Simon Willison’s Weblog

memcache_engine. A memcached storage engine for MySQL.

# 30th August 2006, 6:07 am

FlickrBlog: Geotagging—one day later. Over a million photos geotagged in 24 hours.

# 30th August 2006, 5:59 am

Using CrackLib to require stronger passwords (with Django). Uses a custom validator.

# 29th August 2006, 11:01 am

Flickr launches geocoding. Really great job—congrats Dan Catt and the rest of the team.

# 28th August 2006, 8:46 pm / flickr

Next-Gen DVD Support Yanked from 32-Bit Vista. Stuff like this should greatly accelerate the coming DRM backlash.

# 25th August 2006, 4:48 pm

The “add a class name” JavaScript widget philosophy. Dustin makes a good argument against it.

# 24th August 2006, 10:53 pm

RSS CAPTCHA Prototype. Accessible captchas based on RSS feeds from friends’ sites.

# 24th August 2006, 7:01 pm / captchas

Blow to inventors as Segway banned (via) Segways banned in the UK! That sucks.

# 23rd August 2006, 8:30 pm

Urwid. Text console application library for Python.

# 23rd August 2006, 6:36 pm

Hadoop. Open-source Google File System / map-reduce equivalent. Apparently scales amazingly well.

# 23rd August 2006, 8:36 am / hadoop

Web Inspector Gains New Eyes for Metrics, Properties. Debugging in Safari gets better again. Really neat Metrics view.

# 22nd August 2006, 12:44 am

TradeMe: Big Fish In A Small Pond. Localization matters.

# 21st August 2006, 4:24 pm

GopherNow—Late night food and more. Inspired by Lawrence.com?

# 20th August 2006, 12:35 pm

del.icio.us/tag/openidconsumer. Help me build a list of sites that let you log in with OpenID.

# 20th August 2006, 3:14 am / delicious, openid

Mapping the Roads, One Off-Ramp at a Time Page. How those GPS mapping trucks work.

# 18th August 2006, 9:25 pm

Parsing XML can open network sockets (via) Yikes. Something to bare in mind.

# 18th August 2006, 2:27 pm / security, xml

[xsl] Replace newline characters(\n) with <br>. This is why I’m not a fan of XSLT for templating.

# 18th August 2006, 10:26 am / xslt

If It’s Not Nailed Down, Steal It. Pattern Matching, S-Expressions, and Domain Specific Languages in Ruby.

# 18th August 2006, 10:18 am

DateBocks—Intuitive Date Input Selection. A better version of my better date input script, packaged as a Rails Engine.

# 18th August 2006, 10:03 am / rails

The Auto-Admin Ecosystem. Streamlined developer’s roundup of alternatives.

# 18th August 2006, 9:51 am

HOWTO: Adding an RSS feed to a Subversion Server. Using post-commit hooks and some Python.

# 17th August 2006, 11:17 pm / python, rss, subversion

10 Cool Things About The New Yahoo! Photos. The new Photos interface is a beautiful piece of work. Scott is an absolute wizzard.

# 17th August 2006, 11:05 pm

Bradley Horowitz on Interestingness. The concept of user-discovered content is very useful.

# 17th August 2006, 9:51 pm

Dapper. Ambitious attempt to make screen scraping available to the masses.

# 17th August 2006, 9:10 pm

Bruce Schneier Facts. “SSL is invulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. Unless that man is Bruce Schneier.”

# 17th August 2006, 2:19 pm / bruce-schneier, funny, security

Opera Skin: Tango CL. Great skin for Opera—makes the OS X version far less of an eyesore.

# 16th August 2006, 11:51 am

ack (via) Someone wrote a better grep.

# 16th August 2006, 11:45 am

re2c. A faster lex with a focus on regex matching.

# 16th August 2006, 11:35 am

Pub Standards on the 15th. “It’s nearly Autumn” beer.

# 11th August 2006, 5:14 pm

Gallions Reach. 3D graphics in Opera 9, courtesy of the JavaScript demo scene.

# 11th August 2006, 5:13 pm