Simon Willison’s Weblog

Cross Browser Base64 Encoded Images Embedded in HTML (via) Scarily clever. View the PHP source to see what’s going on—most browsers get image tags that use data URIs starting with data:image/png;base64, but IE gets served a Content-type:message/rfc822 header and a MIME formatted multipart/related document, as used by e-mail clients to embed inline image attachments.

# 4:12 pm / base64, browsers, hedger-wang, ie, internet-explorer, mime, php

Installing CouchDB from source on OS X. So far I’ve just been playing with it in an Ubuntu virtual machine.

# 4:22 pm / building, couchdb, osx, ubuntu

Drop ACID and think about data. I’ve been very impressed with the quality and speed with which the PyCon 2009 videos have been published. Here’s Bob Ippolito on distributed databases and key/value stores.

# 5:13 pm / acid, bobippolito, data, databases, pycon, pycon2009, python

Paul Buchheit: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step. Paul promotes gzip encoding using nginx as a proxy, and mentions that FriendFeed use a “custom, epoll-based python server” as their application server. Does that mean that they’re serving their real-time comet feeds directly from Python?

# 5:19 pm / comet, epoll, friendfeed, gzip, nginx, paul-buchheit, python

Haystack (via) A brand new modular search plugin for Django, by Daniel Lindsley. The interface is modelled after the Django ORM (complete with declarative classes for defining your search schema) and it ships with backends for both Solr and pure-python Whoosh, with more on the way. Excellent documentation.

# 9:53 pm / daniel-lindsley, django, haystack, orm, python, search, solr, whoosh