Thursday, September 04, 2008

Inside Chrome: The Google Browser

The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web: "It's incredible that something as potentially game-changing as a Google browser has stayed under wraps for two years."

Chrome is open source, uses WebKit, faster Javascript, multiprocess architecture and application platform.

Friday, August 29, 2008

Tutorials:Getting Started with jQuery - jQuery JavaScript Library

Tutorials:Getting Started with jQuery - jQuery JavaScript Library
This guide is an introduction to the jQuery library. Basic knowledge of JavaScript and the document object model (DOM) is required. It starts from ground up and tries to explain details where necessary. It covers a simple hello world example, selector and event basics, AJAX, FX and usage and authoring of plugins.

tecosystems � Beyond REST, or Beyond XMPP? Both? The Q&A

tecosystems � Beyond REST, or Beyond XMPP? Both? The Q&A: "SOG: For the folks out there that might not be intimately familiar with XMPP, could you explain it and its value in a few sentences?
JH: The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is a standardized protocol for:

* Streaming chunks of XML at Internet scale
* Exchanging information about the availability of endpoints (presence)
* Addressing messages to those endpoints"

plaintxt.org � Minimalism in blog design, an experiment

plaintxt.org � Minimalism in blog design, an experiment: "Make yourself comfortable. Welcome to my personal experiment in combining minimalism with blog design. I offer themes that showcase your content and not my design skills, which are meager enough. Blogging shouldn’t be about filling a template."

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

YAML�Ain’t�Markup�Language�(YAML™) Version�1.2

YAML�Ain’t�Markup�Language�(YAML™) Version�1.2

“YAML Ain’t Markup Language” (abbreviated YAML) is a data serialization language designed to be human-friendly and work well with modern programming languages for common everyday tasks. This specification is both an introduction to the YAML language and the concepts supporting it, and also a complete specification of the information needed to develop applications for processing YAML.

Open, interoperable and readily understandable tools have advanced computing immensely. YAML was designed from the start to be useful and friendly to people working with data. It uses Unicode printable characters, some of which provide structural information and the rest containing the data itself. YAML achieves a unique cleanness by minimizing the amount of structural characters and allowing the data to show itself in a natural and meaningful way. For example, indentation may be used for structure, colons separate key: value pairs, and dashes are used to create “bullet” lists.

There are myriad flavors of data structures, but they can all be adequately represented with three basic primitives: mappings (hashes/dictionaries), sequences (arrays/lists) and scalars (strings/numbers). YAML leverages these primitives, and adds a simple typing system and aliasing mechanism to form a complete language for serializing any native data structure. While most programming languages can use YAML for data serialization, YAML excels in working with those languages that are fundamentally built around the three basic primitives. These include the new wave of agile languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, and Javascript.

There are hundreds of different languages for programming, but only a handful of languages for storing and transferring data. Even though its potential is virtually boundless, YAML was specifically created to work well for common use cases such as: configuration files, log files, interprocess messaging, cross-language data sharing, object persistence, and debugging of complex data structures. When data is easy to view and understand, programming becomes a simpler task.

1.1. Goals

The design goals for YAML are, in decreasing priority:

  1. YAML is easily readable by humans.
  2. YAML matches the native data structures of agile languages.
  3. YAML data is portable between programming languages.
  4. YAML has a consistent model to support generic tools.
  5. YAML supports one-pass processing.
  6. YAML is expressive and extensible.
  7. YAML is easy to implement and use.

1.4. Relation to JSON

Both JSON and YAML aim to be human readable data interchange formats. However, JSON and YAML have different priorities. JSON’s foremost design goal is simplicity and universality. Thus, JSON is trivial to generate and parse, at the cost of reduced human readability. It also uses a lowest common denominator information model, ensuring any JSON data can be easily processed by every modern programming environment.

In contrast, YAML’s foremost design goals are human readability and support for serializing arbitrary native data structures. Thus, YAML allows for extremely readable files, but is more complex to generate and parse. In addition, YAML ventures beyond the lowest common denominator data types, requiring more complex processing when crossing between different programming environments.

YAML can therefore be viewed as a natural superset of JSON, offering improved human readability and a more complete information model. This is also the case in practice; every JSON file is also a valid YAML file. This makes it easy to migrate from JSON to YAML if/when the additional features are required.

