Simon Willison’s Weblog

Tools of the Modern Python Hacker: Virtualenv, Fabric and Pip. Ashamed to say I’m not using any of these yet—for Django projects, my manage.py inserts an “ext” directory at the beginning of the Python path which contains my dependencies for that project.

# 9th July 2009, 11:40 am / python, tools, django, virtualenv, fabric, pip, deployment, pythonpath

aws—simple access to Amazon EC2 and S3. The best command line client I’ve found for EC2 and S3. “aws put --progress my-bucket-name/large-file.tar.gz large-file.tar.gz” is particularly useful for uploading large files to S3. Written in Perl (with no dependencies), shelling out to curl to do the heavy lifting.

# 19th May 2009, 11:38 am / curl, perl, aws, amazon-web-services, ec2, s3, commandline, tools, tim-kay

lightningtimer.net. I'm fed up of having to dig out or knock up a timer script every time I manage lightning talks, so I've given one a domain name. You can use lightningtimer.net/#90 to set a different start time for the counter.

Update March 25th 2025: I rescued an old copy of this from the Internet Archive and re-published it to tools.simonwillison.net/lightning-timer.

# 12th November 2008, 4:43 pm / lightningtimer, projects, javascript, lightning-talks, tools

The CSS Redundancy Checker. A tool for checking your markup for outdated CSS rules that don’t match any of your HTML. We were discussing the need for something similar to this at Torchbox a few weeks ago.

# 6th July 2007, 12:02 pm / html, hpricot, css, ruby, tom-armitage, tools