Simon Willison’s Weblog

CSS Transforms. WebKit can now do transforms (scale, rotate, translate and skew) in CSS via a new -webkit-transform property. Transforms behave like position relative in that they don’t affect the layout of the page. You can also provide a full affine transform matrix as a shortcut.

# 9:45 pm / matrix, transforms, affinetransformation, graphics, webkit, safari, apple, css, browsers

Django security fix released. Django’s internationalisation system has a denial of service hole in it; you’re vulnerable if you are using the i18n middleware. Fixes have been made available for trunk, 0.96, 0.95 and 0.91.

# 9:47 pm / django, security, vulnerability, python, i18n, internationalisation, denialofservice

VectorMagic. Neat online tool (with a Flex frontend) for tracing bitmap images in to vectors, based on research at the Stanford AI lab.

# 11:46 am / stanford, images, vectors, graphics, flex, flash, vectormagic

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. (via) See also: Wikipedia’s “List of linguistic example sentences”.

# 6:12 pm / buffalo, linguistics, wikipedia

“Open in TextMate” from Leopard Finder (via) Bookmarked for when our copy of Leopard arrives.

# 6:24 pm / textmate, osx, leopard, finder

Unicode code converter (via) Richard Ishida’s tool for converting pretty much any unicode representation to any other.

# 6:26 pm / unicode, richardishida, conversion, utf8

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review. John Siracusa’s 17 page review of Leopard, covering everything from UI tweaks to DTrace sample code. Smart use of embedded video and audio too—I suggest setting aside at least an hour to work through it all.

# 8:55 am / john-siracusa, arstechnica, leopard, osx, dtrace, apple

How Time Machine works. From John Siracusa’s Leopard review. The bad news is that Time Machine doesn’t deal well with huge files that have small changes made to them... such as Parallels VM images.

# 9:56 am / parallels, apple, osx, leopard, john-siracusa, timemachine, virtualisation, arstechnica

LoggerFS. Clever use of FUSE: a virtual filesystem which looks out for lines appended to a log file (matched with a regular expression) and stores them in a database instead.

# 10:40 am / logging, fuse, loggerfs

Google Announces the OpenSocial API. I doubt the similarity between this and Brad Fitzpatrick’s social graph paper are a coincidence—what IS impressive is that he only joined Google a couple of months ago.

# 4:34 pm / brad-fitzpatrick, google, socialgraph, opensocial, apis

I Love My Chicken Wire Mommy (via) Ben Brown discusses Consumating’s points system, and the problems that it caused within the site’s community. I’m always fascinated by how small features like this can have an enormous effect on how people use a site.

# 4:56 pm / ben-brown, smallthings, points, consumating

Marc Andreesen on Open Social. Marc describes it as an open standard for implementing Facebook style “containers” that other applications can live in. My initial assumption that it was an implementation of the Social Graph paper ideas was incorrect.

# 4:58 pm / marcandreesen, opensocial, google, socialgraph

Sorry PR people: you’re blocked. I was added to some PR mailing lists a few months ago and they appear to be spreading my address around like a nasty disease. I’m tempted to contribute some addresses to Chris Anderson’s block list.

# 5:22 pm / email, chris-anderson, pr, spam

A Roundup Of Leopard Security Features (via) Thomas Ptacek’s overview of the new security features in Leopard. Guest Accounts are worthless from a security P.O.V., but I still plan to use one for our PowerBook that’s now just a media player.

# 5:30 pm / leopard, osx, security, thomas-ptacek

Python on Leopard. readline is finally bundled, so the interactive interpreter works correctly without hunting around for frustratingly elusive add-ons. easy_install is bundled as well.

# 5:53 pm / python, readline, leopard, setuptools, osx, christopher-lenz