Simon Willison’s Weblog

VLC 0.8.2 (via) Now with support for Dirac and Apple Lossless Audio.

# 5th July 2005, 3:38 pm

Naked Law (via) A blog about technology law, written by actual lawyers.

# 5th July 2005, 3:33 pm / law

PHPXMLRPC Library Remote Code Execution (via) IXR is not affected by this vulnerability.

# 5th July 2005, 3:21 pm

Safari RSS databases in Mac OS X Tiger. You can query them using sqlite3—and there are (unintended?) easter eggs.

# 5th July 2005, 12:35 pm / rss, safari, sqlite

2005 Underhanded C Contest. Write code that looks innocent but does something evil.

# 5th July 2005, 12:15 pm / c

Those darn wikis. Why the LA Times wikitorial failed.

# 5th July 2005, 12:14 pm

View formatted source extension for Firefox (via) I haven’t tried this yet, but apparently it’s a big improvement.

# 5th July 2005, 12:14 pm / firefox

Handling International Text with Unicode in Python. A nice straight forward recipe from the Python Cookbook.

# 5th July 2005, 12:05 pm

Prototype Effect.Flash. Richard’s been hacking around with Prototype.

# 5th July 2005, 12:04 pm

Salted Hash Login Generator for Rails. I’ve used the precursor to this, Login Generator, to good effect.

# 5th July 2005, 12:02 pm / rails

script.aculo.us—web 2.0 javascript. A pretty impressive collection of modern JavaScript tricks.

# 5th July 2005, 12:01 pm

The state of accessibility in the real world. Screen readers are tricker beasts than you may have imagined.

# 5th July 2005, 11:58 am / accessibility

AJAXSLT on code.google.com. A pure JavaScript XPath and XSLT implementation. With a really silly name.

# 5th July 2005, 11:57 am

Obsoletely Famous. Replacing old tutorials with new ones.

# 5th July 2005, 11:55 am

More Unicode Secrets. Uche expands on some more unicode tricks with Python.

# 5th July 2005, 11:54 am

Object.prototype is verboten. This is a problem with the popular Prototype library.

# 5th July 2005, 11:53 am / javascript, prototype-js

Learning Perl the Hard Way [PDF]. A guide to Perl for people with previous programming experience.

# 18th June 2005, 6:27 pm

New WP.org Search. Matt praises Yahoo’s search APIs.

# 17th June 2005, 11:31 pm

Python programming job at Columbia University. Ignore the jargon—a little birdie tells me this is a Python job.

# 17th June 2005, 11 pm / python

Updates from code.google.com: We’re Expanding the Summer of Code... That’s 2 million dollars instead of 1.

# 17th June 2005, 8:49 pm

Over 600,000 mp3 downloads of BBC Radio 3’s Beethoven programmes. Note the bit at the end about how much internal buzz this is generating.

# 16th June 2005, 9:31 pm

blo.gs has been acquired by yahoo! (via) That’s a relief.

# 14th June 2005, 11:23 pm

The trouble with PHP. This is a good rebuttal to a recent “PHP’s simplicity beats Rails” piece.

# 14th June 2005, 2:27 pm / php

del.icio.us: casting the net wider. system: tags are a really neat way of adding specialised tag features.

# 14th June 2005, 9:01 am / delicious, tagging

Rendering Web Page To Images in Gecko. New feature involving the canvas API, coming soon. Tons of potential.

# 14th June 2005, 8:59 am

Joe Clark: @media2005. Comprehensive notes on all(?) the sessions.

# 14th June 2005, 8:43 am

@Media 2005 report (via) Mike Davies (Isofarro) has some great @media session notes.

# 14th June 2005, 8:34 am

Walcot Nation Day 2005. My photos from Bath’s annual eccentric street festival.

# 13th June 2005, 9:53 am

Financial Times Using Link Spam. Google should publically drop them from their index, then reinstate them when the link spam is removed.

# 12th June 2005, 9:19 am

No New Command Line for Longhorn (via) There goes the only remaining Longhorn feature I was interested in.

# 11th June 2005, 1:42 am