Simon Willison’s Weblog

jsbeautifier.org. Simple online tool for unpacking and beautifying JavaScript.

# 10:39 pm / javascript, obfuscation

Twitter, reformatted. I wrote a Yahoo! Pipe to clean up Twitter’s RSS feeds—removing the username prefix and filtering out items that begin with “@” or “RT”..

# 1:10 am / rss, pipes, twitter, yahoopipes

webhook-relay. Another of my experiments with Node.js: webhook-relay is a self-contained queue and webhook request sending agent. Your application can POST to it specifying a webhook alert to be sent off, and webhook-relay will place that request in an in-memory queue and send it on its own time, avoiding the need for your main application server to block until the outgoing request has been processed.

# 10:17 am / nodejs, node, javascript, webhooks, experiments, projects, webhookrelay

Placehold.it. Useful dynamic image generator for layout mockups—just drop an image in to a page pointing at http://placehold.it/300x200. Takes optional arguments for text, colour and format as well.

# 2:32 pm / images, layout, design

Fear and Loathing in Farmville. “At multiple times during the conference, [Daniel] James expressed his serious ethical qualms over the path social gaming was laying for the industry. So many of the methods for making money are thinly-veiled scams that simply exploit psychological flaws in the human brain.”

# 10:13 am / ethics, gaming, facebook, farmville, psychology

Using Django as a Pass Through Image Proxy (via) Neat idea for running development environments against data copied from a live production site—a static file serving handler which uses a local cache but copies in user-uploaded files from the production site the first time they are requested.

# 7:18 am / django, proxy

Fun with TextMate and PDB. TextMate bookmarks (against lines in a file) are stored as OS X extended attributes, which can be accessed from Python using the xattr module. Here’s a clever piece of code that uses bookmarks to set breakpoints in the command-line pdb debugger.

# 9:48 am / python, xattr, pdb, debugging, textmate, osx

Side-Channel Leaks in Web Applications. Interesting new security research. SSL web connections encrypt the content but an attacker can still see the size of the HTTP requests going back and forward—which can be enough to extract significant pieces of information, especially in applications that make a lot of Ajax requests.

# 4:24 pm / ssl, security, sidechannel, http, ajax

Video on the Web—Dive Into HTML5. Everything a web developer needs to know about video containers, video codecs, adio containers, audio codecs, h.264, theora, vorbis, licensing, encoding, batch encoding and the html5 video element.

# 12:50 am / theora, h264, video, audio, html5, mark-pilgrim

The Onion Uses Django, And Why It Matters To Us. The Onion ported their main site from PHP and Drupal to Django in three months with a team of four developers, including a full migration of their archived content. Their developers answer questions about the switch in this thread on the Django sub-reddit.

# 6:43 pm / reddit, django, python, the-onion, php, drupal

Random Guardian (via) A random page from today’s Guardian, built by Daniel Vydra.

# 4:47 pm / guardian, random, daniel-vydra

Preview: Freebase Gridworks (via) If my experience with government datasets has taught me anything, it’s that most datasets are collected by human beings (probably using Excel) and human beings are inconsistent. The first step in any data related project inevitably involves cleaning up the data. The Freebase team must run up against this all the time, and it looks like they’re tackling the problem head-on. Freebase Gridworks is just a screencast preview at the moment but an open source release is promised “within a month”—and the tool looks absolutely fantastic. DabbleDB-style data refactoring of spreadsheet data, running on your desktop but with the UI served in a browser. Full undo, a JavaScript-based expression language, powerful faceting and the ability to “reconcile” data against Freebase types (matching up country names, for example). I can’t wait to get my hands on this.

# 6:43 pm / freebase, gridworks, cleanup, data, open-data, dabbledb, javascript

A Turing Machine. Someone finally built a real turing machine—and it’s beautiful. All calculations are carried out on a tape, which has 1s and 0s written on it by a robotic dry-erase marker. Hypnotic.

# 2:28 pm / turingmachine, hardware

Redis weekly update #3—Pub/Sub and more. Redis is now a publish/subscribe server—and it ended up only taking 150 lines of C code since Redis internals were already based on that paradigm.

# 3:15 pm / nosql, pubsub, redis, c

Plugging the CSS History Leak (via) Firefox is fixing the nefarious CSS visited link colour history leak flaw, which currently affects all browsers and allows a malicious site to determine if you have visited a specific site by checking getComputedStyle against a link to that page. It’s an obtrusive but necessary fix—visited link styles will be restricted to colour and border styles (no background images and hence no more checkbox effects since the image request could leak information) and those colours will not be reported via getComputedStyle. I hope other browser vendors follow suit.

# 8:01 pm / security, css, history, firefox, mozilla