BBC NEWS | Technology | Google tackled on e-mail security

BBC NEWS | Technology | Google tackled on e-mail security: "Google has been asked to explain why it is not making its Gmail e-mail service more secure.
In an open letter to Google boss Eric Schmidt, security experts, lawyers, and privacy advocates ask why Gmail users are 'needlessly' being put at risk."

The Meat Ship

Don't Look At This - No Matter What You Do.

Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more: theora video vs. h264

Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more: theora video vs. h264: "Firefox now has a pretty nice set of audio and video controls that are certainly ready for an initial launch. The DOM APIs, while not complete, are good enough that we built our browser controls using them and people are able to do some pretty cool demos and even final implementations with them. The Xiph QT Component, a tool that brings Ogg/Theora Vorbis to QuickTime-capable apps has just had another release that brings it up to speed with the Theora 1.0 release and fixes some key bugs. (And another release is expected soon.) Theora 1.1 alpha 2 has made some really big gains for video encoding quality.

And, we're about to ship these capabilities to 300 million Internet users.

So, what about quality. First, it's important to note that when we talk about video on the Web, quality has to be paired with size. So, what kind of quality can you get from Theora in a comparable file size to H.264 -- the latest and greatest of the not-Open video codecs."

QuirksBlog: State of the Browsers — IE edition

QuirksBlog: State of the Browsers — IE edition: "Basically, IE6 will continue to exist when IE7 has all but disappeared, and, contrary to what you might expect, this situation will create exciting opportunities for Microsoft’s competitors.

Besides, last week the news came that Microsoft is going to voluntarily de-bundle IE from all Windows 7 machines that will be sold in Europe, and I continue to have my doubts about that affair.

So it’s time for a special State of the Browsers IE edition."

Activity Streams | Google Groups

Activity Streams |
Google Groups: "An effort to develop an Activity Stream protocol for syndicating activities taken in social web applications and services, similar to those in Facebook's stream or FriendFeed."

Thoughts on Opera Unite | FactoryCity

Thoughts on Opera Unite | FactoryCity: "Okay, so I shit all over Opera Unite, but you can’t come out and promise all kinds of world-changing, freedom-enhancing goodness and then not deliver! — worse, to do so when their newest competitor (Google!) is schooling everyone with the perfect example of how to do it right (see: Wave)."

An introduction to Opera Unite - Opera Developer Community

An introduction to Opera Unite - Opera Developer Community

The time has come to raise the curtain on yet another exciting new Opera technology release. The drums are playing a low roll, which increases in intensity as the onlookers stare in antici … pation; the lights begin to come up, along with the curtain; the stage is all set for passion and the energy of today’s performance; the narrator spoils the mood by talking through it (that’s me…)

So what is Opera Unite? In a nutshell, Opera Unite is a collaborative technology that uses a compact server inside the Opera desktop browser to share data and services. You can write applications — in the form ofOpera Unite Services — that use this server to serve content to other Web users.

Why is this exciting? Well, it allows you to interact with contacts, sharing data and services without the need for any third-party Web sites/applications to be involved at all. Think of the possibilities:

• You could play games and chat to your peers directly using the service
• You could share photos and videos with peers, straight off your hard drive, without needing to use third-party Web applications
• You can work collaboratively with others on files such as data and images (think wikis or drawing applications), and then work with those files offline if you wish, before sharing them again at a later date
• You could even start creating some crazy hacks, like an application that controls a remote car across the Web (I’ve seen a rough prototype in action)

Itching to know more? Good. In this article I first present a tour of Opera Unite, with details of how to activate it, how to install a Opera Unite service, and how to use those services to collaborate with your friends and colleagues. If you want to find out more about developing your own Opera Unite Services, read our Opera Unite developer's primer.

How to please the customer

How to please the customer: "We have a tendency to focus on the easy comparisons and ignore those that may be more important but are harder.

Knowing this, salespeople often present us with a chain of carefully selected pairs of easy choices that lead us to the position they want to get us to."

URI Template

URI Template: Joe Gregorio from Google: "A URI Template is a compact sequence of characters used for the construction of URIs. This specification defines the URI Template syntax and the process for expanding a URI Template into a URI, along with guidelines and security considerations for the use of URI Templates on the Internet. The URI Template syntax allows for the construction of strings that are a superset of URIs, allowing an implementation to process any URI Template without knowing the scheme-specific requirements of every possible resulting URI."

Storm Alert � Good Vibrations

Storm Alert � Good Vibrations

an intertesting critical examination of the Wave specification and protocol.

