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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.
Live Piracy Map. That’s a heck of a lot of (real, nasty, sea-faring) pirates.
Magic/Replace. More inspirational magic from the team at Dabble DB. Be sure to watch the (short) demo video.
Skillswap goes Portable. Skillswap Brighton will be addressing OAuth and Data Portability on Wednesday. I’m annoyed to be missing it.
Fort Clonque. Nat and I are heading here for a week of offline holiday. Back on the 28th.
OAuth in Minneapolis. OAuth looks like it’s on track for an IETF Working Group.
A Matter of Loaf and Death Comes to BBC One This Christmas. New Wallace and Gromit 30 minute short!
Lisa Simpson—crossword fan and ... Django developer? The Django Pony strikes again.
Results from Hack Day at The Guardian. A full list of hacks from last week’s hack day.
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.
Dollarshort: The Definition of a Slow News Day. How to deal with Valleyway.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The new Lawrence.com. The world’s best local entertainment website, relaunched on Django 1.0 with an accompanying substantial 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.
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.
DRGBLZ. lolzeppelins?
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.
Worst. Bug. Ever. Android phones were executing every keystroke typed in to the phone in an invisible root shell! Text “reboot” to a friend and your phone rebooted. Wow.
License Hacking. Wikipedia is making the switch to a CC license, by asking the Free Software Foundation to include that as an option in the latest version of the Free Documentation License which Wikipedia currently uses and which includes an auto-upgrade clause. Devious.
iPhone Backup Extractor possibilities (via) Nick Ludlam points out that iTunes backs up your iPhone call records by copying across a sqlite database—which means it wouldn’t be at all hard to extract the logs in to a larger database. Could make for a really cool addition to a private lifestreaming application.
Secrets of the Django ORM. An undocumented (and unsupported) method of poking a Django QuerySet’s internal query to add group_by and having clauses to a SQL query.
Clearing up inaccuracies about the Google OpenID IDP launch. Google took some undeserved flack when they launched their OpenID provider. For the record, whitelisting providers fits my definition of the “Open” in OpenID perfectly (providers and consumers are free to impose whatever policies they like).
The Tea Cosy. Our favourite Brighton tea room has redesigned their site—truly classy. Don’t forget to memorise the etiquette rules.
Introducing Acre. I’m losing track of all the server-side JavaScript hosted web application platforms now. Here’s the Freebase contribution to the genre, complete with IDE, templating language and strong integration with Freebase itself.
jQuery history plugin. I used this plugin to add back button support to a small Ajax app today, with great results. I tried it a while ago and it didn’t work in Safari, but someone has updated it since and now it works perfectly.
It’s a purple world. Stuart Langridge made a purplish map of the US election results, using JSON data from Google and an SVG map of the US from Wikipedia.
Code your own election mashup with Google’s JSON data. The data that powered Google’s US election results map is available to download as a bunch of JSON files.