Simon Willison’s Weblog

Plazes adds Fire Eagle Support. The Plazer software can now automatically update your location in FireEagle based on fingerprinting your laptop’s local network.

# 1:02 am / fireeagle, location, plazes

OSM Super-Strength Export. Awesome new feature on OpenStreetMap: you can browse to anywhere on the map, then hit “export” and download a rendered bitmap or vector (PDF and SVG) image of the currently displayed map—and because it’s OSM there’s no watermark and a very liberal usage license.

# 9:56 am / mapping, maps, openstreetmap, pdf, svg, vector

Reading binary files using Ajax. There’s a simple trick for Firefox, and (amazingly) you can get IE to play along using a function written in VBScript.

# 7:02 pm / ajax, binary, firefox, ie, javascript, vbscript, xmlhttprequest

Google AJAX Search API: Flash and Server Side Access. Over a year after Google shot down their SOAP Search API, they’ve quietly released a JSON based one under the guise of supporting “Flash and other non JavaScript environments”. Comes with the strange requirement that an HTTP referer be sent with every request; the API key is optional.

# 7:16 pm / ajax, apis, google, json, search, soap, web-services