Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Tuesday, 9th October 2007

Amazon Gets an SLA (But I Still Can’t Use It). “Ontario’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Acts (FIPPA) don’t allow me to store sensitive information (e.g., students’ work) in jurisdictions that permit secret warrants, like those mandated by the USA PATRIOT Act.” # 3 pm

Two months with Ruby on Rails. Good rant—covers both the good and the bad. The first complaint is the lack of XSS protection by default in the template language. Django has the same problem, but the solution was 90% there when I saw Malcolm at OSCON. # 12:23 pm

Writing An Hadoop MapReduce Program In Python. Hadoop (the open source map/reduce framework) can interact with any program that reads from stdin and outputs on stdout—so it’s trivial to drop in Python scripts for the map and reduce steps. # 11:33 am

tranquil. Inspired take on the Django ORM to SQLAlchemy problem: lets you define your models with the Django ORM but use SQLAlchemy to run queries against them. # 2:30 am

String types in Python 3. bytes are now immutable (just like the bytestrings they are replacing) and a new mutable buffer type has been introduced. # 2:08 am

OpenID.net has been redesigned. Love the new look—much cleaner and easier to understand, and it now gives people looking to get themselves an OpenID somewhere to go. # 2 am

Tabula Fracta. Mozilla hacker Robert O’Callahan offers advice for anyone aiming to create a new rendering engine from scratch. The WHATWG’s work on specifying real-world browser behaviour and error models gets a well deserved mention. # 1:20 am

Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement (via) Went in to effect on the 1st of October. Promises 99.9% uptime over a monthly billing cycle or you get “service credits” towards future S3 payments. # 12:52 am