Simon Willison’s Weblog

New Media Hack on YDN Python Center. Recommends pycurl—I have to admit I hadn’t looked at that.

# 11:29 pm

O’Reilly Radar: The Value of Web Standards. “... we’re finally getting rewards for standards-compliance ...”

# 1:42 pm

Rails 1.1.5: Mandatory security patch. Upgrade now, and spread the word.

# 8:55 pm / rails, security

The Python Developer Center got Slashdotted. And this comment made me smile.

# 10:18 pm

On the total nondisclosure of the 8/9/06 [Rails] security vulnerability. The best argument I’ve seen in favour of full disclosure.

# 2:53 pm / rails, disclosure, security

Schneier on Security: New Airline Security Rules. “I’m sure glad I’m not flying anywhere this week” says Bruce. Now I wish I wasn’t!

# 4:26 pm / bruce-schneier, security, airlines

Release: Unobtrusive Javascript For Rails 0.2. RJS kind of sucks. This looks like it doesn’t.

# 4:30 pm

upcalendar. Aaron’s Python S60 app for syncing Upcoming with your phone.

# 5:36 pm

Rails 1.1.6, backports, and full disclosure. Fixes a left over problem from 1.1.5.

# 7:20 pm

Hot PHP UTF-8 tips. Always good to have.

# 7:32 pm

zefrank: don’t be afraid. Terrorists levarage our inability to understand risk.

# 11:11 pm

Django URL dispatcher: Passing callable objects instead of strings. I’m really excited about this change.

# 8:56 am

List of songs performed on the show—zefrank. I often use these to illustrate points at work.

# 3:47 pm

MySQL: Get total number of rows when using LIMIT (via) Useful tip.

# 4:22 pm

Saying goodbye to Visual Basic (for Mac Office). Fascinating detailed insight from a Microsoft MacBU developer.

# 5:12 pm

Gallions Reach. 3D graphics in Opera 9, courtesy of the JavaScript demo scene.

# 5:13 pm

Pub Standards on the 15th. “It’s nearly Autumn” beer.

# 5:14 pm

re2c. A faster lex with a focus on regex matching.

# 11:35 am

ack (via) Someone wrote a better grep.

# 11:45 am

Opera Skin: Tango CL. Great skin for Opera—makes the OS X version far less of an eyesore.

# 11:51 am

Bruce Schneier Facts. “SSL is invulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. Unless that man is Bruce Schneier.”

# 2:19 pm / bruce-schneier, security, funny

Dapper. Ambitious attempt to make screen scraping available to the masses.

# 9:10 pm

Bradley Horowitz on Interestingness. The concept of user-discovered content is very useful.

# 9:51 pm

10 Cool Things About The New Yahoo! Photos. The new Photos interface is a beautiful piece of work. Scott is an absolute wizzard.

# 11:05 pm

HOWTO: Adding an RSS feed to a Subversion Server. Using post-commit hooks and some Python.

# 11:17 pm / rss, python, subversion

The Auto-Admin Ecosystem. Streamlined developer’s roundup of alternatives.

# 9:51 am

DateBocks—Intuitive Date Input Selection. A better version of my better date input script, packaged as a Rails Engine.

# 10:03 am

If It’s Not Nailed Down, Steal It. Pattern Matching, S-Expressions, and Domain Specific Languages in Ruby.

# 10:18 am

[xsl] Replace newline characters(\n) with <br>. This is why I’m not a fan of XSLT for templating.

# 10:26 am

Parsing XML can open network sockets (via) Yikes. Something to bare in mind.

# 2:27 pm / xml, security