Simon Willison’s Weblog

OpenStreetMap Baghdad. OSM has mapped the streets by tracing from aerial imagery, but needs help with the names of the streets.

# 22nd February 2007, 7:48 am / baghdad, iraq, openstreetmap

Django IRC FAQ. Frequently asked questions from the Django IRC channel.

# 20th February 2007, 10:07 am / django, faq, irc

Geek | Manager. Meri Williams is one of the most productive people I know. This is her new blog on being a manager and a geek at the same time, with plenty of productivity advice.

# 19th February 2007, 10:15 am / geek, manager, meriwilliams, productivity

30 second PyPy tutorial. Zyroth on programming.reddit.com shows how to interactively compile a Python function to C using PyPy and benchmark it against the original.

# 18th February 2007, 9:30 pm / pypy, python

parseDateString function in dateparse.js return wrong date for ’2006-12-31’. I didn’t realise that you have to initialise a JavaScript Date object in a certain order; if you don’t weird bugs can result.

# 17th February 2007, 7:04 pm / date, javascript

Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso’s Response to Steve Jobs’s “Thoughts on Music”. By John Gruber.

# 17th February 2007, 6:58 pm / drm, john-gruber, steve-jobs

Neighbourhood Fix-It. Report problems to your council across the UK. The most detailed Ordinance Survey maps anywhere online, and a superb example of progressive enhancement in action—the maps work without JavaScript, and the site even works without images!

# 17th February 2007, 5:05 pm / barcamplondon2, javascript, maps, matthew-somerville, mysociety, progressive-enhancement

Quick Django Benching. Django under Apache/mod_python outperforms nginx/FastCGI and LightTPD/FastCGI once you ramp up the concurrency levels. My setup for this site (Apache/mod_python behind an nginx proxy, with nginx handling static files) should give the best of both worlds.

# 17th February 2007, 4:56 pm / apache, deployment, django, fastcgi, lighttpd, modpython, nginx

What is The Daily You? New feature from Pegasus News that customises the site based on your browsing history and their detailed taxonomy. Probably useful if you live in Texas, but interesting nonetheless.

# 17th February 2007, 1:12 am / pegasusnews, recommendations

Wikipatterns. Great idea this: a wiki documenting patterns for successfully growing your own wiki.

# 17th February 2007, 12:51 am / atlassian, patterns, wiki

The Zimki Plan. Zimki is a hosted JavaScript application server by Fotango. The idea is to open source it, then build a component so developers can seamlessly switch to hosting on Fotango’s server farm if they need to handle a spike in traffic.

# 16th February 2007, 3:50 pm / fotango, javascript, utilitycomputing, zimki

Badge Any RSS Feed With Yahoo! Pipes. Smart hack from Kent Brewster. Uses Yahoo! Pipes’ JSON output plus a few lines of JavaScript to create a badge from any RSS feed.

# 16th February 2007, 8:21 am / badger, json, kent-brewster, pipes, rss, yahoo

Les Orchard: “Web 3.0 will have Galactica-style angled corners.” (via) Here’s hoping.

# 15th February 2007, 10:35 pm / corners, funny, les-orchard, twitter, web3

Automated Translation of Java to Python. java2python can translate most Java code in to non-idiomatic Python, using ANTLR for the heavy lifting.

# 15th February 2007, 3:50 pm / antlr, java, java2python, python

AOL and OpenID. http://openid.aol.com/your-screenname now works as an OpenID, for every AOL user. Wow.

# 15th February 2007, 11:27 am / aol, openid

Content delivery system design mistakes. Collection of tips for optimising Web server performance. Mentions lighttpd/nginx, Keep-Alive, expires headers, noatime and more.

# 15th February 2007, 11 am / http, lighttpd, nginx, performance

PHP and “OpenID authentication failed: Bad signature”. If you’re seeing a “Bad signature” error in your PHP OpenID application it could be down to a miscompiled GMP library.

# 15th February 2007, 10:02 am / gmp, openid, php

Rails 1.2.1 Impression. I hadn’t seen assert_select before, which lets you unit test generated HTML using CSS selectors; a really neat idea.

# 15th February 2007, 9:14 am / assertselect, css, rails, testing

IE and 2-letter domain-names (via) IE won’t let you set a cookie on XX.YY, where YY is anything other than .pl or .gr. Other browsers have better exception lists.

# 15th February 2007, 12:33 am / cookies, dns, internet-explorer, mark-pilgrim

Introducing RDFa. A way of representing RDF triples in XML that doesn’t suck.

# 15th February 2007, 12:22 am / rdf, rdfa, xml

Tips for Writing Nicer Site Badges. Ed Eliot’s putting together a much needed set of best practices for badges and widgets.

# 14th February 2007, 11:26 pm / badges, ed-eliot

Django templates in Venus. It’s nice to see the Django template system being used outside the context of the overall framework.

# 14th February 2007, 11:22 pm / django, templates, venus

Tutorials on Microformats. Roger Costello’s 11 tutorials on microformats, covering hCard, hCalendar, hReview and more.

# 14th February 2007, 4:45 pm / microformats, tutorial

Multimap API: Decluttering Markers (via) V1.2 of the Multimap API is out, and the nicest new feature is automatic decluttering of close-together markers.

# 14th February 2007, 11:30 am / decluttering, mapping, maps, multimap, multimapapi

FreeYourID.com. A free .name domain for 90 days, with built-in tools for managing e-mail forwarding and your OpenID. Could do with some unobtrusive JavaScript, but they’re really fast at responding to suggestions.

# 13th February 2007, 4:26 pm / domains, freeyourid, openid

Too many Chiefs... OpenID’s current biggest problem is that there are plenty of OpenID providers but not nearly enough places that you can log in to with one.

# 13th February 2007, 11:49 am / openid

Say Hello to Elixir for SQLAlchemy. New ActiveRecord style layer over SQLAlchemy; a collaboration that includes the authors of ActiveMapper and TurboEntity.

# 12th February 2007, 10:28 pm / elixir, python, sqlalchemy

soaplib (via) New open-source Python SOAP library, with a pleasantly Pythonic looking API.

# 12th February 2007, 10:26 pm / jonathan-lacour, python, soap, soaplib, web-services

Fake bloggers soon to be “named and shamed” (via) Apparently due to a new EU directive banning companies from “falsely representing oneself as a consumer”.

# 12th February 2007, 9:35 am / astroturfing, spam

United Nuclear (via) Gotta love an online store that stocks both “Misc Radioactive Items” and “Anti-Radiation Pills”.

# 12th February 2007, 8:25 am / radioactive, science