Google's Wave of the future is genius, but will it work? :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Business

Google's Wave of the future is genius, but will it work? :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Business

Very good article about the use and potential of Google Wave

Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more: one year of internet explorer usage share

Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more: one year of internet explorer usage share

Internet Explorer 6 continues its long downward trend, dropping about 10 points in the last year and IE 8 has been cannibalizing IE 7 users at a strong pace for the last 3 months.

I expect that the next month will see IE 6 finally fall under 15% (and hopefully trending to fall under 10% by the end of this year.) That's good news for everyone.

We should also see IE 8 meeting IE 7 and crossing at about 25% each in the next couple of months.

HTML 5 and Web video: freeing rich media from plugin prison - Ars Technica

HTML 5 and Web video: freeing rich media from plugin prison - Ars Technica: "DailyMotion and Google are both experimenting with the HTML 5 video element and have strongly endorsed standards-based solutions for deploying video on the Web. Ars takes a close look at the state of open video and explores both the benefits and challenges of liberating rich media from the proprietary plugin prison."

Google Wave as infrastructure

Google Wave as infrastructure: "All of the things in the Wave demo are possible without Wave. The interesting thing about Wave is not so much the application, but the infrastructure, the protocol and the underlying concepts. Many limited collaboration apps have offered various subsets of the Wave functionality, for example, and the superficial functionality can be built using existing technology, without fancy new protocols and clients etc.

But that's missing the point. Wave is interesting because the infrastructure makes it extremely open-ended.

A lot of people have been comparing Wave to e-mail. That's missing the point too. Wave has the potential to be as important as the Web. I'm serious. Wave is taking the web and making it interactive, embeddable, recordable, and shareable on a whole different level than what we are used to. And like most great 'revolutionary' ideas it doesn't actually add all that much new"

Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today? - O'Reilly Radar

Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today? - O'Reilly Radar: "Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the original creators of Google Maps, will take the stage to unveil their latest project, Google Wave. As Lars describes it, 'We set out to answer the question: What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?'"

Google Bets Big on HTML 5: News from Google I/O - O'Reilly Radar

Google Bets Big on HTML 5: News from Google I/O - O'Reilly Radar: "'Never underestimate the web,' says Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra in his keynote at Google I/O this morning. He goes on to tell the story of a meeting he remembers when he was VP of Platform Evangelism at Microsoft five years ago. 'We believed that web apps would never rival desktop apps. There was this small company called �Keyhole, which made this most fantastic geo-visualization software for Windows. This was the kind of software we always used to prove to ourselves that there were things that could never be done on the web.' A few months later, Google acquired Keyhole, and shortly thereafter released Google Maps with satellite view.
'We knew then that the web had won,' he said. 'What was once thought impossible is now commonplace.'
Google doesn't want to repeat that mistake, and as a result, he said, 'we're betting big on HTML 5.'"

Google Wave Preview

Google Wave PreviewThis presentation is an hour and 20 minutes but an interesting view into collaborative systems. Google are positioning this as the future of email while merging with tools like Google Docs. A chain of emails is a conversation, which in Wave is a type of document, somewhat like a Wiki or a bulletin board. In essence it is a server hosted document tree collaboratively edited. Changes are made real-time like Google Talk (pushed through via Jabber-like XMPP)

Draft Protocol Spec ‎(Google Wave Federation Protocol)‎

Draft Protocol Spec ‎(Google Wave Federation Protocol)‎: 

Google Wave is built on top of XMPP which is the core protocol of the Jabber Instant Messaging.

"Waves are a new medium for communication that could be described as a new form of multi-user document. Conceptually, waves do not exist themselves, instead being made up of a set of one or more wavelets which in turn contain one or more documents. A wave is visualised to participants primarily through display of its root conversation wavelet, which is discovered through convention (wavelet of ID '~conversation/root'). Users become notified of wavelets by being added as participants, ala being invited to edit and participate in a multi-user document. It is also worth noting that wavelets have create-on-use semantics, and as such, users must create a new wave by adding themselves to its (currently non-existant) root wavelet."

Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web.

Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web.

Yesterday, during the Google I/O keynote, Google’s VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, laid out a grand vision for the direction Google sees the web heading towards with the move to the HTML 5 standard. While we’re not there yet, all the major browser players besides Microsoft are aligned and ready for the next phase, which will include such things as the ability to run 3D games and movies in the browser without additional plug-ins. But Google wants to take it one step further with a brand new method of communication for this new era. It’s called Google Wave.

Detecting Chrome with Javascipt

Google Chrome � JavaScriptly

John Resig - ECMAScript 5 Strict Mode, JSON, and More

John Resig - ECMAScript 5 Strict Mode, JSON, and More: "Altogether I think ECMAScript 5 makes for an interesting package. It isn't the massive leap that ECMAScript 4 promised but it is a series of respectable improvements that reduces the number of obvious bugs while making the language safer and faster. I'm looking forward to when some implementations start to go public."

