Simon Willison’s Weblog

Changes in Opera’s user agent string format (via) How depressing... Opera 10 will ship with 9.80 in the User-Agent string because badly written browser sniffing scripts can’t cope with double digits.

# 1:16 am / opera, browsersniffing, browsers, useragent

Announcing Google Maps API v3. Sounds like a complete rewrite, with performance as the key goal. Only a developer preview at the moment, but my favourite feature is that API keys are no longer required.

# 1:22 am / google, api-keys, google-maps, googlemaps3, mapping

TiddlyPocketBook. Paul Downey took Nat’s dinky pocketbooks CSS and combined it with TiddlyWiki to create a single page pocketbook editor.

# 1:24 am / pocketbook, natalie-downe, paul-downey, tiddlywiki, css, javascript

optfunc. Command line parsing libraries in Python such as optparse frustrate me because I can never remember how to use them without consulting the manual. optfunc is a new experimental interface to optparse which works by introspecting a function definition (including its arguments and their default values) and using that to construct a command line argument parser. Feedback and suggestions welcome!

# 7:38 pm / optfunc, github, introspection, commandlines, optparse, projects, python

PostgreSQL Development Priorities. The top two for 8.4 are “Simple built-in replication” and “Upgrade-in-place”, Josh Berkus is seeking feedback on priorities for future work on 8.5.

# 8:08 pm / postgresql, replication, josh-berkus, databases, open-source

Perl 6: The MAIN sub (via) "Calling subs and running a typical Unix program from the command line is visually very similar: you can have positional, optional and named arguments." - that's exactly what I was thinking when I came up with optfunc.

# 9:32 pm / perl, optfunc, commandlines, perl6, python, unix