Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe
Atom feed

Blogmarks

Filters: Sorted by date

Becoming PHP 6 Compatible. According to this article, I’ve been writing PHP 6 compatible code since about 2002.

# 24th September 2007, 12:13 pm / php, php6

IEContentLoaded. An alternative method of detecting DOMContentLoaded on IE; works by polling until the doScroll() method on an unattached element stops throwing errors.

# 24th September 2007, 12:10 pm / domcontentloaded, dom-scripting, hedger-wang, iecontentloaded, internet-explorer, javascript, unobtrusive-javascript

OLPC: Give 1 Get 1. The long rumoured “buy two OLPCs, donate one to the third world” scheme is actually happening. I plan to get one; the robustness, battery life and WiFi range should make for an excellent conference / outdoor machine.

# 24th September 2007, 11:07 am / charity, conferences, hardware, olpc

gefingerpoken. Michal Migurski shows how to implement the algorithm for two-finger deforming drag using affine transformation matrices in Flash.

# 24th September 2007, 8:50 am / affinetransformations, algorithm, flash, matrices, michal-migurski, multitouch

Team Fortress 2. I gave this a go today for old time’s sake. Nine years in development and all they could come up with was TFC without the grenades?

# 23rd September 2007, 10:33 pm / games, onlinegaming, teamfortress2, teamfortressclassic, tf2, tfc, valve

7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails. After two years working on a Rails rewrite of CD Baby, Derek Sivers scrapped it and instead rewrote the PHP version using Rails-inspired design principles. Derek would still use Rails for a greenfield project though.

# 23rd September 2007, 8:49 am / cdbaby, derek-sivers, php, rails, rewrites

Hello JS-CTYPES, Goodbye Binary Components. Mark Finkle is porting Python’s ctypes functionality to the Mozilla platform, to allow binary XPCOM components to be defined in pure JavaScript.

# 22nd September 2007, 11:57 pm / ctypes, javascript, mark-finkle, mozilla, python, xpcom

Sun’s OpenID IdP: Data Governance. Lauren Wood explains the checklist used to ensure Sun’s OpenID provider adequately respected user privacy and data governance (what happens to the data that is stored).

# 22nd September 2007, 8:50 pm / data-governance, governance, lauren-wood, openid, privacy, sun, sunmicrosystems

Sun OpenID IdP: protocol and implementation review. Sun employees are posting lots of useful insights gathered during the implementation of their OpenID provider.

# 22nd September 2007, 8:22 pm / openid, sun, sunmicrosystems

Django GridContainer. Media Temple’s virtualized Django hosting is now accepting applications for beta testers.

# 22nd September 2007, 12:01 pm / django, gridcontainer, hosting, mediatemple, virtualization

robots.txt Adventure. Interesting notes from crawling 4.6 million robots.txt, including 69 different ways in which the word “disallow” can be mis-spelled.

# 22nd September 2007, 12:36 am / andrew-wooster, crawling, robots-txt

Quechup: Another Social Network Enemy! This is why we need to stop teaching users that it’s OK to give their e-mail username and password to any site that asks for it.

# 21st September 2007, 11:36 pm / oauth, openid, quechup, social-networks, spam

OAuth: Your valet key for the Web. OAuth is a really important new specification that aims to solve the “give this application permission to do X on my behalf” problem once and for all.

# 21st September 2007, 11:34 pm / apis, authentication, oauth, openid, specification, web-services

The Rubinius Sprint. Sun are throwing a ton of resources at Ruby, because as Tim Bray says, “it’s not fast enough”. Imagine where they’d be if they’d invested this kind of support in Jython five years ago...

# 21st September 2007, 11:32 pm / java, jython, open-source, python, rubinius, ruby, sourgrapes, sun, tim-bray

Google To “Out Open” Facebook On November 5. “Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.”

