Simon Willison’s Weblog

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353 posts tagged “google”

2008

DjangoCon and PyCon UK

September is a big month for conferences. DjangoCon was a weekend ago in Mountain View (forcing me to miss both d.Construct and BarCamp Brighton), PyCon UK was this weekend in Birmingham, I’m writing this from @media Ajax and BarCamp London 5 is coming up over another weekend at the end of this month. As always, I’ve been posting details of upcoming talks and notes and materials from previous ones on my talks page.

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Google wants your Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL contacts. And they’re using the password anti-pattern to get them! Despite both Yahoo! and Hotmail (and Google themselves; not sure about AOL) offering a safe, OAuth-style API for retrieving contacts without asking for a password. This HAS to be a communications failure somewhere within Google. Big internet companies stand to lose the most from widespread abuse of the anti-pattern, because they’re the ones most likely to be targetted by phishers. Shameful.

# 15th September 2008, 10:39 am / shameful, google, passwordantipattern, oauth, aol, yahoo, hotmail, ffs, security, phishing

The story behind Google Chrome. Superbly researched by Niall Kennedy—a detailed overview of the staff and acquisitions that went in to Google Chrome.

# 4th September 2008, 1:50 am / chrome, google, niallkennedy

We haven’t changed the name of the conference to “Over Quota”. Aral is having intermittent App Engine quota problems, which are proving impossible to debug. I had a similar problem with an App Engine app a while ago—the quota / debugging story really needs fixing.

# 3rd September 2008, 1:37 pm / aral-balkan, appengine, google

The greatest coup Microsoft pulled with Internet Explorer was putting the word "Internet" in its name. It sits there, on the desktop of every new Windows computer, and it says "Internet". So you click it. [...] What better way to beat a browser with the word "Internet" in its name - a browser that seemingly can't be beat no matter how hard we try - than the Internet Company itself making a browser?

Tom Armitage

# 3rd September 2008, 10:19 am / microsoft, tom-armitage, google, browsers, ie, chrome

V8 Design Elements. High level design details of Google’s V8 JavaScript engine, including how it uses “hidden classes” to optimise object property lookups and a bit of information on the machine code generation and garbage collection.

# 2nd September 2008, 11:58 pm / google, javascript, v8, chrome

Chromium. Google Chrome is out! Here’s the open source project, including the code for the new V8 JavaScript virtual machine.

# 2nd September 2008, 9:06 pm / google, browsers, open-source, v8, javascript, chromium, chrome

Google Chrome, the comic book (via) Google have finally announced a browser project, though it’s currently vapourware (or rather comicware), existing only as a Scott McCloud comic. Still, it looks fascinating—entirely open source, WebKit with a brand new JavaScript VM, every tab running in a separate process for smarter memory usage and some new UI concepts and anti-pishing measures thrown in as well.

# 1st September 2008, 7:45 pm / googlebrowser, google, scott-mccloud, javascript, webkit, phishing, antiphishing, usability, chrome

Google’s undocumented favicon to png convertor (via) Showing the favicon of a domain next to a link is a really nice trick, but it’s slightly tricky to achieve as IE won’t display a .ico file if you link to it from an img element, so you need to convert the images server-side. This undocumented Google API does that for you, meaning it’s much easier to add favicons as a feature to your site.

# 30th August 2008, 8:40 pm / favicon, google, undocumented, apis, png

Gears for Safari Beta. “Chances are it will break your browser. Please proceed with caution.”

# 26th August 2008, 4:27 pm / gears, google, safari, beta

Keyczar (via) New open source cryptography toolkit from Google, designed to get algorithm selection, key rotation and versioning right so you don’t have to. Java and Python versions are available; the Python version depends on PyCrypto.

# 13th August 2008, 1:20 pm / pycrypto, python, google, encryption, keyrotation, ben-laurie, java, keyczar

Underscores are now word separators, proclaims Google. I missed this story last year—the change was announced by Matt Cutts at WordCamp 2007.

