Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Digg to drop their global “top users” list. It’s fascinating how big an effect a simple feature like a top users list can have on the social behaviour of a site.

# 2nd February 2007, 6:03 pm / digg, social-software

Linux Genuine Advantage. As with all the best parodies, this one ships with source code.

# 2nd February 2007, 5:29 pm / funny, linux, vista

Microsoft confirms Vista Speech Recognition remote execution flaw. “I have verified that I can create a sound file that can wake Vista speech recognition, open Windows Explorer, delete the documents folder, and then empty the trash.”

# 1st February 2007, 5:19 pm / funny, microsoft, security, speechrecognition, vista

iConcertCal (via) “iConcertCal is a free iTunes plug-in that monitors your music library and generates a personalized calendar of upcoming concerts in your city.”

# 1st February 2007, 5:12 pm / icalendar, iconcertcal, music

Jeff Croft: Geocoding My Life. Really smart weblog integration of the Flickr API, using the Geocoder.us reverse geocoder along with hand entered locations to create a browseable archive of photos by location.

# 1st February 2007, 1:27 pm / django, flickr, geocoding, jeff-croft, mashup

nose. Really nice Python unit testing tool—run ’nosetests somedir’ and it finds and executes every unittest (and test_like function) it can find in that directory tree.

# 1st February 2007, 2:20 am / nose, python, testing

Spelling correction using the Python Natural Language Toolkit. Uses porter stemming to implement a search engine ’did you mean’ feature based on the Brown Corpus.

# 31st January 2007, 10:07 pm / browncorpus, natural-language, nltk, porterstemming, python

Mr. Gosling—why did you make URL equals suck?!? Wow, the behaviour of java.net.URL.equals is completely idiotic.

# 31st January 2007, 8:40 pm / java

Announcing Jyte. “Jyte is a simple service that allows you to associate claims, credibility and contacts to build a reputation with your OpenID”. The OpenID landscape is wide open for innovation like this.

# 31st January 2007, 6:04 pm / janrain, jyte, openid, scott-kveton

James Randi owes me a million dollars (via) Interesting case study in cryptographic bit commitment protocols, which allow something to be published that can later prove the authenticity of a revealed secret.

# 30th January 2007, 1:10 am / cryptography

OpenID as easy as 1,2,3. An idproxy.net walkthrough, with screenshots.

# 30th January 2007, 12:27 am / howto, idproxy

XRID.net (via) Sign up for a free @xrid*something i-name by logging in with an OpenID.

# 29th January 2007, 4:55 am / iname, openid, xri

Apple UK Get a Mac ads. Totally awesome, they’re using Mitchell and Webb. Not sure how much Mac users will want to be associated with Jeremy from Peep Show though...

# 29th January 2007, 4:27 am / advertising, apple, mitchell-and-webb, peepshow

undisposable.org. A free Web Service for checking if an address is likely to come from a disposable e-mail service. It’s the anti-Mailinator!

# 29th January 2007, 3:49 am / mailinator, undisposable, webservice

OpenID Enabled: OpenID Tests. Useful for checking if your OpenID consumer or server are working OK.

# 27th January 2007, 10:34 am / janrain, openid

How-to: Read and Write NTFS Windows Partition on Mac OS X. NTFS driver for MacFUSE, with full read and write support. Great for BootCamp.

# 27th January 2007, 12:55 am / bootcamp, macfuse, macos, ntfs, windows

MacFUSE Tech Demos from Amit Singh’s Macworld 2007 Talk (via) DocsFS, PicasawebFS, ProfFS, RSSFS and SpotlightFS. Eye-opening—especially the ease with which they can be mounted.

# 27th January 2007, 12:38 am / amit-singh, filesystem, macfuse, macos

Introduction to Neogeography (via) Having run in to Andrew Turner at last year’s EuroOSCON, this is the first O’Reilly Short Cuts PDF that I’ve been seriously tempted to buy.

# 27th January 2007, 12:09 am / andrew-turner, eurooscon, mapping, neogeography, oreilly

VCS Migration: The Hare and the Tortoise. Bazaar and Mercurial compared from the point of view of importing 1 million diffs from Mozilla CVS. Bazaar’s import is more robust but will take more than a month to complete.

# 26th January 2007, 11:44 pm / bazaar, mercurial, mozilla, version-control

Web 2.0 Company Name Generator. I talked to a company recently who had actually used this to come up with a name for one of their products.

# 26th January 2007, 6:38 pm / funny, web2

Opera Skins: Tango CL. This skin is the first thing I install when I set up Opera. It’s an enormous improvement on the default.

# 26th January 2007, 4:16 pm / opera, skin

The Django Book: Deploying Django. Solid advice based on years of experience at the Journal-World and the Washington Post.

# 26th January 2007, 12:38 pm / deployment, django, django-book

Farm subsidies in United Kingdom. Top recipients of EU subsidies in the UK include Tate and Lyle and Nestle—do they really need the money?

# 26th January 2007, 12:07 pm

XForms in Firefox (via) Practical tutorial on taking advantage of the Firefox XForms plugin, sadly not yet bundled with the browser itself.

# 26th January 2007, 9:59 am / firefox, tutorial, xforms, xml

MySpace Allegedly Kills Computer Security Website. No need for the allegedly; it’s been confirmed. MySpace got GoDaddy.com to redirect DNS for seclists.org after a list of phished user accounts posted to the full disclosure mailing list list was archived there.

# 26th January 2007, 9:57 am / dns, godaddy, myspace, phishing, security

Ninja kitten band win Coke battle (via) There’s a headline you don’t expect to see on BBC News.

# 26th January 2007, 1:05 am / bbcnews, humor, joel-veitch, kittens

Justin Mason: more on social whitelisting with OpenID. The author of spam assassin warns that whitelist-based trust networks are a lot harder than they look.

# 26th January 2007, 1:02 am / openid, social-whitelisting, spamassassin

Social whitelisting with OpenID... (plasticbag.org). Tom’s write-up of the social whitelisting idea. Lots of sceptics in the comments.

# 26th January 2007, 1 am / openid, social-whitelisting, spam, tom-coates

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