52 posts filed under this category.
Google Chrome 26 for Android includes an experimental setting to proxy all http scheme requests through Google servers over a SPDY connection backed by Page Speed optimizers for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and image content.
LinkedIn shares their evaluation process for choosing a client-side templating solution from 18 different options across 15 formal metrics.
In the world of cloud computing every action has a cost. Every HTTP request fires off a chain of actions, each uniquely measured on a variety of billable meters. Gone are the days of idle or unused resources on our local servers. Cloud computing charges by the sip (when sips are available) aligning business goals of resource efficiency and its cost. The cloud computing world shares many similarities with the plug-in and go world of electricity, including the need to run green for the sake of resources and cost savings. What can the world of green energy teach us about the future of cloud computing? How can we measure computing resources in the cloud for efficiency, replacement costs, and cost savings?
Cloud computing is changing the way we provision hardware and software for on-demand capacity fulfillment. Lately I have been thinking about the ways on-demand servers, storage, and CDNs are changing the way we develop web applications and make business decisions. In this post I will provide an overview of the cloud hosting landscape with a particular focus on cloud utilization by web companies. I will walk through a managed infrastructure stack and examine a few major business targets.
Every day our web applications ignore useful visitor data. We respond to single request based on a domain and a path without listening to the capabilities, location, preferences, and favorite interactions of our visitors and their requesting agent. A few weeks ago I challenged a room full of designers at PARC to rethink what’s possible on the Web and rely on adaptive programming techniques to serve the right content to the right audience at the right time. I titled the 50-minute talk “Better Design Through Code” and walk through latent capabilities of servers and browsers ready and waiting to deliver personalized, adaptive content to unique Web visitors.
On June 30 Adobe announced a partnership with Google and Yahoo! to better index SWF content on the Web. Search engines can now look inside the binary SWF format to extract text, links, and possible actions. In this post I will take a deeper look at search engine Flash interpreters and provide a few tips for successful indexing.
Yesterday Adobe announced support for H.264 and AAC decoding in the next version of its popular Flash Player plugin. The announcement will change the face of online video playback and production based on international standards. In this post I take a look at the major changes in Flash Player 9 “Moviestar” and how it may affect multimedia publishing on the Web.
Steve Jobs announced the iPhone development platform at last week’s Worldwide Developer Conference to sighs of disappointments. Mac developers were anxious to develop new applications for the the most anticipated consumer electronics device in years, only to be told they should code fancy websites instead. The 9-minute iPhone development demonstration during the WWDC keynote was a bit confusing for anyone new to Apple widget development. In this post I’ll break down a few Apple widget components, transport you to the iPhone development world, and explain a few restrictions and lock-downs common in the mobile phone industry. Dashboard under the…
Adobe released early bits of its next big product bet on Monday morning, a web and desktop hybrid code-named Apollo. Apollo is the first child born out of the Adobe-Macromedia merger of April 2005, bringing together the desktop strength of Adobe PDF combined Macromedia’s web-savvy Flash and Apple’s web browser engine. Apollo will continue to receive heavy marketing from Adobe building towards a 1.0 launch in the fall. In this post I’ll break down the components of Adobe’s Apollo framework, identify opportunities for application development, and compare the promised features against other software offerings. What is Apollo? Apollo combines…
Yahoo! is opening up the JavaScript powering its websites a bit more tonight, encouraging developers to directly reference libraries on its servers from within their webpages. Yahoo! User Interface Hosting opens up versioned access to the popular YUI Library, creating faster load times for sites across the web using Yahoo’s optimized, geo-distributed, and reliable data centers. Many websites utilize common libraries for JavaScript development, creating a drop-down menu, file retrieval, or chart rendering using a library such as Prototype, script.aculo.us, dojo, and many others. If five Ruby on Rails sites utilize the same script.aculo.us library for effects you’ll have to…
Guido van Rossum unveiled his first Google project, Mondrian, tonight during a Python tech talk at the Google campus in Mountain View. Mondrian is a web-based code review system built on top of a Perforce and BigTable backend with a Python-powered front-end. Mondrian is a pretty impressive system and is currently in use across Google. Shared Development Environment Google uses a company-wide Perforce depot with almost no developer branches. Each developer has their own NFS workspace readable by anyone in the company, including automated processes. An administrative process takes snapshots of each developer workspace including local development environments accessed…
Google has a new search product focused on source code. It peeks inside tarballs and other recognized formats, allowing you to search the index by regex, license, or language. It’s pretty easy to see how many projects are using a given library (such as feedparser or magpie) and keep inventing new ways to explore software. You can access the code search engine through a GData Atom feed for easy integration wherever you choose. I find Google Code Search is easier to use than Koders, and may come in handy when looking for different ways of approaching a particular programming…
Social networking site Facebook has opened up access to its service via a set of RESTian APIs, giving developers access to a user’s profile data, friend list, inbox, calendar, photos, blog posts, and more. The API could be used to create a desktop or mobile version of a user’s Facebook data or easily migrate them to a new social network, photo site, or calendar. (via GigaOm) Web applications are limited to 100,000 requests a day and desktop applications are restricted to 5 requests per second….
