Simon Willison’s Weblog

OpenID for non-SuperUsers. Sam Ruby explains the key concepts of OpenID that many first-time users tend to miss.

# 7th January 2007, 10:21 pm / openid, sam-ruby

Browser Cache Usage—Exposed! Includes real numbers for browser cache usage on some of Yahoo!’s most popular pages.

# 7th January 2007, 10:20 pm / cache, performance, yahoo

Groovy 1.0 is done. They finally got to 1.0!

# 7th January 2007, 10:18 pm / groovy, java

DjangoID. Django-based OpenID server for hosting your own (or someone else’s) identity.

# 7th January 2007, 9:54 pm / django, openid

Unobtrusive OpenID. Sam’s implementation passes association data in the URL rather than using sessions. I need to do that here.

# 28th December 2006, 9 pm / openid, sam-ruby

Login to other services with Technorati. Technorati are now an OpenID provider. I’d much rather they were a consumer though; at the moment you can claim your blog with OpenID but you can’t log in to your Technorati account with an OpenID from elsewhere.

# 26th December 2006, 8:41 pm / openid, technorati

Serving Multiple Hosts from a Single Django Instance. Includes a patch to pull the urlconf from the request object, where it has been placed by some custom middleware.

# 25th December 2006, 11:21 pm / django, urlconf

Del.icio.us fun with automated links. Nat’s documented one of del.icio.us’ least promoted features—the ability to auto-post your links to your weblog once a day.

# 25th December 2006, 12:26 am / delicious, natalie-downe

Friends, friendsters, and top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites. I finally got around to reading this. Fascinating; lots to digest.

# 24th December 2006, 7:32 pm / danah-boyd, myspace, social-networks, social-software

VMWare Fusion (virtualization for Mac). Competition is good. The race is on between VMWare and Parallels as to who can get 3D acceleration virtualized first (and let me play Half-Life 2 without using BootCamp).

# 24th December 2006, 12:49 pm / parallels, virtualization, vmware

Rails vs Django Paper and Slides. Even if you’ve already read the paper you should check out the slides. Really good flow, clear and clever use of diagrams.

# 24th December 2006, 12:43 pm / django, presenting, rails, slides

A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection (via) Vista’s content protection is a nightmare for hardware manufacturers and consumers alike. It’s far worse than even BoingBoing readers would expect.

# 24th December 2006, 10:34 am / contentprotection, drm, security, vista

killableprocess.py. “I have created a python module which can launch a subprocess, wait for the process with a timeout, and kill that process and all of its sub-subprocesses correctly, on Windows, Mac, and Linux.”

# 23rd December 2006, 12:23 am / processes, python

html5lib (via) A python library for working with HTML5 documents.

# 22nd December 2006, 11:58 pm / html5, python, whatwg

WebFaction blog: BIG holiday present! (via) WebFaction offer Django/Rails/TurboGears hosting for $7.50/month, allowing one long-running process and 40MB of RAM for their basic plan.

# 22nd December 2006, 11:44 pm / django, hosting, webfaction

The Daily Python-URL. Python’s number one news source, now powered by Django.

# 22nd December 2006, 11:39 pm / django, effbot, python

digg: Screencast: How to use OpenID. No exclamation mark this time—let’s see if it makes a difference.

# 22nd December 2006, 9:50 pm / digg, openid, screencast, selfpromotion

Comment transformer votre blog en une OpenID ? My piece on OpenID tranlated in to French by Christophe Ducamp.

# 21st December 2006, 3:26 pm / french, openid, translation

Javascript character set screw-ups (via) Some browsers treat JavaScript files as having the same content-type as the page from which they are linked. This could cause problems with UTF-8 encoded JSON; the workaround is serving up ASCII with unicode escape sequences.

# 21st December 2006, 3:20 pm / javascript, json, unicode

CNET interviewer assaulted by flying wang. Aah, Second Life. Never a dull moment.

# 21st December 2006, 10:36 am / cnet, secondlife, wang

Introducing text-stroke. Webkit has some sexy new CSS properties: -webkit-text-fill-color, -webkit-text-stroke-color, -webkit-text-stroke-width.

# 21st December 2006, 10:34 am / css, webkit

Percussive maintenance, with a twist. How to fix your broken iPod by dropping it, repeatedly.

# 20th December 2006, 9:15 pm / ipod

Three steps to OpenID. Maybe explaining OpenID isn’t as hard as I thought... Jacob Kaplan-Moss nails it in three.

# 20th December 2006, 12:44 pm / jacob-kaplan-moss, openid, reddit

Conditionally Sticky Sidebar. A nicer implementation of the trick I’m using for my add comment form; this one takes advantage of position: fixed in browsers that support it.

# 20th December 2006, 1 am / css, javascript

ErlyWeb Documentation. The Erlang web framework finally gets some formal documentation.

# 20th December 2006, 12:45 am / erlang, erlyweb

Beginning of the end for open web data APIs? Google just ditched their SOAP API in favour of a crippled Ajax widget. What are the implications for other free-as-in-beer APIs?

# 20th December 2006, 12:44 am / apis, google

Mapping the postal network. Image of a GPS trace for a unit that was left on and sent in the post.

# 20th December 2006, 12:43 am / gps, mapping

Create cross browser vector graphics. An accessible introduction to dojo.gfx, a powerful 2D drawing API built on SVG and VML.

# 20th December 2006, 12:42 am / 2d, dojo, drawing, javascript, svg, vml

Nginx English wiki. I’m back up and running after the digg meltdown, currently using CherryPy load-balanced behind Nginx.

# 20th December 2006, 12:37 am / cherrypy, nginx

botbouncer.com (via) Neat concept: a third party service for ensuring that an OpenID has passed a CAPTCHA.

# 19th December 2006, 6:01 pm / captchas, janrain, openid