# 13th August 2008, 1:06 pm / matt-cutts, wordcamp, wordpress, google, underscores, hyphens, seo

knol: content w/out context, collaboration, capital, or coruscation. danah boyd: “A system that is driven by individualism quickly becomes a tool for self-promoters”

# 3rd August 2008, 3:13 pm / knol, google, danah-boyd

DjangoCon 2008. Venue: Gooleplex, San Francisco Bay Area. Dates: 6th and 7th Sept. Official post will be on djangoproject.com soon.

Robert Lofthouse

# 13th July 2008, 4:50 pm / robert-lofthouse, djangocon, django, python, events, google, googleplex, san-francisco

Question: how do you upgrade servers when you need to pass new information between them? It's a fool's game to try to upgrade both servers at the same time. So you need a communication protocol that is not only backward compatible (a new server can speak the old protocol) but also forward compatible (an old server can speak the new protocol). Protocol Buffers provide that because new additions to the protocol can be ignored by the old server.

Matt Cutts

# 8th July 2008, 9:11 am / protocolbuffers, google, matt-cutts, upgrades

Protocol Buffers: Google’s Data Interchange Format. Open sourced today. Highly efficient binary protocol for storing and transmitting structured data between C++, Java and Python. Uses a .proto file describing the data structure which is compiled to classes in those languages for serializing and deserializing. 3-10 times smaller and 20-100 times faster than XML.

# 8th July 2008, 8:20 am / c-plus-plus, google, idf, java, open-source, protocolbuffers, python, xml

ratproxy. “A semi-automated, largely passive web application security audit tool”—watches you browse and highlights potential XSS, CSRF and other vulnerabilities in your application. Created by Michal Zalewski at Google.

# 3rd July 2008, 2:35 pm / ratproxy, proxy, michal-zalewski, google, security, testing, xss, csrf

OAuth for Google Data APIs (via) Awesome. Now, how’s OAuth support shaping up over at Twitter (who are serious offenders when it comes to encouraging the password anti-pattern, despite Twitter engineers being key to the creation of the original OAuth spec)?

# 27th June 2008, 7:49 am / oauth, twitter, google-data, google, apis

There is a reason why Flickr eventually killed Yahoo! Photos and why it was decided that Google Video be relegated to being a search brand while YouTube would be the social sharing brand. The brand baggage and the accompanying culture made them road kill.

Dare Obasanjo

# 16th June 2008, 2:54 pm / flickr, yahoo, google, youtube, branding, dare-obasanjo

The X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. News to me, but both Google and Yahoo! have supported it since last year. You can add per-page robots exclusion rules in HTTP headers instead of using meta tags, and Google’s version supports unavailable_after which is handy for content with a known limited shelf-life.

# 9th June 2008, 9:21 am / google, yahoo, robots-txt, xrobotstag, http

Google Finance Comet. Google Finance now shows live stock quotes, updated by Comet.

# 4th June 2008, 8:36 am / comet, google-finance, google, stockquotes, cometdaily

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.

# 29th May 2008, 12:38 am / gears, google, opera, firefox3, safari

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.

# 28th May 2008, 11:13 pm / firebug, javascript, google-earth, dan-catt, google

If we see good usage, we can work with browser vendors to automatically ship these libraries. Then, if they see the URLs that we use, they could auto load the libraries, even special JIT'd ones, from their local system. Thus, no network hit at all!

Dion Almaer

# 27th May 2008, 5:58 pm / dion-almaer, ajax, libraries, google, browsers

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.

# 27th May 2008, 5:56 pm / ajax, google, libraries, cdn, jquery, prototype, mootools, dojo

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).

# 26th May 2008, 9:43 pm / google-charts, brian-suda, 24-ways, graphs, google

Search Engine Optimization Through Hoax News. Devious new black-hat SEO technique: invent a news story that’s pure link-bait. The recent “13 year old steals dad’s credit card to buy hookers” story was a hoax: it was a pure play for PageRank.

# 22nd May 2008, 6:09 pm / seo, pagerank, google, blackhat

Doctype: /trunk/goog. Google’s newly released JavaScript library (pure JavaScript, so more along the lines of YUI and jQuery than GWT). I haven’t found the documentation for it yet, but the code is extremely well commented. UPDATE: The documentation is spread throughout Doctype.

# 14th May 2008, 9:12 pm / jquery, goog, google, googledoctype, gwt, javascript, dojo, libraries, yui