Wikipedia moves its server infrastructure to Ubuntu

Wikipedia simplifies IT infrastructure by moving to one Linux vendor: "In a few months, Wikipedia will finish a major transformation by moving from a combination of versions of Red Hat products to Ubuntu Linux Version 8.04 on all 400 of its servers that support the Web site."

Extreme JavaScript Performance

Extreme JavaScript Performance: "JavaScript engines are serving as the test bed for new forms of dynamic language optimization. No other language is seeing this level of competition and rapid improvement that JavaScript is. This is optimal considering that JavaScript is one of the most widely-deployed programming languages available."

Majek's technical blog: Google App Engine tips&tricks

Majek's technical blog: Google App Engine tips & tricks

"A while ago I was writing some sample applications forGoogle App Engine. I noted the things that can be useful for other GAE programmers."

jQuery: � jQuery, Microsoft, and Nokia

jQuery: � jQuery, Microsoft, and Nokia: "Both Microsoft and Nokia are taking the major step of adopting jQuery as part of their official application development platform. Not only will they be using it for their corporate development but they will be providing it as a core piece of their platform for developers to build with."

Canon 5D Mark II Initial Thoughts - James Duncan Davidson

Canon 5D Mark II Initial Thoughts - James Duncan Davidson: "Canon has finally launched the successor to the EOS 5D. The Canon EOS 5D Mark II brings a 21 megapixel sensor to the game that provides higher ISO performance than its predecessor, a new review screen, live view, and a new 1080p HD movie mode. On paper, there’s much to like about this new camera. But, there are a couple of major points that make this release bittersweet, at least for me."

Clickjacking: new cross-browser exploit

Clickjacking: Researchers raise alert for new cross-browser exploit: "Researchers are beginning to raise an alarm for what looks like a scary new browser exploit/threat affecting all the major desktop platforms — Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Adobe Flash."

Vincent Laforet's high quality video on a budget

Something Very Interesting is coming…both to this blog and to our industry: "I had it in my hands for less than 72 hours before I had to send it back - but the time I did have with a prototype of the Canon EOS 5D MKII will possibly change the path of my career as well as the photography industry to some degree."

See the video from the new camera and a behind the scenes video.

John Resig - BBC Removing Microformat Support

John Resig - BBC Removing Microformat Support

After performing a number of usability studies (both on average users and users with screen readers) the BBC found that using the Microformat convention of ... to denote items like dates negatively impacted usability. This is a huge blow to the Microformats community. While this concern has been discussed for a while this is the first instance of a major corporation reneging on their previous Microformat commitment.

As an alternative the BBC seems to be examining RDFa - one of the leading "competitors" in the "embed machine-readable data in (X)HTML markup" space. Examining the basic RDFa-in-XHTML primer it's obvious that RDFa still has a long ways to go before any sort of practical adoption by developers and designers. Riddled with advanced, or just plain confusing, terminology (XML namespaces, Dublin Core, semantic web, and not to mention the addition of many new attributes - like typeof, about, and property) it appears to be solidly entrenched in the ways that Microformats were able to shake themselves free of, allowing them to achieve widespread adoption.

It's pretty obvious that the Microformats community is going to have to step up and prevent any sort of attrition that will occur in this situation.

Google search finds seafaring solution - Times Online

Google search finds seafaring solution - Times Online: "Google may take its battle for global domination to the high seas with the launch of its own “computer navy”.

The company is considering deploying the supercomputers necessary to operate its internet search engines on barges anchored up to seven miles (11km) offshore."

This is reminiscent of Radio Goodies.

How the 'Net works: an introduction to peering and transit

Page 1: "The story of how the Internet is structured economically is not so much a story about net neutrality, but rather it's a story about how ISPs actually do use AT&T's pipes for free, and about why AT&T actually wants them to do so. These inter-ISP sharing arrangements are known as 'peering' or 'transit,' and they are the two mechanisms that underlie the interconnection of networks that form the Internet."

Server Name Indication - Support & Test Site Reference

Server Name Indication - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

TLS Extension - Server Name Indicator (SNI)

Another Caffeinated Day: "TLS Upgrade is better known as RFC 2817. Indeed, it is not widely supported by browsers. Firefox 2 and IE 7 do not. Firefox 3 will. IE 7 never. Not sure about Safari. But it seems that RFC 3546 has more adherents. FF2, IE7 already support RFC 3546 (Safari again absent), which specifies a Server-Name-Indicator (SNI), not unlike the Host header today in HTTP/1.1."

Google raising newspaper morgues from the dead

Google raising newspaper morgues from the dead | News - Digital Media - CNET News: "Google is making searchable, digital copies of old newspapers available online through partnerships with their publishers, the company said Monday.

Under the ad-supported effort, Google will digitize millions of pages of news archives, including photos, articles, headlines, and advertisements, Google said."

jQuery history/remote - solution for hijaxing links

jQuery history/remote - solution for hijaxing links: "Implement Ajax driven links in a completely unobtrusive and accessible manner (also known as Hijax) with support for the browser's back/forward navigation buttons and bookmarking. Enhance comparable DHTML driven links as well."

reallysimplehistory - Google Code

reallysimplehistory - Google Code: "Really Simple History is a lightweight JavaScript library for the management of bookmarking and browser history in Ajax/DHTML applications. RSH serializes application data in an internal JavaScript cache so that bookmarks and the back button can be used to return your application to an earlier state.

Originally developed by Brad Neuberg in 2005, RSH has won a large user base for its simplicity, ease of use and lack of dependency on any specific Ajax framework. It's written in plain old JavaScript and can be included on any site according to the terms of its BSD license."

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.

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."

urlBorg: features

urlBorg
short URLs done right.

Bloog

Bloog
A RESTful Blog/Homepage for Google AppEngine.

Heroku

Heroku

Platform as a Service, PaaS :: Morph Labs

Platform as a Service, PaaS :: Morph Labs

Bungee Connect :: Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Bungee Connect :: Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Experimenting with Google App Engine - Bret Taylor's blog

Experimenting with Google App Engine - Bret Taylor's blog

Google App Engine Open Source Projects - Google App Engine | Google Groups

Google App Engine Open Source Projects - Google App Engine | Google Groups

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.

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!

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."