Simon Willison’s Weblog

Smart vs. Dumb Templates. Ian argues for smart template languages, because layout isn’t as simple as you think.

# 13th April 2005, 6:42 pm

zestyping: In the time-wasting hacks department... Ping’s iChat buddy icon now features a sparkline, and rotates over the course of the day.

# 13th April 2005, 5:07 pm

lxml (via) A Pythonic wrapper for libxml2.

# 13th April 2005, 5:04 pm / libxml2, python, xml

Howto Generate PDFs in Rails. Use HTMLDoc, PdfWriter or Ruby FPDF.

# 13th April 2005, 5:03 pm / rails

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? I’m pretty much thinking what Chris Applegate is thinking.

# 13th April 2005, 5 pm

Safari WebDevAdditions (via) I haven’t tried these yet, but they look useful.

# 13th April 2005, 4:55 pm / safari

Continuations for Curmudgeons. They aren’t as scary as you may have been lead to believe.

# 13th April 2005, 4:54 pm

Benefits (Ftrain.com) (via) This is why the NHS, for all its flaws, is a very very good idea.

# 13th April 2005, 4:11 pm

Why Greasemonkey is good for publishers (via) Free usability tips and bug fixing—your users know more than you do.

# 13th April 2005, 4:09 pm / adrian-holovaty, greasemonkey

Ruby on Rails and FastCGI: Scaling using processes instead of threads. Relates to the shared-nothing architecture.

# 12th April 2005, 2:06 pm / fastcgi, rails, scaling

Colorization Using Optimization. Holy cow, this is impressive.

# 12th April 2005, 12:08 am

Ubuntu 5.04 Release Notes (via) What’s new in Hoary.

# 8th April 2005, 2:57 pm

See the sights with Google Maps. MetaFilter thread with links to interesting satellite photos on Google Maps.

# 8th April 2005, 10:23 am

A Tour of the BBC Film Archive at Windmill Road. Martin Belam continues his streak of fascinating posts about the BBC.

# 8th April 2005, 9:20 am / film

Anabasis: Userscript.org. Jeremy wants feedback on his plans for a userscript directory site.

# 8th April 2005, 8:42 am

Geekcheat vi reference mug (via) I want one!

# 8th April 2005, 2:32 am

Now, Really, As Bigoted As You Think. Kansas passed the gay marriage amendment.

# 6th April 2005, 4:14 pm

Slashdot interview with Mark Shuttleworth. Some great answers on Ubuntu.

# 6th April 2005, 10:18 am / slashdot

Interview: 43Folders’ Merlin Mann. LifeHacker talks to a Life Hacker.

# 6th April 2005, 10:17 am

Customizing Opera. Tips from one of Opera’s developers.

# 6th April 2005, 9:51 am

Multi-threaded JavaScript (with Rhino). Good tutorial on using Rhino to do cool things with JavaScript.

# 6th April 2005, 6:42 am

My childhood, seen by Google Maps. Very clever use of Flickr notes and Google Maps.

# 6th April 2005, 6:40 am / flickr

More Nifty Corners. Now with wider browser support and mild anti-aliasing.

# 6th April 2005, 6:38 am

Channel 4 Broadband. Watch Channel 4 content online for a fiver a month. Sadly, it’s RealPlayer.

# 5th April 2005, 6:39 am

Google Maps—The White House. I love how the roofs of the nearby buildings are blacked out. Must be where they keep the SAMs.

# 5th April 2005, 6:29 am

Google Maps: UK. The satellite photos cover the whole world—up to a certain zoom level.

# 5th April 2005, 6:21 am

Google Maps + Keyhole = Satellite photos. Even more like map.search.ch ;)

# 5th April 2005, 6:12 am

Toothing was a hoax! How disappointing. Shows how easy it is to create a fake story though.

# 5th April 2005, 5:09 am

Episode III Line FAQ (via) Yup, the line for Star Wars Episode III has its own FAQ.

# 4th April 2005, 10:33 pm

Content, services, and the yin-yang of intermediation (via) Jon Udell combines LibraryLookup and Greasemonkey in his latest screencast.

# 4th April 2005, 6:19 am / greasemonkey, jon-udell