

Search Engine Strategies New York. Eric Meyer is a stranger in a strange land.

# 12:19 pm

NS 8 Beta review. Danial Glazman gives it to thumbs down.

# 9:57 pm

NS8, part 1: I need closure. Blake Ross on Netscape 8’s many usability snafus.

# 9:58 pm

The strength of edition (via) Brian Hamman defends “digital editions”—not a position you see very often.

# 10:14 pm

March 7, 2005

Bad laws won’t stop the bombers (via) Explaining the motivations behind the UK’s scandalous new anti-terror laws.

# 2:40 pm

Anabasis. Jeremy Dunck finally set up his domain name.

# 3:35 pm

Greasemonkey Stole Your Job (and Your Business Model) (via) “It’s so meta” in the comments made me chuckle.

# 3:48 pm / greasemonkey

Are Confirmation Dialogs Harmful? (via) Undo beats confirmation dialogs every time.

# 3:56 pm

From the archives of The Scotsman. In 1865, newspapers were formatted much like blogs.

# 5:27 pm

The on-demand blogosphere. I get a bit-part in a Jon Udell screencast! This actually ties in to my final year project...

# 9:31 pm / jon-udell

2005 » March

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