Simon Willison’s Weblog

Tracking Christmas Cheer with Google Charts. Brian Suda’s Google Charts tutorial on 24 ways has proved invaluable for figuring out how to handle grid lines and axis labels, both of which are pretty unintuitive (and not hugely helped by the official documentation).

# 9:43 pm / 24-ways, brian-suda, google, google-charts, graphs

Google AJAX Libraries API (via) Google are hosting copies of jQuery, Prototype, mooTools and Dojo on their CDN, with a promise to permanently host different versions and an optional JavaScript API to dynamically load the most recent version of a library. I wish they’d stop capitalising Ajax though.

# 5:56 pm / ajax, cdn, dojo, google, jquery, libraries, mootools, prototype-js

OpenID phishing demo (via) A demonstration of the OpenID man-in-the-middle phishing attack. idproxy.net OpenIDs are immune to this particular variant due to the landing page not asking for your password (the phishing site could still provide their own redesigned landing page and hope users don’t notice though).

# 8:09 am / idproxy, openid, phishing, security

Using Memcache with Google App Engine. Brad Fitzpatrick’s 20% time project.

# 11:11 pm / brad-fitzpatrick, google, google-app-engine, memcache

Google Earth in a browser (sort of), Scriptable, a quick peek and poke. Dan Catt on Google’s new browser plugin version of Google Earth... which conveniently exposes a JavaScript API to the browser in the form of the “ge” object, which can then be poked at interactively using Firebug.

# 11:13 pm / dan-catt, firebug, google, google-earth, javascript

Google Gears renamed “Gears”. “We want to make it clear that Gears isn’t just a Google thing. We see Gears as a way for everyone to get involved with upgrading the web platform.” Support for Firefox 3 and Safari is being added and Opera are integrating Gears with both their desktop and mobile browsers.

# 12:38 am / firefox3, gears, google, opera, safari

Twitter, or Architecture Will Not Save You. Kellan is not an armchair architect. He also doesn’t mention Rails once. Well worth reading.

# 1:16 am / kellan-elliott-mccrea, rails, twitter, software-architecture

Obscure bugs revisited: IE, HTTPS and plugins. Filed for future reference: IE breaks mysteriously if you serve it up plugin content (e.g. Flash) over HTTPS with a no-cache header—it deletes the file from cache before the plugin software gets a chance to open it.

# 9:54 am / bugs, caching, flash, https, internet-explorer, plugins, richard-terry

Python + Hadoop = Flying Circus Elephant. Last.fm have released Dumbo, a Python module that lets you easily write Hadoop map/reduce tasks using Python and generators.

# 2:14 pm / dumbo, generators, hadoop, lastfm, mapreduce, python