Simon Willison’s Weblog

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May 2004

May 1, 2004

USB Devil Duckie Drive (via) Evil eyes blink as it reads and writes data. I want it SO badly.

# 12:33 am

May 2, 2004

Google, circa 1998

Thanks to the ever impressive Internet Archive (did you know they host old public information films as well?) here’s Google’s homepage from 1998. Their searchable index was slightly less than 25 million pages, their hardware was less than a dozen machines apparently held together with lego and their crawler was called BackRub. Following the links will take you to Sergey and Larry’s homepages, where digging a little deeper will even uncover the now infamous Sergey-in-drag photo.

[... 204 words]

Google Blog? They’re teasing us.

# 8:45 pm

Resign Patterns (via) Ailments of Unsuitable Project-Disoriented Software

# 8:46 pm

Sasser worm ’spreading rapidly’. Here we go again.

# 8:49 pm

New worm’s got sass, but not much else | CNET News.com. Analysis of the sasser worm.

# 8:57 pm

Staying valid

Andrei Herasimchuk:

[... 290 words]

Russian Museum to Exhibit Rasputin’s Penis. This isn’t a joke. Picture included.

# 11:01 pm

May 3, 2004

Read Print. Public domain online library. I like free books.

# 12:16 am

Making Sun Policy. Sun are opening up. Tim Bray explains their new public discourse policy.

# 2:22 am

The mysteries of flexible software (via) Sean McGrath on Parameterization.

# 2:39 am

Roundup Issue Tracker (via) Handy looking Python app.

# 6:50 am

BBC introduces flexible TV with online trial. This is really, really cool.

# 11:54 pm

May 4, 2004

CSS Support in Safari (via) A full list of properties, from Apple themselves.

# 6:46 am

Jython. Tim Bray gets excited about Jython, and says nice things about Python in the process.

# 7:22 am

PayPal Announces ’’PayPal Web Services’’ (via) It looks like these are aimed at people who pay others using PayPal.

# 5:33 pm

When semantic markup goes bad. Matthew Thomas argues for <b> and <i>

# 5:38 pm

Mark Pilgrim’s Atom feed (via) Atom + XSL + CSS = a self explanatory feed that functions in a browser.

# 5:39 pm

Bruce Schneier: We are all security customers. How can the US get the best return on investment for homeland security?

# 6:34 pm / bruce-schneier, security

Chris_Pratley’s WebLog. The program manager for Word and OneNote joins the MS blogging revolution

# 6:37 pm

May 5, 2004

The Shining in 30 seconds with bunnies. (via) But of course.

# 1:48 am

CSS History

John Allsopp: Message To The Messengers—Props to the old school:

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May 6, 2004

Interview: Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of Apache (via) Includes discussion of “the world needs less software”.

# 12:19 am

May 7, 2004

Don’t make me lie to you

So what’s the deal with this?

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What makes a geek?

Meri has a great post up entitled Because We Are Geeks, which highlights the differences between geeks and the rest of the world and asks if geeks are really suited to designing and marketing products for non-geeks.

[... 148 words]

Switch statements in Python

Python doesn’t support a native switch statement. I’ve found myself using the following coding idiom instead recently which seems to work pretty well:

[... 114 words]

May 8, 2004

PDML: Portable Document Markup Language (via) Generating PDFs just got even easier.

# 2:02 am

May 9, 2004

Major labels ’force 70% price hike’ on Apple | The Register (via) ... and bring my iTunes legal music spending spree to an abrupt end.

# 10:41 pm

May 10, 2004

Stopdesign | The New Blogger. Doug helped redesign Blogger: this is his write-up.

# 7:27 pm

2004 » May

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