Monday, August 25, 2008

Why Amazon’s EBS Should Worry Data Centers - GigaOM

Why Amazon’s EBS Should Worry Data Centers - GigaOM: "Why this is a big deal? Well in the past, data that was coming off storage that was attached to Amazon EC2 instance was lost once the instance was lost, a problem that became an issue for quite a few app builders. Persistent access is key to many applications. With the release of this service, now you can simply use Amazon as a full-scale virtual data server. Another way to think about it: a storage area network in the cloud. Check out this post about how to run MySQL on Amazon EC2 with EBS.

Think about it this way — Amazon has taken one more step (a big one) toward turning servers into a service, a prospect that should keep the chiefs of big server makers awake at night."

Amazon’s Elastic Block Store explained � RightScale Blog

Amazon’s Elastic Block Store explained � RightScale Blog

Now that Amazon’s Elastic Block Store is live I thought it’d be helpful to explain all the ins and outs as well as how to use them. The official information about EBS is found on the AWS site, I’ve written about the significance of EBS before and I’ll follow-up with a post about some new use-cases it enables.

The Basics

EBS starts out really simple: you create a volume from 1GB to 1TB in size and then you mount it on a device (like /dev/sdj) on an instance, format it, and off you go. Later you can detach it, let it sit for a while, and then reattach it to a different instance. You can also snapshot the volume at any time to S3, and if you want to restore your snapshot you can create a fresh volume from the snapshot. Sounds simple, eh? It is but the devil is in the detail!

Amazon Elastic Block Store features

Saturday, August 23, 2008

IPv6 doomed

IPv6 doomed, requires act of God - Networking - iTnews Australia: "ISPs and carriers have spectacularly failed with IPv6, to the point where they need to resurrect network address translation (NATs) to persist with IPv4, a leading expert has warned.

In what at times resembled a doomsday prophecy, Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) chief scientist, Geoff Huston, told a packed AusNOG conference that ‘it’s way too late’ for IPv6 and that the industry will need ‘religion’ to get it working before the impending exhaustion of IPv4 addresses.

It is anticipated IPv4 address allocation could now run out as early as January 2009 – particularly as sectors of the industry resort to ‘panic buying’ of addresses as the shortage looms, according to Huston.

“When the IPv4 supply runs out, you’re going to have to pay [to get addresses], and after another ten years the price is going be amazing,” said Huston."

Friday, August 22, 2008

Microsoft Live Labs Creates Web “Synth” For 3-D Photo Tour | Walter S. Mossberg | Personal Technology | AllThingsD

Microsoft Live Labs Creates Web “Synth” For 3-D Photo Tour | Walter S. Mossberg | Personal Technology | AllThingsD: "This week, Microsoft Live Labs is releasing its first broad consumer Web service, called Photosynth. This service turns multiple photos of a scene or site — say, an art gallery or a building — into a 3-D scene you can virtually “walk” through on the Web."

Photosynth, based on technology Microsoft acquired in 2006, is entirely free, and it’s entirely based on the Web, at photosynth.net. At that site you can view not only your own synths, but the synths created by every other Photosynth user.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

ongoing � REST Questions

ongoing � REST Questions

Has REST Been Fortunate in its Enemies? · I have been among the most vocal of those sneering at WS-*, and I’m comfortable with what I’ve said. But that doesn’t prove that the core WS-* ideas are wrong. Here are some of the handicaps WS-* struggled under:

Gmail Account Hacking

Gmail Account Hacking Tool | Hacking Truths: "A tool that automatically steals IDs of non-encrypted sessions and breaks into Google Mail accounts has been presented at the Defcon hackers’ conference in Las Vegas.

Last week Google introduced a new feature in Gmail that allows users to permanently switch on SSL and use it for every action involving Gmail, and not only, authentication."

Saturday, August 16, 2008

How To Demo Your Startup

How To Demo Your Startup: "For the past 10 days I’ve sat through 200 company demos for the TechCrunch50 conference. These demos are mostly done over the phone for 10 minutes using the phone and web conferencing software like WebEx or Adobe’s wonderful new “Connect” service.

After doing 2,500 minutes of demos (40 hours) this year and many more last year for the conference, I’ve learned a lot about what makes for a great demo and what makes for a horrible demo. Since demoing your idea is a key to your success as an entrepreneur, I thought I would share everything I know in a few simple bullet points."

