Simon Willison’s Weblog

Django snippets: Authenticate against Active Directory. Uses a custom authentication backend with the Python ldap module. If Django hasn’t seen the user before a new Django user account is created with data from ldap.

# 8:40 am / ldap, activedirectory, django, authentication, python

Updates to template_utils. James Bennett’s Django template_utils library now provides tags for consuming external RSS and Atom feeds. Combine with template fragment caching for an instant mashup written just using templates.

# 3:25 pm / james-bennett, django, templateutils, rss, atom, feeds, universalfeedparser, python

ErlyWeb vs. Ruby on Rails EC2 Performance Showdown. ErlyWeb’s peak response rate beats Rails by 47x, albeit with a hugely simplified benchmark. More interesting than the results is the idea of using EC2 for benchmarking on identical simulated hardware.

# 3:27 pm / amazon, ec2, virtualisation, erlang, rails, erlyweb, benchmarks, performance, yarivsadan

Shadowmaker. Upload a PNG with a transparent background and get back a shadow image suitable for use with the Google Maps API.

# 3:45 pm / shadowmaker, png, google-maps-api, google-maps