Simon Willison’s Weblog

Xooglers: This word just in…. Insider insight on the Google-as-a-verb story.

# 13th July 2006, 12:39 am

BackgrounDRb (via) Easy back-end daemons for your Rails apps. Django needs this.

# 10th July 2006, 4:46 pm

What Is a Wiki (and How to Use One for Your Projects). Smart wiki tips from the authors of Mind Hacks.

# 9th July 2006, 11:05 am

ChristianLindholm.com: The Fat Duck Restaurant is truly a moving experience. Snail porridge? I’m so there...

# 7th July 2006, 6:56 pm

Holux GPSlim (GR-236) Review. Matt Biddulph has one of these. They’re awesome.

# 7th July 2006, 1:56 pm / gps, matt-biddulph

FlashAid. Excellent. I’ve been talking about this for ages; Aral and Jeremy have actually built it.

# 7th July 2006, 12:40 pm

RailsConf 2006 Keynote Series. Videos. To watch.

# 7th July 2006, 12:33 pm

vadm. Source control for server configuration files, built on svn.

# 7th July 2006, 12:31 pm

Anatomy of a Paypal Phishing Scam. The phishers even get the form validation right.

# 7th July 2006, 11:04 am

JavaScript Closures for Dummies. Not quite for Dummies as it talks about C pointers, but a valiant attempt.

# 6th July 2006, 10:01 am / closures

Don’t serve JSON as text/html. Another sneaky XSS trick.

# 5th July 2006, 11:46 pm / http, json, security, xss

ASP.NET 2 url rewriting considered harmful in some cases. This is dumb.

# 5th July 2006, 11:27 pm

DeWitt Clinton: On RSS and Atom. Atom is lossless.

# 5th July 2006, 8:06 am / atom, dewitt-clinton, rss

pytz—World Timezone Definitions for Python. This stuff is surprisingly complicated.

# 4th July 2006, 9:02 am

15 Things you can do with Yahoo! UI. Dustin’s tricks and hacks with YUI.

# 3rd July 2006, 1:41 pm

Django and Ajax. Django already has all the Ajax support it needs.

# 3rd July 2006, 1:34 pm

Software Patent Lawsuits Against Open Source Developers (via) Someone has a patent on ORM.

# 3rd July 2006, 8:52 am

Cory Doctorow switching to Ubuntu. Another high profile defector.

# 30th June 2006, 12:43 pm / cory-doctorow, linux, ubuntu

CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down. Ouch.

# 30th June 2006, 8:43 am

Python Web Developer Appliance. A VMWare virtual machine with Python web developer frameworks pre-installed for you.

# 29th June 2006, 6:58 pm / python

A Week in Chicago with Rails, Perl, and Django. I love Nat’s observations about Java programmers who discover dynamic languages.

# 29th June 2006, 6:21 pm

Javaref.com. Sane Java API browsing.

# 29th June 2006, 2:12 pm

Greenpeace goes open source in collaboration push. Django in the news.

# 29th June 2006, 11:40 am

Wrapping Text With Regular Expressions. Neat regexp trick.

# 29th June 2006, 11:12 am

Speeding up Prototype’s Selector. Really smart getElementsBySelector optimisations.

# 28th June 2006, 7:16 pm / javascript, prototype-js

Exploring the Google Web Toolkit. Covers all the reasons I’m uninterested in GWT.

# 28th June 2006, 4:14 pm

Safari gets a JavaScript debugger. Great news, especially considering the tricky nature of Safari bugs. Opera needs one too.

# 28th June 2006, 11:48 am

Safari fragment identifier history demo. Brilliant hack, but iframe/scrollTop to detect the back button is a bit too hairy for me.

# 27th June 2006, 11:12 pm

Media in Transition Conference 2006. German Web 2.0 conference with some interesting speakers. Sadly this clashes with dConstruct.

# 27th June 2006, 7:21 pm

Office IU Blog: Let’s Talk About Customization. 98% of people never customised their Office toolbars.

# 27th June 2006, 4:21 pm