Simon Willison’s Weblog

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How I Use TextMate. “Ack in Project” is a brilliant replacement for TextMate’s disappointing single threaded “Find in Project” feature.

# 6th December 2008, 10:32 am / ack, alex-payne, textmate

pyquery. “A jQuery-like library for Python”—implemented on top of lxml, providing jQuery style methods for manipulating an HTML or XML document.

# 6th December 2008, 9:53 am / jquery, lxml, pyquery, python, xml

Warcraft account security. Apparently Blizzard have been selling two factor authentication key fobs for World of Warcraft for about six months.

# 6th December 2008, 9:52 am / blizzard, nelson-minar, security, twofactor, worldofwarcraft

Python 3.0. “We are pleased to announce the release of Python 3.0 (final), a new production-ready release, on December 3rd, 2008.”

# 4th December 2008, 12:38 pm / python, python3, releases

Secret Geek A-Team Hacks Back, Defends Worldwide Web. Wired’s take on the story of Dan Kaminsky’s breaking-the-internet DNS vulnerability. Horrible headline.

# 3rd December 2008, 11:10 am / dan-kaminsky, dns, security, wired

Getting OpenID Into the Browser. David Recordon makes the case for online identity management as a key browser feature (I like the “your browser is currently locked” concept), and argues that Gears is in a great position to deliver it.

# 3rd December 2008, 10 am / browsers, david-recordon, gears, identity, openid

24 ways: User Styling. The web geek advent calendar is up and running again this year, with a striking new design.

# 3rd December 2008, 9:08 am / 24-ways, css, design, jon-hicks, userstyles

Internet explorer mystery #1376. IE executes function definitions inside an “if (0)” block. That frightens me.

# 3rd December 2008, 9:04 am / internet-explorer, javascript, ned-batchelder

Amazon SimpleDB a complete flop? Terry asks if anyone is actually using SimpleDB (related Google searches indicate not, and I’ve personally not heard of anyone using it despite plenty of usage of S3 and EC2). One factor might be that lock-in to EC2 and S3 is pretty small, but if you rely on SimpleDB you’ll need to rewrite your entire application to escape.

# 2nd December 2008, 10:17 am / amazon-web-services, cloud, ec2, lockin, s3, simpledb, terry-jones

Dopplr: New city pages, with public tips and Creative-Commons-licenced, Flickr-powered goodness. Explains why I’ve been unable to convince any of the Dopplr crew to come out and do fun things for the past month.

# 1st December 2008, 12:43 am / dopplr, flickr

Live Piracy Map. That’s a heck of a lot of (real, nasty, sea-faring) pirates.

# 1st December 2008, 12:29 am / maps, pirates

Magic/Replace. More inspirational magic from the team at Dabble DB. Be sure to watch the (short) demo video.

# 1st December 2008, 12:23 am / avi-bryant, cleanupdata, dabbledb, data, magicreplace

Skillswap goes Portable. Skillswap Brighton will be addressing OAuth and Data Portability on Wednesday. I’m annoyed to be missing it.

# 21st November 2008, 10:25 am / brighton, data-portability, events, oauth, skillswap

Fort Clonque. Nat and I are heading here for a week of offline holiday. Back on the 28th.

# 21st November 2008, 7:51 am / fortclonque, holiday, offline

OAuth in Minneapolis. OAuth looks like it’s on track for an IETF Working Group.

# 20th November 2008, 6:55 pm / ietf, mark-nottingham, oauth, standards

Results from Hack Day at The Guardian. A full list of hacks from last week’s hack day.

# 19th November 2008, 9:57 am / hackday, the-guardian

Django 1.0.2 released. An update to last week’s 1.0.1 release, which I failed to link to. 1.0.2 mainly fixes some packaging issues, while 1.0.1 contains “over two hundred fixes to the original Django 1.0 codebase”. The team are holding up the promise to move to a regular release cycle after 1.0.

# 19th November 2008, 8:46 am / django, python, releases

The March of Access Control. The W3C Access Control specification is set to become a key technology in enabling secure cross-domain APIs within browsers, and since it addresses a legitimate security issue on the web I hope and expect it will be rolled out a lot faster than most other specs.

# 19th November 2008, 8:40 am / accesscontrol, browsers, crossdomain, internet-explorer, john-resig, security

Notes from Hack Day at The Guardian. Our first hack day was a ridiculous amount of fun. Matt’s write-up includes a 15 minute highlight video, which includes my 90 second presentation of my crowdsourcing SVG-powered parliamentary constituencies hack.

# 18th November 2008, 11:42 pm / hackday, hacks, matt-mcalister, svg, the-guardian

Hack Day at the Guardian. Video of the demos from the first Hack Day at the Guardian. I presented a crowdsourcing app I used to collect annotations for an SVG map of the UK.

# 18th November 2008, 5:58 pm / guardian, hackday, svg

Amazon CloudFront. The Amazon CDN front end for S3 has launched. Traffic is 2 cents per GB more than S3. I’d like to see a price comparison with existing CDNs; I have a hunch it’s an order of magnitude less expensive.

# 18th November 2008, 2:37 pm / amazon, cdn, cloudfront, s3

The new Lawrence.com. The world’s best local entertainment website, relaunched on Django 1.0 with an accompanying substantial redesign.

# 18th November 2008, 2:25 pm / design, django, kansas, lawrence, lawrence-com, python, redesign

On UI Quality (The Little Things): Client-side Image Resizing. Two neat tips for cleanly scaling down images in IE 6 and 7 from Flickr’s Scott Schiller.

# 12th November 2008, 11 pm / flickr, imagescaling, internet-explorer, scott-schiller

lightningtimer.net. I'm fed up of having to dig out or knock up a timer script every time I manage lightning talks, so I've given one a domain name. You can use lightningtimer.net/#90 to set a different start time for the counter.

Update March 25th 2025: I rescued an old copy of this from the Internet Archive and re-published it to tools.simonwillison.net/lightning-timer.

# 12th November 2008, 4:43 pm / javascript, lightning-talks, lightningtimer, projects, tools

Interview @MarsPhoenix (via) “For over a year, Veronica McGregor has been Twittering from Mars.”—an interview with the Twitter voice of the Mars Phoenix lander.

# 11th November 2008, 12:17 pm / marsphoenix, space, twitter, veronicamcgregor

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