Adobe released version 9 of its popular Flash player in June, boasting 10x performance increases and a variety of new video, audio, and security filters. MySpace worked with Adobe on new security settings for Flash embeds on its sites and required its members upgrade to the new plugin version for access to Flash content on the site. The new player release combined with the MySpace required upgrade created a lot of confusion around the future of embedded widgets on MySpace and other popular web properties. I spoke with Emmy Huang, senior product manager of the Flash 9 plugin at…
MySpace recently required all widgets upgrade to Flash Player 9 (ActionScript 3) and disable internal links.
Yahoo! released the latest version of its UI utilities this week, including the components used in the new Yahoo! homepage design. You can use the various utilities to build your own website, but Dustin Diaz decided to build a version of Tetris. The game combines Yahoo’s Event Utility and DOM Collection utility to create some cross-browser brick busting action. One of the good things about releasing your code to the world is you never know just how people will use it. I doubt anyone at Yahoo! thought about gaming when they released the UI widgets but developers are resourceful!…
AOL Instant Messenger is now officially available to external developers for custom presence, add-ons, and full integration of AIM into existing applications. I signed up for a developer key and I’ve implemented my AIM presence to my contact page as a first step. The new AIM developer features open up new methods of integration for everyone from the independent publisher all the way up to big corporations. AIM Presence You can now integrate your AIM status into web pages and other applications to let people know when you are online. You can also communicate your idle status, away message,…
TailRank launched a bunch of new features today focused on improving the meme tracker’s ability to recommend new sources and hot posts. Users can now have their favorite weblogs automatically recognized without the need for relatively confusing terms such as OPML, RSS, or blogrolls. Favorite sites are imported using a user’s browser history. I think this technology will be common across many sites in the next 6 months, and here’s how you do it. The user clicks on an “Auto Configure” button that initiates the magic. Clicking the button loads a list of links that are potentially sites visited by…
In this week’s episode of Om and Niall PodSessions we talk about newly popularized methods of interaction within web applications. JavaScript, Ajax, and Flash have all seen a huge surge in demand and mindshare over the past year. What is the current state of the technology and is there enough talent to step up and fill the demand? JavaScript developers need to account for a variety of different implementations and parsers across browser platforms. You need to apply special tricks and hacks to the interaction experience consistent and dependable. I’d prefer to develop for the latest version of Firefox only…
Yesterday afternoon I collaborated with Caterina Fake, Chris Ratcliff, and Josh Kinberg to create WhuffieTracker. WhuffieTracker is an Web application that tracks your ego and citations from a variety of online sources. Our team’s idea was to combine all of the ways someone might be talking about you online, regardless of the discovery or publishing source, into one package you install on your own server to track your whuffie over time. The collaboration was part of a hackfest called Mash Pit. WhuffieTracker prefers to consume information using RSS feeds corresponding to activity around a certain URL or, in a…
SD Forum is hosting a half-day session all about Python on Wednesday, January 25 from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. in Santa Clara. For just $25 you can spend your morning learning about Python from Guido van Rossum, Greg Stein, Bram Cohen, Alex Martelli, and active startups using Python. $25 for all that and $10 less if you are already a SD Forum member. Tags: sdforum, python…
If you are a Mac developer and received a developer transition kit from Apple you can now exchange the old system for a new Intel-based iMac. Apple will send out the 17″ iMac first, allowing you to transition all your work off the old box, and Apple will even pick up all shipping costs. Sweet deal. The developer transition kit gives you a $1300 iMac for about $1000. Tags: imac…
