URI, XML, HTTP, REST, and the Azure Services Platform � Jon Udell

URI, XML, HTTP, REST, and the Azure Services Platform � Jon Udell: "Note also that you don’t have to use any Microsoft technologies to work with these Azure services. The demo program used LINQ, WCF, and — for the Live Mesh stuff — a wrapper library that packages the API for use by .NET software. But any technology for shredding XML and communicating over HTTP will work just fine."

Knuth: Financial Fiasco

Knuth: Recent News: "due to an unfixable security flaw in the way funds are now transferred electronically, worldwide, it is no longer safe to write personal checks"

Learning Advanced JavaScript

Learning Advanced JavaScript: John Resig:

Function.prototype.bind = function(){
var fn = this, args = Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments), object = args.shift();
return function(){
  return fn.apply(object,
    args.concat(Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments)));
};
};

When should we stop caring about IE6?

When should we stop caring about IE6?

Source chart URL

Depending on your views, a browser below x% of the market does not have to be supported. For me, this is any browser below the 10% mark. If it's a standards based browser, then my layout will work anyway (I'm looking at you Safari).

From this data, I'm predicting that by 2010 IE6 will have a small enough market share to be ignored.

That said, by then, we should be on Firefox 4-5, IE10 IE9-beta and Safari 5.

Sure, 2010 is pretty far away right now, but it'll be here before you know it.

JS Bin - About

JS Bin - About: "JS Bin is a webapp specifically designed to help JavaScript and CSS folk test snippets of code, within some context, and debug the code collaboratively.

JS Bin allows you to edit and test JavaScript and HTML (reloading the URL also maintains the state of your code - new tabs doesn't). Once you're happy you can save, and send the URL to a peer for review or help. They can then make further changes saving anew if required."

What is JSONP?

What is JSONP?: "JSONP is script tag injection, passing the response from the server in to a user specified function"

Google Abandons Standards, Forks OpenID — The NeoSmart Files

Google Abandons Standards, Forks OpenID — The NeoSmart Files

In Google’s version of the OpenID “standard,” users would enter their @gmail.com email addresses in the OpenID login box on OpenID-enabled sites, who would then detect that a Google email was entered. The server then requests permission from Google to use the OpenID standard in the first place by POSTing an XML document to Google’s “OpenID” servers. If Google decides it’ll accept the request from the server, it’ll return an XML document back to the site in question that contains a link to the actual OpenID URI for the email account in question.

This is shown quite clearly in the following image (courtesy of Google, ironically):

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: First Click Free for Web Search

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: First Click Free for Web Search: "First Click Free is designed to protect your content while allowing you to include it Google's search index. To implement First Click Free, you must allow all users who find your page through Google search to see the full text of the document that the user found in Google's search results and that Google's crawler found on the web without requiring them to register or subscribe to see that content. The user's first click to your content is free and does not require logging in. You may, however, block the user with a login or payment or registration request when he tries to click away from that page to another section of your content site."

NuConomy Helps Online Publishers See People behind Pageviews | Profy | Internet news and commentary

NuConomy Helps Online Publishers See People behind Pageviews

Product Parenting

Product Parenting:

A Brief but Reasonably Complete Lecture on Managing People in a Software Company

Stop treating them like children.

That's it?

Yep, that's it. Stop treating them like children.

If you follow this rule and all of its corollaries, you will be a competent manager, thus placing you in the top one percent of all managers in the software industry.

Software professionals are grownups. They do not deserve to be treated like children.

On the other hand...

Unlike your coworkers, software products deserve to be treated very much like children.� They're rebellious and wayward.� They need to be given strict boundaries and lots of guidance.

Like children, products go through stages.� Joel Spolsky said that 'good software takes ten years'.� Those ten years are not all the same.

The life of a growing software product has six different stages.� And the progression of those stages is a lot like the stages of parenting a child.

Each stage requires a different approach.
There is a gradual progression from 'high control' to 'letting go'."

Coding Horror: The Importance of Sitemaps

Coding Horror: The Importance of Sitemaps

I'm constantly looking up my own stuff via Google searches, and I guess I've gotten spoiled. I expect to type in a few relatively unique words from the title and have whatever web page I know is there appear instantly in front of me. For the first two weeks, this was definitely not happening reliably for Stack Overflow questions. I'd type in the exact title of a question and get nothing. Sometimes I'd even get copies of our content from evil RSS scraper sites that plug in their own ads of questionable provenance, which was downright depressing. Other times, I'd enter a question title and get a perfectmatch. Why was old reliable Google letting me down? Our site is simple, designed from the outset to be easy for search engines to crawl. What gives?

What I didn't understand was the importance of a little file called sitemap.xml.

Coding Horror: The Web Browser is the New Laptop

Coding Horror: The Web Browser is the New Laptop: "I agree with Omar that Netbooks are poised to transform computing. They still have a way to go, of course, but the $299 or $199 no-compromises, go-anywhere, zero-monthly-contract-fees web browser in the palm of your hand -- with the requisite 9' or larger screen -- is almost upon us. I guess I hadn't been paying enough attention, because that's a shocker to me.

Pitching the web browser as a bona-fide operating system always seemed stupid to me. Or at least it did, until I sat down with my first netbook. If I were Apple or Microsoft, I'd I'd be watching this category of devices very, very closely."

Survey Proves Online Advertising Will Be Less Hurt Than Other Mediums | Profy | Internet news and commentary

Survey Proves Online Advertising Will Be Less Hurt Than Other Mediums | Profy | Internet news and commentary: "SearchEngineWatch has reporting on the results of quite an interesting survey about how the economic downturn is supposed to affect marketing budgets for various businesses. Quite understandably this is the question that bothers the entire internet industry now as we are trying to figure out if anything ad-supported (both blogs and startups) will be able to survive the recession or if we should start packing our possessions and moving to some other businesses."

Stevey's Blog Rants: The Universal Design Pattern

Stevey's Blog Rants: The Universal Design Pattern: "Today I thought I'd talk about a neat design pattern that doesn't seem to get much love: the Properties Pattern. In its fullest form it's also sometimes called the Prototype Pattern.

People use this pattern all over the place, and I'll give you a nice set of real-life examples in a little bit. It's a design pattern that's useful in every programming language, and as we'll see shortly, it's also pretty darn useful as a general-purpose persistence strategy.

But even though this pattern is near-universal, people don't talk about it very often. I think this is because while it's remarkably flexible and adaptable, the Properties Pattern has a reputation for not being 'real' design or 'real' modeling. In fact it's often viewed as a something of a shameful cheat, particularly by overly-zealous proponents of object-oriented design (in language domains) or relational design (in database domains.) These well-meaning folks tend to write off the Properties Pattern as 'just name/value pairs' – a quick hack that will just get you into trouble down the road."

Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?

Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?

This may be destruction—but it's creative destruction. Business models will crumble, sure, but others will be born. Open source methods illustrate a hard, cold fact about hardware: It's increasingly becoming a commodity. It is not merely that China has massively decreased the price of producing goods. It's that the price of designing goods is dropping through the floor. As Eric von Hippel, an MIT professor of entrepreneurship, points out, that drop is the result of the emergence of cheap or free tools for chipmaking, 3-D modeling, and online collaboration.

"In a sense, hardware is becoming much more like software, up to the point where you actually fabricate an object," von Hippel says. "That's why you're starting to see open source techniques in hardware. Design is largely going to shift out from manufacturers to the communities."

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."