Sarissa - Sarissa Home Page

Sarissa - Sarissa Home Page: "Sarissa is an ECMAScript library acting as a cross-browser wrapper for native XML APIs. It offers various XML related goodies like Document instantiation, XML loading from URLs or strings, XSLT transformations, XPath queries etc and comes especially handy for people doing what is lately known as 'AJAX' development."

John Resig - ECMAScript 5 Objects and Properties

John Resig - ECMAScript 5 Objects and Properties: "ECMAScript 5 is on its way. Rising from the ashes of ECMAScript 4, which got scaled way back and became ECMAScript 3.1, which was then re-named ECMAScript 5 (more details)- comes a new layer of functionality built on top of our lovable ECMAScript 3.

There are a few new APIs included in the specification but the most interesting functionality comes into play in the Object/Property code. This new code gives you the ability to dramatically affect how users will be able to interact with your objects, allowing you to provide getters and setters, prevent enumeration, manipulation, or deletion, and even prevent the addition of new properties. In short: You will be able to replicate and expand upon the existing JavaScript-based APIs (such as the DOM) using nothing but JavaScript itself."

Ajaxian � Digg shows Multipart XMLHttpRequest prototype

Ajaxian � Digg shows Multipart XMLHttpRequest prototype: "One of the ways that high-performance websites like Yahoo suggest speeding up load times is by reducing the number of HTTP requests per page. We started thinking about what we could do to reduce HTTP overhead, and where we could get the biggest benefits from it. Well, one thing led to another and the next thing we knew we were talking about writing a generalized framework for bundling files, sending them through a single request, then separating them for use once they head down the pipe."

ongoing � Database Helper

ongoing � Database Helper: Tim Bray: "I’ve been in a lot of Cloud-flavored discussions recently about what kind of Platform-as-a-Service offerings might hit sweet spots. On several occasions, People Who Should Know have said things like “A huge proportion of apps, even really big apps, can coast along just fine on a single MySQL instance with help frommemcached.” Some numbers crossed my radar today that would tend to support that theory; and they’re sort of astounding.

Check out Zoran Radovic’s Scaling Memcached: 500,000+ Operations/Second with a Single-Socket UltraSPARC T2. The title kind of says it: hundreds of thousands of ops per second, and a saturated 10G Ethernet link, with a 1U single-socket server. Now, benchmarks aren’t reality, but them are still some mind-boggling numbers.

Our Shanti Subramanyam has been mining the same territory with the new Nehalem boxes; see Memcached Performance on Sun's Nehalem System and Multi-instance memcached performance. And there were some even scarier numbers being bandied about on an internal email list; stay tuned.

But still, at the end of the day, that throughput on a single-socket box is the real news story, to my eye."

Compatibility View

IEBlog : Introducing Compatibility View: "In the event that a user selects Compatibility View for your site, you can “bring them back” to your desired layout mode via use of the version targeting tag / HTTP header."

Unnecessary scrollbars appear in designMode iframe in IE8

Unnecessary scrollbars appear in designMode iframe in IE8: "In standards mode in the IE8 final (8.0.6001.18702), if you turn designMode ON in an iframe with scrolling set to auto, regardless of how little text appears, unnecessary scrollbars are presented. If you turn designMode off, the scrollbars disappear."

AJAX APIs Playground

AJAX APIs Playground

The Google Visualization API lets you access multiple sources of structured data that you can display, choosing from a large selection of visualizations. Google Visualization API enables you to expose your own data, stored on any data-store that is connected to the web, as a Visualization compliant datasource. Thus you can create reports and dashboards as well as analyze and display your data through the wealth of available visualization applications. The Google Visualization API also provides a platform that can be used to create, share and reuse visualizations written by the developer community at large.

• Embed visualizations directly into your website: Display attractive data on your website by choosing from a vast array of visualizations created by the developer community.

RTE: IE8 creates erroneous ranges when selection is empty

0010844: htmlArea RTE: IE8 creates erroneous ranges when selection is empty - TYPO3 bugtracker: "When the selection is empty (the cursor is in the RTE editing area but nothing is highlighted), IE8 creates erroneous ranges leading to various erratic behaviours of the RTE."

" Solution: Reclaim focus on the editor window before creating any range."

YouTube - Changes to JavaScript, Part 1: EcmaScript 5

YouTube - Changes to JavaScript, Part 1: EcmaScript 5: "In this first talk, we'll explain changes in EcmaScript 5, the problems they're meant to address, the de-facto standards they codify,
and how these changes are likely to affect web applications."