Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Introducing: World Explorer and TagMaps. “Can we automatically extract information from Flickr geotagged images to create a rich visualization of the world we live in? The answer is: you bet.”

# 19th January 2007, 9:55 am / flickr, maps, tagging, yrb

MySpace Blocking Widgets? Making your business dependent on revenue from MySpace is sharecropping of the worst possible kind.

# 19th January 2007, 9:54 am / myspace, sharecropping, widgets

The NHL’s All-Star voting disaster. The NHL ran an online poll to decide which players are picked for their All-Star Game. The only authentication was a poorly implemented CAPTCHA. Unsurprisingly, it got gamed.

# 19th January 2007, 9:50 am / captchas, gaming, nhl, security, stupid

Visual Security: 9-block IP Identification. Smart (and pretty) trick for showing a representation tied to a commenter’s IP address without affecting their privacy.

# 18th January 2007, 4:55 pm / 9block, donpark, ip, privacy

Planet OpenID. Aggregating news about OpenID—surprisingly high traffic.

# 18th January 2007, 12:04 am / openid, planet

FIPA Abstract Architecture. Bill de hÓra shows how the work of the Intelligent Agents community relates to SOA / WS-*. We studied FIPA at University and the parallels to parts of the Web Service stack are pretty interesting.

# 17th January 2007, 11:32 pm / bill-de-hora, fipa, service-oriented-architecture, ai-agents

Mono-based device wins Best-of-Show at CES. “The Sansa Connect is running Linux as its operating system, and the whole application stack is built on Mono, running on an ARM processor.”

# 17th January 2007, 11:21 pm / ces, hardware, linux, mono, open-source

Inside MySpace.com. Case study of scaling against a network effect. Includes pretty honest coverage of the mistakes made along the way, although the article was put together second hand from conference presentations rather than from interviews.

# 17th January 2007, 9:18 am / myspace, scaling

MySpace: Too Much of a Good Thing? CSS customization really was just the result of forgetting to strip HTML. They “eventually” decided to filter out JavaScript(!)

# 17th January 2007, 9:09 am / css, javascript, myspace, security, xss

Gmail Atom feeds. Could be useful as a pipe for creating an e-mail interface to an existing Atom-consuming application.

# 16th January 2007, 2:50 pm / atom, gmail

New Dutch accessibility law. Sounds extremely forward thinking, designed by people who really understand the field. Just one problem: the guidelines are only available in Dutch!

# 16th January 2007, 12:59 pm / accessibility, dutch, guidelines, law, ppk

OpenID users can be just as trusty as local users. Martin Atkins makes a similar argument to my own: OpenIDs are trustworthy, provided you subject them to the same authentication steps (CAPTCHA/e-mail validation) as regular users.

# 16th January 2007, 11:13 am / martin-atkins, openid

jQuery 1.1. jQuery is one year old. The latest release features API improvements and some significant optimisations.

# 15th January 2007, 5:13 pm / javascript, jquery

Free VMware Server in action. I’m interested in reading more case studies of Virtual Machine deployments in the wild.

# 15th January 2007, 3:18 am / casestudy, virualization, vmware

The Django newforms-admin branch. This should make customising the Django admin application a whole lot easier.

# 15th January 2007, 2:43 am / admin, branch, django, django-admin, newforms

CSS library for Python (via) “A Python package to parse and build CSS Cascading Style Sheets. Partly implements the DOM Level 2 Style Stylesheets and CSS interfaces.”

# 15th January 2007, 2:32 am / css, python

Using TextMate with Django. Including a nice looking theme inspired by the Django website.

# 15th January 2007, 2:16 am / django, textmate

How to enable session saving in the new Camino 1.1a2 (via) I’ve stopped spending time in any browser that doesn’t have session saving built in—sorry Safari!

# 15th January 2007, 1:49 am / browsers, camino, safari, sessionsaving

Ubuntu Screencasts. Fantastic resource—exactly what Ubuntu (and desktop Linux in general) needs.

# 15th January 2007, 1:41 am / linux, screencasts, ubuntu

Designing Google Reader’s trends. “But beyond the visualization, this serves as a good example of collecting and understanding the ambient information that flows through our digital lives.”

# 15th January 2007, 12:53 am / design, google, google-reader, jeffrey-veen, visualization

Details of Google’s Latest Security Hole. For a brief while you could use Blogger Custom Domains to point a Google subdomain at your own content, letting you hijack Google cookies and steal accounts for any Google services.

# 14th January 2007, 1:36 pm / domains, domainsecurity, google, security, xss

OSCON 2007 Call for Participation. The submission deadline is February 5th; the conference itself is July 23rd to 27th.

# 13th January 2007, 10:47 pm / call-for-proposals, conferences, oscon

Solid State Disk Changes The Game. “What if you had 2GB of RAM to compute, 32GB of SSD for fast random access, and 250GB of the slow kind. How would that change the way you design, and the kind of features you build?”

# 13th January 2007, 12:53 pm / assaf-arkin, harddisk, ssd

Apache Solr 1.1. Solr is the search Web Service built on top of Lucene. The latest release introduces JSON, Python and Ruby response formats in addition to XML.

# 13th January 2007, 1:16 am / json, lucene, python, ruby, search, solr, webservice, xml

Correo. New open-source OS X mail client, based on Thunderbird but with a Camino-style native interface.

# 12th January 2007, 11:36 am / camino, correo, macos, mail, mozilla, open-source, thunderbird

AJAX Debugging with Firebug. Great Firebug tutorial from creator Joe Hewitt himself. I didn’t know you could trigger profiling from your own code using console.profile() / console.profileEnd().

# 12th January 2007, 11:21 am / ajax, drdobbs, firebug, javascript, joe-hewitt, tutorial

A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope (via) Reconsidering Star Wars IV in the light of I-III. It turns out R2-D2 and Chewie were the most significant characters by quite a long way.

# 12th January 2007, 10:54 am / starwars

Hacking Django, how Bazaar. This is a neat trick: use Subversion to track an upstream project, then create Bazaar branches to manage your own development against the trunk.

# 12th January 2007, 10:34 am / bazaar, django, subversion, version-control

MacFUSE: FUSE for Mac OS X. Mac support for user-space custom file systems, API compatible with those already written for Linux. Amit Singh runs kernelthread.com; I hadn’t realised that he had moved to Google.

# 12th January 2007, 9:47 am / amit-singh, filesystem, fuse, google, macos

Firefox3/Firefox Requirements (via) OpenID and CardSpace are both listed as mandatory features.

# 11th January 2007, 6:56 pm / cardspace, firefox, identity, openid

Years

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