Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Launch Late to Launch Often. “The bottom line being that you want to invest pre-launch such that you optimize for innovation post-launch.”

# 20th March 2007, 9:50 am / dick-costolo, feedburner

Flash vs. Ajax: It’s time to expand your toolbox. Dan Webb offers his smart, pragmatic take on the Flash vs. Ajax permathread.

# 20th March 2007, 9:49 am / ajax, dan-webb, flash, flex

Two visions. It looks like Mark Pilgrim is going to be joining Hixie at Google.

# 20th March 2007, 8:32 am / google, ian-hickson, mark-pilgrim

Highrise Forum: Using the undocumented API. Add .xml to the end of many URLs in Highrise to get an XML representation of that page.

# 19th March 2007, 11:29 pm / api, highrise, rest, xml

Highrise. The new online contact manager from 37signals—exactly the tool I need for managing my freelancing, and it even accepts OpenID.

# 19th March 2007, 10:39 pm / 37-signals, highrise, openid

On the BBC Annotatable Audio project... Tom’s write-up of the work done on audio annotation by the BBC Radio and Music Interactive R&D team.

# 19th March 2007, 4:13 pm / annotation, bbc, viddler

Viddler.com. Online video sharing site with annotation tools, including the ability to link to a point in a video, tag specific moments and even attach time-specific comments. Reminds me of the BBC’s audio annotation project.

# 19th March 2007, 4:12 pm / annotation, viddler, video

Algorithm Education in Python (via) A paper describing the usage of Python in Algorithm courses at UC Irvine. I found Python invaluable when I was at university and would have loved to see it become part of the official curriculum.

# 19th March 2007, 1:46 pm / education, python

Primality regex. A regular expression that can identify prime numbers. Unsurprisingly, this one comes from the Perl community.

# 18th March 2007, 1:17 am / perl, primenumbers, regex

OmniTI_OpenID. OmniTI’s PHP OpenID 1.1 consumer library. Much less full featured than the JanRain library, but it’s good to have more than one.

# 18th March 2007, 1:15 am / omniti, openid, php

Chris Shiflett: My Amazon Anniversary. Chris Shiflett discloses an unfixed CSRF vulnerability in Amazon’s 1-Click feature that lets an attacker add items to your shopping basket—after reporting the vulnerability to Amazon a year ago!

# 16th March 2007, 10:16 am / amazon, chris-shiflett, csrf, security

What is OpenID Good For? Dare Obasanjo provides some smart responses to Tim Bray’s criticisms of OpenID, including a good angle on the phishing problem.

# 14th March 2007, 10:12 am / dare-obasanjo, openid, phishing, tim-bray

pg8000 v1.02. The pure Python PostgreSQL library now supports DB-API 2.0 (and SSL too). That didn’t take long!

# 13th March 2007, 9:18 pm / dbapi, pg8000, postgresql, python

Improve your forms using HTML5! (via) Anne Van Kesteren demonstrates the Web Forms 2 support in Opera 9—new form attributes include autofocus, required and type=email.

# 13th March 2007, 2:08 pm / anne-van-kesteren, html5, opera, webforms2

WaSP Street Team. A new Web Standards Project initiative to encourage the promotion of Web standards in local communities. Your help needed!

# 13th March 2007, 1:40 pm / web-standards-project

SXSW: Web App Autopsy. Conversion rates and revenue per customer for RegOnline, FeedBurner, Wufoo, and Blinksale.

# 13th March 2007, 12:39 am / sxsw

The Figures Behind The Top Web Apps. DropSend.com makes $100,000 profit a year, before tax. Ryan’s slides also have cost-to-build data for Freshbooks, Maya’s Mom, Mobissimo and Wesabe.

# 13th March 2007, 12:37 am / dropsend, ryan-carson, sxsw

You vs. the Real World. The lengths programming libraries go to to be liberal in what they accept.

# 12th March 2007, 10:48 pm / jacob-kaplan-moss, postelslaw

Google Video: How do I enter transcripts? Neat feature of Google Video I hadn’t seen before: you can upload timestamped transcripts of your videos. Anyone seen a video that uses these?

# 12th March 2007, 10:44 pm / google, google-video, subtitles, transcripts, video

wii.js (via) A JavaScript library that lets you detect the Wii browser, and provides easy hooks for reacting to keys pressed on the Wiimote.

# 12th March 2007, 10:23 pm / javascript, opera, wii

opensource @ Joost. Joost is built on top of Mozilla, Redland, SQLite and a bunch of other bits and pieces of Open Source infrastructure.

# 12th March 2007, 1:29 pm / joost, mozilla, open-source

Balancing One-Wheeled Scooter. Technical details of the scooter I linked to earlier.

# 12th March 2007, 1 pm / make, scooter

XSS. Sanitising HTML is an extremely hard problem. The sanitize helper that ships with Rails is completely broken; Jacques Distler provides a better alternative.

# 12th March 2007, 12:34 am / jacques-distler, rails, security, xss

Meet the one wheel balancing scooter. Home made one wheeled motorised scooter that looks like a skateboard and self-balances like a Segway.

# 11th March 2007, 9:19 pm / engadget, make, scooter

Ficlets (via) AOL’s first application to launch on Rails, and their first application to accept OpenIDs as well as AOL screen names.

# 10th March 2007, 5:41 pm / aol, ficlets, openid, openidconsumer, rails

Google Seattle conference on scalability. Google are hosting a conference on scalability in Seattle on June 23rd. They’ve just put out the CfP.

# 10th March 2007, 4:37 pm / call-for-proposals, conferences, google, scalability, seattle

OpenID Server Integrated with CAS. Case Western Reserve University now provides an OpenID for every network account holder.

# 10th March 2007, 8:48 am / openid

pg8000 (via) A pure-Python interface to PostgreSQL, using the PostgreSQL network protocol directly. Doesn’t (yet) support DB-API 2.0, but that’s promised in a future release.

# 9th March 2007, 7:35 pm / pg8000, postgresql, python

Ajax3d Demo. Really impressive Virus clone, using the canvas element.

# 9th March 2007, 7 pm / 3d, ajax, ajax3d, canvas, javascript

Web Focus Leads Newspapers to Hire Programmers for Editorial Staff. It’s great to see this trend taking off. A newsroom is an excellent place to work as a programmer.

# 8th March 2007, 12:27 am / adrian-holovaty, jacob-kaplan-moss, jobs, newspapers, programmers

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