Simon Willison’s Weblog

Mozilla Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 Release Notes. New features include animated PNGs, <link rel="offline-resource"> and the HttpOnly cookie flag which indicates that a cookie should not be accessible to script (borrowed from IE).

# 25th March 2007, 9:37 pm / granparadiso, httponly, mozilla, offlinebrowsing

Free Software Foundation to switch to Django. “FSF is switching from Zope to Django (both Python powered!) for web application development... Lots of new stuff coming soon, including contributions back to the Django community.”

# 25th March 2007, 7:56 pm / django, free-software-foundation, python, zope

Twitter from TextMate. A TextMate Bundle that lets you send your currently selected text to Twitter.

# 25th March 2007, 6:10 pm / stuart-colville, textmate, twitter

Python web development and frameworks in 2007. A fair and detailed look at the current main options for web development with Python.

# 25th March 2007, 5:30 pm / python

JPC (via) Pure Java emulation of an x86 PC, running at 10% native speed. No code to download yet, but there’s a neat applet that lets you play Lemmings (and other games) running on FreeDOS.

# 25th March 2007, 5:06 pm / java, lemmings, virtualization

JSON and JSON-RPC for Erlang. Nice example of using lists:reverse and an accumulator to efficiently build a string in reverse order.

# 25th March 2007, 4:29 pm / erlang, json, jsonrpc

Adobe Apollo: beyond the hype. Niall Kennedy explains Apollo.

# 24th March 2007, 7:10 pm / adobe, apollo, niall-kennedy

Commodore 2.1-20070321 (via) Without a doubt the best WordPress theme ever.

# 24th March 2007, 5:07 pm / commodore, wordpress

TweetyPy. A Python-based CLI client for Twitter, by Stuart Colville

# 24th March 2007, 4:47 pm / cli, python, stuart-colville, tweetypy, twitter

Dave Thomas on Writing a Book. A series of articles on writing a technical book, from Pragmatic Programmer Dave Thomas.

# 24th March 2007, 2:53 pm / dave-thomas, writing

Django version 0.96 release notes. The two big improvements are the newforms library and the ability to use callables directly in your URLconfs, enabling a bunch of useful new tricks.

# 23rd March 2007, 11:47 pm / django, newforms, urlconfs

Beginner’s guide to OpenID phishing (via) Excellent primer on the phishing problem, which concludes that phishing can only be solved by moving away from usernames and passwords entirely.

# 23rd March 2007, 9:22 pm / openid, phishing

New Open Source Utility Library for the Google Maps API (via) Google are taking a hybrid approach to development on their Maps API—an open source utility library layered on top of their closed source, obfuscated core code.

# 23rd March 2007, 9:09 pm / google, google-maps, open-source

ANN: PHP OpenID 1.2.2 released. Includes a fix to a bug that was causing some consumers to be incompatible with the WordPress.com OpenID provider. If you’re using this in a PHP OpenID consumer you should upgrade now.

# 23rd March 2007, 8:33 pm / janrain, openid, php

base2. Dean Edwards’ new JavaScript library which adds useful cross-browser features based on upcoming DOM standards (the Selectors API, DOMContentLoaded, addEventListener and more).

# 23rd March 2007, 5:59 pm / addeventlistener, base2, dean-edwards, domcontentloaded, javascript, libraries, selectors

Rules For JavaScript Library Authors. The guiding principles behind Dean Edwards’ base2 library, entirely applicable to every JavaScript developer.

# 23rd March 2007, 5:53 pm / base2, dean-edwards, javascript, libraries

HP acquires Tabblo. The first high profile Django-powered acquisition? Very well deserved; Tabblo is an excellent application.

# 23rd March 2007, 3:49 pm / django, hp, tabblo

Modest Maps. Flash draggable maps library, BSD-licensed. Use it with tiles from OpenStreetMap / NASA / Google / Yahoo! etc or run it against your own tile set.

# 23rd March 2007, 3:41 pm / flash, maps, modestmaps

How to code debuggers (via) Accessible discussion of debuggers, ptrace, ELF, dynamic libraries and /proc.

# 23rd March 2007, 9:22 am / debuggers, dynlibs, elf, ptrace

My photos tagged “cheese” on a Google Map. You can paste a Flickr GeoRSS feed directly in to the Google Maps query box.

# 23rd March 2007, 1:55 am / cheese, flickr, georss, google, google-maps

Highrise: Early stats, Cases for all, the new Solo plan, and more disk space! 9% of signups came in through OpenID, and they’ve opened up cases to everyone fixing my number one complaint about the service. Great job!

# 23rd March 2007, 1:44 am / 37-signals, highise, openid

Vitamin Interviews: Simon Willison. Bobbie Johnson pointed a camera at me after my Future of Web Apps talk and interviewed me for eight minutes on OpenID.

# 23rd March 2007, 1:41 am / bobbie-johnson, fowa, future-of-web-apps, interview, openid

KML and GeoRSS support added to the Google Maps API. Since Flickr can output GeoRSS, this means you can now plot your Flickr photos on a Google Map (if you’re so inclined).

# 23rd March 2007, 1:03 am / flickr, georss, google, google-maps, kml

Highrise Forum: Cases for the Rest of Us. My biggest problem with Highrise: I could really do with cases, but I just can’t justify shelling out $50 a month for them when I only need one user.

# 21st March 2007, 2:01 am / cases, highrise

applications used by simon. My profile on iusethis.

# 21st March 2007, 1:12 am / iusethis, macos

Iusethis now supports OpenID for authentication. A great example of a site I probably wouldn’t have tried out if it hadn’t supported OpenID.

# 21st March 2007, 1:11 am / iusethis, openid, openidconsumer

JavaScript/CSS Font Detector (via) Really clever trick: detects the fonts that you have installed by writing out some text and measuring its dimensions.

# 20th March 2007, 11:20 pm / css, fonts, javascript

Subversion Tips. To edit a Subversion log entry: svn propset --revprop -r XXX svn:log “New message here”

# 20th March 2007, 2:59 pm / subversion

DED|Chain JavaScript Library (via) Dustin’s new JavaScript library, which puts a JQuery style chained API on top of YUI.

# 20th March 2007, 10:36 am / dedchain, dustin-diaz, javascript, jquery, yui

A Zoned Defense. Using JavaScript’s date.getTimezoneOffset() to detect the user’s timezone and stash it in a cookie.

# 20th March 2007, 9:51 am / javascript, timezones