Simon Willison's Weblog

Best of OpenStreetMap (via) I keep on telling people OpenStreetMap is this year's Wikipedia--at its best, it beats commercially available maps. This "best of" site highlights the areas where OSM really shines (the yellow stars)--the German mapping community in particular have produced some outstanding cartography.

# 12:30 pm / cartography, mapping, maps, openstreetmap, wikipedia

SQL pie chart. Generating ASCII art pie charts using the world's scariest MySQL SELECT statement.

# 1:04 pm / ascii-art, graphing, mysql, sql

When we get the tools to do distributed Twitter, etc., we get the tools to communicate in stanzas richer than those allowed by our decades-old email clients. Never mind Apple being anti-competitive, social networks are the peak of monopolistic behaviour today.

-- Blaine Cook

# 1:06 pm / apple, blaine-cook, distributedsocialnetworks, facebook, social-networks, twitter

Scriptlets--Quick web scripts (via) From the prolific Jeff Lindsay, a pastebin-style tool for short server-side scripts written in Python, JavaScript or PHP that executes them within a Google App Engine powered sandbox. The Java code that implements the service is available on GitHub.

# 1:51 pm / github, google-app-engine, java, javascript, jeff-lindsay, open-source, php, python, scriptlets, webhooks

Mandelbrot set in PostgreSQL. Surprisingly short SQL statement that produces an ASCII art Mandelbrot set.

# 2:23 pm / ascii-art, fractals, mandelbrot, postgresql, sql

Python logging from multiple processes. Use Python's socket log handler to send all log messages to a single server--the python-loggingserver project implements such a server as a Twisted application with a handy web interface for viewing the aggregated logs.

# 11:55 pm / logging, python, twisted

2009 >> August