Simon Willison’s Weblog

Google Chrome Frame: Stable and Speedy (via) “Today, we’re very happy to take the Beta tag off of Google Chrome Frame and promote it to the Stable channel.”—MSI installer included, for IT administrators to easily deploy Chrome Frame to multiple machines. # 23rd September 2010, 1:34 am

I pushed 20 more of my projects to GitHub. Some great Node.js stuff here from Peteris Krumins, including modules for processing PNG, JPEG and animated GIFs. # 23rd September 2010, 1:18 am

ijson. A SAX-style streaming JSON parser for Python, using ctypes to talk to the yajl C library. # 22nd September 2010, 9:59 pm

A Gentle Introduction to CouchDB for Relational Practitioners. By “High Performance MySQL” author Baron Schwartz—a smart, concise overview that touches pretty much everything that’s interesting about CouchDB. # 22nd September 2010, 9:51 pm

Creating Shazam in Java. Using a Fast Fourier Transformation. # 22nd September 2010, 9:39 pm

Welcome to Lanyrd | The Lanyrd Blog. We’ve started a blog for Lanyrd, our social conference directory project. We’re off to a great start: “Lanyrd is now listing 1,508 conferences and 5,167 individual speaker profiles. 5,637 people have signed in to the site and made 13,293 edits to our data.” # 11th September 2010, 9:32 pm

ZeroMQ: Modern and Fast Networking Stack. I get ZeroMQ now. I was having trouble figuring out how it differed from things like RabbitMQ—it turns out it’s an entirely new low-level socket abstraction, designed to make common socket programming tasks like message sending/receiving and publish/subscribe a whole lot easier than dealing with raw BSD sockets. # 5th September 2010, 7:41 pm

Vox is closing on September 30, 2010. One month seems like very short notice for closing a service of this size, especially since it functions as an OpenID provider so in addition to migrating their content away users may need to sign in to other services and set up an alternative form of authentication. UPDATE: From the comments, Vox accounts that migrate to TypePad will also have their OpenID migrated, and TypePad will continue to serve OpenID requests for old vox.com addresses. Smart solution. # 3rd September 2010, 8:50 am

The Seven Secrets of Successful Data Scientists. Some sensible advice, including pick the right sized tool, compress everything, split up your data, use open source and run the analysis where the data is. # 3rd September 2010, 12:36 am

Setting up Munin on Ubuntu. Useful guide to setting up my favourite graphing/monitoring tool for personal projects. # 1st September 2010, 2:05 pm

RasterWeb: Lanyrd. Pete Prodoehl calls me out on Lanyrd’s integration with the Twitter auth API at the expense of OpenID. I’ve posted a comment with my justification—essentially, tying to Twitter’s ecosystem means I can actually implement the features I’ve been talking about building on top of OpenID for years, with far less engineering effort. # 31st August 2010, 8:49 pm

Lanyrd—the social conference directory. Nat and my new project, launched today and doing pretty well despite some early server hiccups. Sign in with Twitter to see conferences that your friends are speaking at, attending or tracking, then add your own events. We’re particularly keen on helping people build up a detailed profile of their previous talks, so adding older conferences is encouraged. # 31st August 2010, 7:41 pm

LWPx::ParanoidAgent. Every programming language needs an equivalent of this library—a robust, secure way to make HTTP requests against URLs from untrusted sources without risk of tarpits, internal network access, socket starvation, weird server errors, or other nastiness. # 31st August 2010, 2:30 am

What is the history of Django? I’ve been playing with Quora—it’s a really neat twist on the question-and-answer format, which makes great use of friends, followers and topics and has some very neat live update stuff going on (using Comet on top of Tornado). I just posted quite a long answer to a question about the history of Django. # 24th August 2010, 5:31 pm

Readme Driven Development (via) Tom Preston-Werner advocates for writing the readme before any other code. “Until you’ve written about your software, you have no idea what you’ll be coding.” # 23rd August 2010, 8:20 pm

Using Freebase Gridworks to Create Linked Data. A very handy tutorial from data.gov.uk’s Jeni Tennison. # 23rd August 2010, 8:11 pm

PNGStore—Embedding compressed CSS & JavaScript in PNGs. Cal did some further analysis on the CSS/JS to PNG compression trick (including producing some interesting images of jQuery compressed using different image packing techniques) and found it to be slightly less effective than regular GZipping. # 23rd August 2010, 9:47 am

10K Apart Contest: Cheating by Compressing Your JavaScript and CSS to PNG Images. Fascinating hack: transform your JS and CSS in to coloured pixels, save the result as a PNG to benefit from PNG’s built in compression algorithms, then read the data back out of the PNG and convert it back to text using JavaScript and canvas—all to reduce the on-disk filesize when entering the 10K app competition. Alex’s GithubFinder entry is worth checking out too. # 23rd August 2010, 9:45 am

Undelete! How to undelete a file accidentally removed using rm on Linux, by grepping through the raw bytes on the hard drive searching for a unique string that was contained in the file. “grep -a -B 25 -A 100 ’some string in the file’ /dev/sda1 > results.txt” # 21st August 2010, 10:56 am

Polymaps. Absurdly classy: “a JavaScript library for image- and vector-tiled maps using SVG”. It can pull in image tiles from sources such as OpenStreetMap, then overlay SVG paths specified using GeoJSON. The demos make use of GeoJSON tiles for US states and counties hosted on AppEngine. The library is developed by Stamen and SimpleGeo, and released under a BSD license. SVG support in the browser is required. # 20th August 2010, 6:46 pm

A More Royal Royal Opera House. Beautiful piece of work updating the branding for the Royal Opera House, including a strikingly modern take on the original crest. # 20th August 2010, 12:08 pm

Surfin’ Safari: Announcing... MathML! MathML is now supported by the WebKit nightlies. Worth checking out for the typographical discussion that’s broken out in the comments. # 18th August 2010, 1:49 pm

Pictos. Here’s something new: a for-sale font containing a set of beautiful royalty-free icons (like Wingdings, but good) designed to be embedded in web applications using @font-face. Small file sizes, scalable vectors without SVG. Not sure about the accessibility implications though. # 17th August 2010, 8:54 pm

Yahoo! Developer Network: Important API Updates and Changes. Some important (and potentially worrying) news about Yahoo! APIs. The BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) API will no longer be free—not an enormous surprise, and hopefully the pricing will be sensible. Most of the other search APIs (including web, news and image search) are being turned off with no replacement, while term extraction and spelling suggestions will be YQL-only. Most worrying, changes to Geo, Maps and Local APIs will be announced in September, with some set to close. I really hope this doesn’t affect the GeoPlanet APIs. # 17th August 2010, 6:14 pm

Human pylons carry electricity across Iceland. An entry in the “Icelandic High-Voltage Electrical Pylon International Design Competition” proposes giant human-shaped electricity pylons. “The figures can be placed into different poses, with the suggestion that the landscapes could inform the position that the sculpture is placed into. For example, as a power line ascends a hill, the pylons could look as if they’re climbing. The figures could also stretch up to gain increased height over longer spans.” # 17th August 2010, 1:38 pm

Writing Bulletproof Apps with API Errorpoints. This is a very good idea: Web APIs should offer special API endpoints for simulating each of the possible errors that might be returned by the production API. # 16th August 2010, 7:12 pm

An implausibly illustrated introduction to HTML5 Web Workers. By Mark Pilgrim. # 15th August 2010, 11:14 pm