Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Why people hate SEO... (and why SMO is bulls$%t). Jason Calacanis explains SMO, or “Social Media Optimisation”—digg spamming now has its own TLA.

# 8th February 2007, 7:47 am / jason-calacanis, seo, smo, spam, tla

method_missing: best saved for last. My least favourite thing about Ruby is the cultural tendency towards introducing weird new bugs in other people’s code.

# 7th February 2007, 2:16 pm / methodmissing, ruby

TurboGears and Pylons (a technical comparison). Ian Bicking explores the differences between the two, and finds that the most significant is probably CherryPy v.s. Paste.

# 7th February 2007, 1:51 pm / cherrypy, paste, pylons, python, turbogears

Useless Account. “Change your password 1000 times a day... For Free!”

# 7th February 2007, 1:29 pm / funny, uselessaccount

Thoughts on Music. Steve Jobs comes out against DRM, lays the blame squarely on the big four music companies.

# 7th February 2007, 2:25 am / apple, drm, steve-jobs

CardSpace & OpenID: Working together. A more detailed explanation of what the Microsoft OpenID collaboration actually means.

# 7th February 2007, 1:58 am / cardspace, microsoft, openid, scott-kveton

Microsoft & OpenID. HUGE news. Microsoft are officially supporting OpenID, through integration with CardSpace.

# 7th February 2007, 1:56 am / cardspace, microsoft, openid

Em Calculator. Tool for working out CSS relative em values, useful for creating completely resizable layouts.

# 6th February 2007, 2:03 pm / css, ems, layout

Live DOM Viewer (via) Neat tool from Hixie that provides an insight in to what browsers are actually thinking.

# 6th February 2007, 1:12 am / browsers, dom, ian-hickson, javascript

Running the DRM Gauntlet. DRM war stories from the Songbird team. Windows Media and QuickTime both block debuggers in different ways.

# 6th February 2007, 12:55 am / drm, quicktime, songbird, windowsmedia

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us. Absolutely worth watching—don’t be put off by the title.

# 5th February 2007, 11:05 pm / web2, youtube

The window.onload problem (still). Peter Michaux offers the most comprehensive overview of this important topic to date.

# 5th February 2007, 8:13 pm / javascript, onload

SMTP Service Extension for Yadis Discovery. Could potentially let you use your e-mail address as an OpenID, although personally I wouldn’t always want to hand my address over to third-party sites.

# 5th February 2007, 9:44 am / dmitryshechtman, email, identity, openid, yadis

This site may harm your computer. Tom Dyson’s personal weblog was flagged by Google as hosting malicious software, without any clue as to what the problem was. Sure looks like a false positive to me.

# 5th February 2007, 9:26 am / blacklists, google, tom-dyson

A brief update with some numbers for hardware load-balanced mongrels. 4000 requests/second on 48 mongrels behind a hardware load balancer.

# 5th February 2007, 12:38 am / mongrel, rails, scaling

Linus Torvalds: Super Kernel Sunday! Linux kernel version 2.6.20 is out, and includes virtualization thanks to KVM.

# 4th February 2007, 10:32 pm / kernel, kvm, linus-torvalds, linux, virtualization

IronPython URLs. Mark Rees’ and Seo Sanghyeon’s collection of interesting URLs posted to the IronPython mailing list.

# 4th February 2007, 5:25 pm / ironpython, python

Adam Vandenberg on disambiguated URLs. He was fighting for cache-friendly URLs at Encarta Online way back in 1998.

# 4th February 2007, 5:18 pm / encarta, urls

Identifrac (via) Beautiful twist on identicons: use the IP address / other input data as the seed for a fractal.

# 4th February 2007, 3 pm / fractals, identicons, identifrac

www. is deprecated. I wouldn’t go as far to say avoid www—just as long as you pick one and redirect the other.

# 4th February 2007, 2 pm / urls

skipdb (via) Small, fast BerkeleyDB style database using skip lists, by the creator of the Io programming language.

# 4th February 2007, 1:09 pm / berkeleydb, io, skipdb, skiplists, steve-dekorte

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

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