Simon Willison’s Weblog

Launching Expectnation. Edd’s conference organisation software. I was a reviewer for XTech and the process was completely painless.

# 8:55 pm / edddumbill, expectnation, xtech, conferences

How Ads Really Work: Superfans and Noobs. My variant on this idea is to serve ads only on content that’s at least 6 months old. I’ve made $473.98 since January.

# 9:10 pm / ads, matt-haughey

Making use of the XRDS. One of the better explanations of XRDS: provides some background information and isn’t too long.

# 9:35 pm / xrds, openid, andy-dale

Deploying a Django app on the desktop. Silver Stripe used cx_freeze to package their commercial agile project management Django application as an easy to run Windows executable.

# 9:45 pm / desktop, django, silverstripe, windows

Oxford Geek Night 3 (via) The date for your diary is July 25th (moved from the 18th).

# 12:38 am / conferences, events, oxford, oxford-geek-nights, oxfordgeeks, upcoming

The Zonetag API Goes Public. Awesome new API from YRB—given a cell tower ID can provide both a location and a list of suggested tags, based on data collected by ZoneTag.

# 12:53 am / zonetag, api, yrb, location, cellid, tags, ydn, yahoo

Google Gears DB Abstractions. Here come the ORMs.

# 8:54 am / javascript, google, google-gears, db, orm

JavaScript Minifier that doesn’t break code (via) Perl re-implementation of Douglas Crockford’s classic JSMin that doesn’t clobber IE’s conditional comments, by Peter Michaux.

# 5:44 pm / douglas-crockford, jsmin, james-bennett, internet-explorer, ie, conditionalcomments, perl, pete-michaux, javascript

jsjuicer. Another conditional comment respecting minifier tool, this time in C++. Ships with a command line utility, unlike JavaScript::Minifier.

# 5:57 pm / javascript, jsmin, c-plus-plus, jsjuicer, minification, adrian-johnston

Oxford Geek Night 3 now on the 25th July. The date has been moved back by a week.

# 9:49 pm / oxfordgeeks, oxford-geek-nights, events

ITA Software Trip Planner. Super nerdy flight booking search site, operated by the company that provides software to everyone else in the industry.

# 10:14 pm / itasoftware, flights, travel

start.gotapi.com. Lightning fast lookups of API documentation; includes Python docs, YUI, HTML, CSS and lots more.

# 6:05 pm / css, html, yui, python, docs, documentation, gotapi

Unsettling. Sounds like there might be a massive scripted hack going on against out of date WordPress installs on Dreamhost. Check your site. See also discussion in the comments attached to this post.

# 9:16 pm / dave-shea, dreamhost, hosting, php, security, spam, wordpress

Semi-synchronous replication for MySQL (via) Google’s patch for MySQL which enables more reliable master-slave replication (a transaction isn’t committed until at least one slave has replicated the data).

# 10:07 pm / mysql, google, open-source, philippearson, replication, masterslave

IE vulnerability allows cookie stealing. Full exploit against the same-domain cookie origin policy, so malicious sites can steal cookies from elsewhere. Avoid using IE until this is patched.

# 9:53 am / ie, security, samedomain, cookies

Gaping holes exposed in fully-patched IE 7, Firefox (via) Michal Zalewski released a new Firefox 2.0 vulnerability in addition to the IE cookie stealing one.

# 9:57 am / firefox, ie, michal-zalewski, security

Firefox promiscuous IFRAME access bug. Lets malicious sites “display disruptive or misleading contents in the context of an attacked site” and intercept keystrokes! The demo worked in Camino 1.5 as well. Avoid using Gecko-based browsers until this is patched?

# 10 am / michal-zalewski, camino, firefox, security, iframes

The CSS working group is irrelevant. “Someone really needs to do to CSS what the WHATWG has been doing to HTML”.

# 10:10 am / ian-hickson, css, hixie, w3c, stardands, whatwg

Talking to the internal GPS in my N95 from Python. Thanks to a new LocationRequestor module for Python Series 60.

# 10:31 am / pyseries60, python, gps, nokia, nickburch

Sun Identity Provider for OpenID. “We’re talking to partners about offering special services to Sun employees that use this service for authentication.”

# 12:57 pm / sun, openid

WCAG Samurai. Anonymous Samurai, headed up by Joe Clark, publish their errata for WCAG 1.0 (with two independent peer reviews). Recommended as a better alternative to WGAC 2.0.

# 5:56 am / errata, accessibility, joe-clark, samurai, wcag, atmedia2007

Security Breach. A statement from Dreamhost.

# 8:16 am / security, dreamhost, hosting

Wait For It (via) Neat WSGI middleware from Ian Bicking that launches a thread for every incoming request and watches for slow responses; if something is taking too long it returns a “please wait” page to the user and polls for completion.

# 4:53 pm / wsgi, python, middleware, ian-bicking

10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head (via) A great list, with a positive conclusion.

# 5:36 pm / journalism, ryan-sholin, jon-udell, newspapers

google-diff-match-patch (via) Robust algorithms to perform the operations required for synchronizing plain text, in Java, JavaScript and Python.

# 6:15 pm / neilfraser, google, open-source, diff, java, javascript, python

Doing Local Right. The slides from my presentation at @media 2007.

# 7:31 pm / atmedia, atmedia07, atmedia2007, django, lawrence, ljworld, talks, local

Croquet. Open-source collaborative virtual world environment built on top of Squeak, a bit like a decentralised version of Second Life.

# 10:50 am / secondlife, croquet, squeak, virtualworld, open-source, smalltalk

ECMAScript 4 Reference Implementation. Including discussion of the benefits of writing it in Standard ML.

# 12:49 pm / standardml, ecmascript