Simon Willison’s Weblog

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November 2006

Nov. 14, 2006

Ruthless enough for a startup? Quite depressing reading.

# 8:29 pm

Nov. 15, 2006

WriteRoom

I had a look at WriteRoom a few months ago and wasn’t impressed, but Leonard just convinced me to give it another look and I’m completely sold. It’s a free text editor for OS X with two killer features:

[... 157 words]

Graded Browser Support: Q4 Update. Opera 9 Mac is now A-Grade.

# 12:37 pm

Nov. 16, 2006

Firebug 1.0 preview. With network profiling inspired by Tamper Data!

# 9:59 am

Get the most out of generic views in Django. Awesome tip re-inforcing the power of wrappers around generic views.

# 4:43 pm

Nov. 17, 2006

svnrepo 0.1. A Pythonic API to svn, wrapped around the low-level svn bindings.

# 9:30 am

New World Notes on the Second Life CopyBot controversy. Absolutely fascinating, especially the in-game protests.

# 9:42 am

Django on OS X setup notes. MySQLdb currently depends on Python 2.3.3 or higher.

# 4:40 pm

Freeing the postcode

UK postcodes have some interesting characteristics: a full six character post code identifies an average of around 14 house holds, and postcodes are mainly hierarchical—W1W will always be contained within W1 for example. They’re useful for a huge range of interesting things.

[... 295 words]

Nov. 18, 2006

Introducing the Technorati Link Count Widget. I’m trying this out; it’s pretty sweet. Nicely unobtrusive too.

# 10:53 am / technorati, unobtrusive, javascript

minimock. Python mock object library for use with doctest, in 25 lines of code.

# 11:23 am

Nov. 19, 2006

How To Subclass The JavaScript Array Object. Utterly brilliant—create a fresh copy of Array in an iframe and customise that.

# 7:11 pm

Nov. 20, 2006

The continued adventures of the Permalink slideshow. Now powered in part by YUI.

# 12:52 am

Donut Robot of Love 2000 (via) IM ON UR ROBOT EATIN UR DONUTZ (scroll to comments)

# 1:15 pm

The top 10 arguments against DRM. Includes some good business arguments I hadn’t heard before.

# 1:23 pm

TheyWorkForYou.co.nz. Rob McKinnon’s site for tracking New Zealand’s Parliament.

# 3:47 pm

Nov. 21, 2006

Flickr Camera Finder. I hadn’t seen this; includes some really nice graphs.

# 11:25 am

bbum: How to harvest a turkey. Fascinating, if a little graphic.

# 11:41 am

Zhongdian. Ping’s continuing adventures in China.

# 7:03 pm

Nov. 22, 2006

Natalie Downe: Inline image quotes. Neat CSS trick this one.

# 12:29 am / natalie-downe, css

The Spam Farms of the Social Web. Really interesting exposé by Niall Kennedy.

# 10:41 am

Rich-Media Delivery In Second Life—A HOWTO. Second Life supports SMIL, via QuickTime.

# 11:30 am

Nov. 23, 2006

Riding Rails: Rails 1.2: Release Candidate 1. Highlights include REST, resources and unicode support.

# 8:21 am

Nov. 24, 2006

The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security. Thought provoking.

# 7:18 pm

Nov. 25, 2006

15-second delay. Train doors driven by GPS have a manual over-ride for covered stations.

# 8:59 am

Resizable Reloaded—A reusable component for resizing elements. Another useful YUI widget from Jack Slocum, with a clear and well designed API.

# 9:34 am

Hex Fiend Developers Overview. Best code documentation I’ve seen in ages.

# 9:38 am

Nov. 26, 2006

’Pump-and-Dump’ Spam Surge Linked to Russian Bot Herders. Many people I’ve talked to have noticed an up-surge in spam recently. This could be why.

# 7:20 pm

Inside World of Warcraft Gold Farm, Future of Work. Half a million (!) people make a living farming gold in World of Warcraft.

# 10:11 pm

python-dateutil. A bunch of useful datetime extensions, including recurrence rules and date parsing.

# 11:44 pm

2006 » November

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