Simon Willison’s Weblog

Ten Things Yahoo! Is Already Doing with the YUI Library. A good answer to a Frequently Asked question.

# 18th July 2006, 11:18 pm

ruby_blocks.py. Ian Bicking’s port of Ruby style blocks to Python using decorators.

# 18th July 2006, 10:25 pm

Instant inlining of C/C++ in Python. Really neat API, but depends on SWIG.

# 18th July 2006, 9:56 pm

MySpace parser. Tom Dyson’s Python library for screen scraping MySpace profiles, based on Beautiful Soup.

# 18th July 2006, 2:53 pm

Ruby Style Adding Methods to Existing Classes in Python? What’s the best way of doing this?

# 18th July 2006, 9:12 am

How Shellcodes Work. Surprisingly accessible considering the level of detail.

# 18th July 2006, 7:03 am

S5 Project. Ryan King is running a community development process around Eric Meyer’s S5.

# 18th July 2006, 6:33 am

TracDev/UnicodeGuidelines. How the Trac developers handle unicode. Includes a good Python-Unicode introduction.

# 18th July 2006, 6:20 am

L.A. News Service Sues YouTube Over Beating Video. The first lawsuit with tags (an “idiosyncratic choice of descriptive terms”) as a key concept?

# 18th July 2006, 5:40 am

How the myspace SWF hack worked. If Flash is a vector for XSS, is this the end of Flash badges?

# 17th July 2006, 6:04 pm / flash, myspace, swf, xss

Driving Mum and Dad Mad—Video. I sat next to this kid on the train last night. He was quite sweet. Glad he was unarmed though...

# 17th July 2006, 5:39 pm

CouchSurfing—Participation. Community barn-raising brought back the site after a total backup failure.

# 17th July 2006, 10:07 am

YUI Library Release 0.11. Forgot to link this last week. Highlights include colour animation and a logger control.

# 17th July 2006, 8:28 am

Carousel Component—Documentation. Bill Scott’s latest widget.

# 17th July 2006, 8:12 am

The Right Way to do Ajax is Declaratively. I wouldn’t say it’s the only right way, but it’s definitely a useful concept.

# 17th July 2006, 8:11 am

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 / rails

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