Friday, August 15, 2008

Business Requirements are Bullshit

Another rant from Steve Yegge of Google

Stevey's Blog Rants: Business Requirements are Bullshit

trueSpace7, Introduction

trueSpace7, Introduction: "trueSpace7.6 is a fully-featured 3D authoring package that will let you model, texture, light, animate and render 3D content. As well as traditional images and movies, you can also make 3D content for online shared spaces, and for Virtual Earth."

It's also free.

Monday, August 11, 2008

The goings on behind the iPhone application blacklist (Updated)

The goings on behind the iPhone application blacklist (Updated): "Several sites have reported on the discovery of an apparent application blacklist by iPhone forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski. Allegedly, Apple would be able to keep a blacklist of certain apps that are not allowed on (or that the company has revoked from) the App Store, and therefore be able to kill the apps remotely on customers' iPhones once a certificate has been revoked. Naturally, this has caused some hand-wringing and tinfoil-hat-shaping among iPhone customers who don't want to sacrifice that level of control of their devices to Apple. Here, we dig into the rabbit hole to see if we can figure out what's going on."

ongoing � Mobility Blues

ongoing � Mobility Blues: "These days, I’m gloomier and gloomier about the prospects for the mobile Internet; you know, the one you access through the sexy gizmo in your pocket, not the klunky old general-purpose computer on your desk."

Safari Web Content Guide for iPhone: Introduction to Safari Web Content Guide for iPhone

Safari Web Content Guide for iPhone: Introduction to Safari Web Content Guide for iPhone"Because Safari on iPhone uses the same web engine as Safari on the desktop, your webpages might work well on iPhone without any modifications. Some differences exist, however, so at a minimum you should ensure that your webpages are compatible with Safari on iPhone. Next, you might optimize your webpages for iPhone simply as a convenience to the user. For example, ensure that your webpages work over both Wi-Fi and EDGE, scale correctly when rendered, and contain media that is viewable on iPhone. Finally, you might build custom web applications for iPhone that look and behave like native applications."

Bloggers Are Hard to Please and Hard to Pitch: Some Mistakes in Pitches from Startups | Profy | Internet news and commentary

Bloggers Are Hard to Please and Hard to Pitch: Some Mistakes in Pitches from Startups | Profy | Internet news and commentary: "I am sure that every blogger has a rather extensive list of his or her preferences about how they want to be pitched by startups looking for the blogosphere coverage. And from time to time we all discuss the most funny or atrocious cases right in our blogs - probably hoping that startups will finally learn that we don’t want some things or we do want very different things. So I have decided to compile my own list of the most common mistakes that startups make when pitching bloggers (or at least what I consider mistakes myself)."

Saturday, August 09, 2008

Patch for Internet Security Hole May Not Do the Job - NYTimes.com

Patch for Internet Security Hole May Not Do the Job - NYTimes.com: "On Friday, a Russian physicist demonstrated that the emergency fix to the basic Internet address system, known as the Domain Name System, is vulnerable and will almost certainly be exploited by criminals."

Friday, August 08, 2008

Gmail Suffers 15-Hour Partial Fail

Gmail Suffers 15-Hour Partial Fail: "“The Gmail Team is currently aware of a subset of users being affected by the 502 error on login. Our engineers are actively investigating the issue, and we will provide updates as soon as we have them. We appreciate your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”"

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

About Google Page Creator

About Google Page Creator: "We are no longer accepting new sign-ups for Page Creator because we have shifted our focus to developing Google Sites, which offers many of the capabilities of Page Creator along with new features like site-level navigation, site-level headers, control over who can see and edit your site, and rich embeddings like calendars, videos, and Google docs.

If you are currently a Page Creator user, you can continue to use Page Creator and your pages will automatically be transitioned to Google Sites later this year. We are committed to making this transition as smooth and easy as possible, and we will post more details as we get closer to the transition time. You can also manually move your web pages from Page Creator to Google Sites or other service providers at any time."

Friday, August 01, 2008

ENGINEERS' DREAMS

Edge: ENGINEERS' DREAMS By George Dyson: "And why trace the connections in the brain of one individual when you can trace the connections in the mind of the entire species at once? Are we searching Google, or is Google searching us?"