Simon Willison’s Weblog

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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

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

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