Simon Willison’s Weblog

Legal advice for businesses that are scared of open source (via) Useful for pointing people to.

# 31st July 2007, 9:59 pm / law, open-source

Mouseover DOM Inspector v2.0. Steve Chipman’s excellent debugging bookmarklet created back in 2005—includes useful keyboard shortcuts for quickly manipulating the DOM of the current page.

# 30th July 2007, 5:13 pm / bookmarklets, dom, javascript, modi, steve-chipman

XRAY web developer’s suite (via) Smart new bookmarklet from westciv—kind of like Steve Chipman’s MODI but with the addition of the canvas element for box model visualisation.

# 30th July 2007, 5:11 pm / bookmarklets, canvas, javascript, jeffrey-zeldman, steve-chipman, westciv, xray

Django weekly roundup: July 30. Every active open source project needs something like this.

# 30th July 2007, 5:03 pm / clint-ecker, django, open-source

Top 10 dotcoms to watch. From the Guardian—Dopplr and Moo both get a mention.

# 30th July 2007, 2:19 pm / dopplr, guardian, moo, startups

Scale rails from one box to three, four and five. Excellent, concise run-down of what it takes to scale a web application. Most of the advice is easily portable to other frameworks.

# 30th July 2007, 1:40 pm / courtenay, rails, scaling

YUI-based Image Cropper Widget. Nice implementation of a useful widget.

# 30th July 2007, 12:56 pm / javascript, widget, yui

Thread Synchronization Mechanisms in Python. Locks, RLocks, Semaphores, Events and Conditions as explained by Fredrik Lundh.

# 29th July 2007, 9:32 pm / conditions, effbot, events, fredrik-lundh, locks, python, rlocks, semaphores, threads, tutorial

Facebook Bankruptcy. I have exactly the same problem.

# 29th July 2007, 9:11 pm / bankruptcy, facebook, jason-calacanis

System Administrator Appreciation Day. The last Friday in July is Annual System Administrator Appreciation day. Thank (or hug) your sysadmin today!

# 27th July 2007, 7:21 pm / sysadmin

Grub. Jimmy Wales just announced at OSCON that Wikia have acquired Grub from LookSmart, and will be releasing it as open source.

# 27th July 2007, 5:24 pm / grub, jimmywales, looksmart, open-source, oscon, oscon07, search, wikia

tesseract-ocr. Open source OCR, sponsored by Google. I just sat in on a talk on this at OSCON and the complexity of the problem is pretty incredible.

# 26th July 2007, 8:23 pm / google, ocr, oscon, oscon07, tesseract

mod_wsgi 1.0 Release Candiate Available. mod_wsgi is shaping up to be an excellent alternative to mod_python.

# 26th July 2007, 8:21 pm / django, modpython, modwsgi, python, wsgi

High Scalability (via) New blog about building scalable, reliable sites.

# 26th July 2007, 8:15 pm / cal-henderson, highscalability, scaling

Mozilla and IronPython: IronMonkey. Interesting to note that all three new Mozilla projects are being lead by experienced Python developers.

# 26th July 2007, 8:07 pm / ironmonkey, ironpython, javascript, mozilla, python, voidspace

Brendan Eich: New Projects. Exciting new projects from Mozilla. ActionMonkey is joined by IronMonkey (IronPython/IronRuby on Tamarin) and ScreamingMonkey (Tamarin for IE). Upgrading IE’s JavaScript using the Flash Player as a vector is a game-changing idea.

# 26th July 2007, 8:05 pm / actionmonkey, brendan-eich, flash, internet-explorer, ironmonkey, ironpython, ironruby, javascript, mozilla, screamingmonkey, tamarin

Twitter / Natalie: Its announced and official... We’re both moving to Brighton in September.

# 26th July 2007, 5:22 pm / brighton, moving, natalie-downe, twitter, personal-news

YSlow. New extension for Firebug (yes, an extension on top of another extension) from the Yahoo! performance team which provides improved performance measurement tools and optimisation advice.

# 25th July 2007, 4:48 am / extension, firebug, firefox, http, optimisation, performance, yahoo, yslow

OpenID Bootcamp Tutorial. Slides from the OpenID Bootcamp tutorial I gave this morning with David Recordon.

# 25th July 2007, 12:39 am / bootcamp, david-recordon, openid, oscon, oscon07, speaking, my-talks

Instant Django. Portable Django environment for Windows, no installation required. Can also be run from a USB thumb drive.

# 24th July 2007, 6:49 pm / django, instantdjango, python, usb, windows

ActionMonkey (via) SpiderMonkey + Tamarin = ActionMonkey. New JavaScript engine for Mozilla 2, incorporating code from Adobe’s Open Source ActionScript VM.

# 24th July 2007, 3:29 pm / actionmonkey, actionscript, adobe, javascript, mozilla, spidermonkey, tamarin

Django Master Class. Notes and slides from the OSCON tutorial I gave yesterday with Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Jeremy Dunck.

# 24th July 2007, 3:20 pm / django, jacob-kaplan-moss, jeremy-dunck, oscon, oscon07, python, speaking, my-talks, tutorial

Disambiguated URLs with Ruby on Rails. Using before_filter to remove trailing slashes and a few lines of lighttpd configuration to kill the www.

# 24th July 2007, 3:18 pm / disambiguated, lighttpd, nowww, rails, urls

One App, One User Account and Multiple OpenIDs. Dr Nic on allowing many OpenIDs to be associated with a single account.

# 22nd July 2007, 9:42 pm / nic-williams, openid, rails

Building Brickslayer. New tutorial from Michal Wallace on building games in JavaScript using Prototype.

# 22nd July 2007, 9:28 pm / brickslayer, javascript, michal-wallace, prototype-js, tutorial

Undelete in Django. Inspired by the conversation about undo the other day, Nathan Ostgard created a simple solution based around custom managers and a trashed_at model field.

# 20th July 2007, 6:54 pm / custommanagers, django, nathan-ostgard, orm, python, undelete, undo

mod_proxy_balancer gets a thumbs up. Chris Miles explains mod_proxy_balance’s hot spare feature. nginx doesn’t appear to support this, unless I’ve missed something in the documentation.

# 20th July 2007, 5:44 pm / apache, chris-miles, modproxybalance, nginx

Announcing Babel. Impressive new Python i18n / l10n package, with improved message extraction and a huge amount of bundled locale data.

# 20th July 2007, 12:20 pm / babel, christopher-lenz, cldr, i18n, l10n, locale, python, unicode

Friends, Followers, and Notifications. Twitter drops the confusing distinction between “friend” and “follow”—now it’s just “follow”. The less sites that demand I reduce friendship to a binary decision the better.

# 20th July 2007, 10:59 am / friending, social-networks, twitter

Seasoning Templates. “Designing a template language is a lot like seasoning a dish; there’s a whole range of tastes out there.”

# 19th July 2007, 6:04 pm / django, jacob-kaplan-moss, templates