Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Friday, 12th October 2007

The password anti-pattern. What I don’t understand is why Google / Yahoo! / other webmail providers haven’t just deployed a simple OAuth-style API for accessing the address book. Sites have been scraping them for years anyway; surely it’s better to offer an official API than continue to see users hand out their passwords?

# 9:25 am / gmail, google, jeremy-keith, oauth, passwords, phishing, yahoo

A Visual Explanation of SQL Joins. It turns out Venn diagrams are an excellent way of illustrating joins.

# 9:42 am / jeff-atwood, sql, venndiagrams

Configuring Apache httpd. Ben Laurie shows how to build up an Apache configuration file from first principles.

# 12:52 pm / apache, ben-laurie, httpd

Using the jQuery test suite for your own projects. jQuery’s test suite has clever start(), stop() and expect() methods for running assertions within asynchronous code.

# 12:56 pm / javascript, jquery, testing, unittests

Get Lat Lon. I finally got fed up of hunting around for simple latitude/longitude tools when messing around with mapping APIs, so I built my own with a memorable URL. I plan to add new features as and when I need them.

# 2:14 pm / getlatlon, google-maps, latitude, latlon, longitude, maps, negeography, projects

I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise. I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off.

Doris Lessing

# 7 pm / doris-lessing, literature, nobelprize

Unfuddle. Private Subversion repository hosting provider with plans starting at free: now there’s no excuse not to have a svn repository somewhere. Also provides web based repository browsing and a reasonable looking ticket system.

# 7:15 pm / bugtracking, free, subversion, unfuddle, version-control