# 21st September 2007, 11:23 pm / gmail, google, google-talk, igoogle, michael-arrington, openid, orkut, social-graph, techcrunch

Amazon guide to ripping your CDs. “Many of our customers have already figured out that one cheap way to get DRM-free MP3 files is to buy them on CD and rip them themselves.”

# 21st September 2007, 11:20 pm / amazon, cds, drm, funny

Six Apart: We Are Opening the Social Graph. Six Apart put their cards on the table with respect to the social graph problem—focusing on OpenID, XFN and FOAF as enabling technologies. Be sure to watch the screencast demo of their new social graph visualisation tool.

# 20th September 2007, 9:19 pm / david-recordon, foaf, openid, sixapart, social-graph, xfn

Want To Learn Web Programming? Write A Blog Engine. I couldn’t agree more. Weblogs are an ideal starter project—simple enough to get your head around, complex enough to teach you a bunch of important lessons, ideally suited for eating your own dog food.

# 20th September 2007, 1:17 pm / dogfood, programming, weblogs

Flickr: [what was with the pirates?] Garrrrhhhh! (via) It’s fascinating reading all the complaints on this thread—partly due to different international senses of humour, and partly just because as Flickr became more mainstream it attracted users who never picked up the sense of fun at the center of the Flickr brand.

# 20th September 2007, 9:35 am / community, culturaldifferences, flickr, jokes, talklikeapirateday

Happy Talk Like A Pirate Day. What’s a pirate’s favourite cheese? Cornish Yaaaarg!

# 19th September 2007, 8:55 am / cheese, pirate, talklikeapirateday

ActsAsUndoable. Lawrence Carvalho shows how robust undo functionality can be added to a JavaScript application through careful application of the Memento design pattern.

# 18th September 2007, 3:51 pm / actsasundoable, design-patterns, javascript, lawrence-carvalho, memento, undo, yui

OpenID event at the British Library. On the 8th of November. Sadly I’ll be in Berlin for the Web 2.0 Expo but it looks like a great lineup. Free to attend but limited to 50 people so book soon.

# 18th September 2007, 1:22 pm / berlin, britishlibrary, events, openid, web2expo

Webstock 2008—New Zealand’s web conference. I’m speaking next year in New Zealand! Very excited, plan to spend most of February there to make the most of the flights.

# 18th September 2007, 12:02 pm / newzealand, speaking, travel, webstock, webstock2008

Satisfaction signup page. Check out the box on the right: it lets you use hCard to instantly import your public profile data (including a user icon) from Flickr, Twitter, Upcoming and more.

# 18th September 2007, 11:25 am / hcard, microformats, portablesocialnetworks, satisfaction, signup

Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site. The New York Times finally acknowledges that you can’t be the “paper of record” if no one can link to you.

# 18th September 2007, 8:40 am / journalism, news, new-york-times

Jottit. Aaron Swartz’s latest venture: a complete rethink of the Infogami concept. Well worth checking out for the extremely thoughtful way it introduces features, and the way account creation with a password remains optional until you want to add access control.

# 16th September 2007, 9:43 pm / aaron-swartz, authentication, bitbots, infogami, jottit, usability, userflow, wiki

Opera 9.5 alpha, Kestrel, released. “With history search, Opera creates a full-text index of each and every page you visit, and when you go to the address bar, you can simply start entering words you know have been on pages you’ve visited before, and items matching your search show up.” I just tried this; it’s magic. I’m switching back to Opera from Camino.

# 16th September 2007, 8:34 pm / browsers, camino, full-text-search, history, kestrel, opera, search

virtualenv 0.8.1. Ian Bicking’s tool for creating isolated Python environments; designed to replace his earlier workingenv package. Does anyone have any experience using this? It looks fantastically useful.

# 15th September 2007, 11:36 pm / ian-bicking, python, virtualenv

Zope3 for Djangoers. I prefer “Djangonauts”, personally. Useful overview of Zope 3 for people with Django experience (first of a multi-part series).

# 14th September 2007, 3:20 pm / django, djangonauts, python, zope, zope3

Years

Tags