Blog zeitgeist tool TailRank is opening up its parsed feed update stream to third-party developers through a new feed delta API. Developers can request the latest 100 posts discovered and parsed by TailRank’s spiders. The API is a good way to capture a snapshot of the most active and highly linked blogs written in English at any one time. Past research and development projects have seeded their data sets from Weblogs.com and perhaps TailRank can be a new source of information for newcomers to analyze the blogosphere in different ways. API keys will be available at no cost for non-profits…
The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. This week’s theme is APIs and the new opportunities for service providers, developers, and end users. Kevin Burton of TailRank joined us to add an independent developer perspective to this week’s discussion. This week’s session is 26 minutes and 28 seconds in length and a 12.2 MB download. Topics Amazon introduced its Alexa web search platform on Monday. The new services give developers the ability to use content from Alexa’s crawler data and other web services in a hosted environment. Amazon is letting developers upload their own data, process…
Congratulations to David Heinemeier Hansson and the rest of the Ruby on Rails team for releasing version 1.0 of the development framework. It’s an important milestone and the framework has made a big impact over the last 15 months and changed the way some people think of programming online applications. Tags: rubyonrails, rails, ruby…
Earlier today I had the opportunity to interview Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals for my podcast with Om Malik. We talked about scalability’s role in business planning, built-to-flip startup companies, and programming using the Ruby on Rails framework. Our interview with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson is 29 minutes and 50 seconds in length and a 13.7 MB download. Om posted earlier this week about companies that don’t take scale into account when building a web service. David Heinemeier Hansson responded to Om with his own experiences building Basecamp and other hosted applications. We took the…
The basic Oddpost JavaScript is broken up between a few JavaScript files including new code from Yahoo! with comments dated throughout the past couple months. Part of the new Yahoo! Mail is a straight drop-in from Oddpost, including some developer fun in the “SubjectOMatique” complete with references to He-Man, The Simpsons, and Zoolander. BY THE POWER OF GRAYSKULL! Get out of my dreams, get into my car. Up ahead! It’s a DONUT HUT!! When Lawyers Attack Joey Jo Jo Junior Shabadu Hold me closer, Tony Danza The Dreaded Executive Spousal Review It’s funny to see old jokes live on even…
I created a Simple Sharing Extensions exporter for NetNewsWire followed links as a proof of concept.
Six Apart is hosting the San Francisco Perl Users Group tonight at 8 p.m. for a behind-the-scenes look at Movable Type. Byrne Reese will discuss the underpinning of Movable Type’s architecture and design decisions. The meeting is free and open to all attendees. Topics Template tags Text fliters Callbacks Alternate templates MT::Plugin MT::Object MT:App Tags: movabletype, perl…
The latest stable version of Bugzilla, 2.20, outputs queries in RSS 1.0 format. The new feature cuts down on the notifications flooding your inbox and will probably lead to more developers following more product changes. Tags: bugzilla, RDF, RSS…
I just finished reading Paul Graham’s latest essay he prepared for OSCON: What Business Can Learn from Open Source. Paul is an excellent writer and hit on a few key points I want to emphasize here. I think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is that people work a lot harder on stuff they like. Well, that’s news to no one. So how can I claim business has to learn it? When I say business doesn’t know this, I mean the structure of business doesn’t reflect it. Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by…
MySpace, a popular online social networking and blogging site with nearly 20 million users, is moving from ColdFusion to .Net. MySpace received over 7.5 billion page views from 15.5 million unique visitors in May according to comScore. Looks like the site will continue to use its CFML code as native .Net web applications. Seems like a big win for Microsoft! Tags: cfml, coldfusion, dotnet…
I attended the “Meet the Community” panel at the Open Source Business Conference today in San Francisco. After reading the list of panelists I knew I just had to be there.
Amazon is hosting DevCon this week for its software development team. If you could like to join the developer chat you may have a chance to ask questions of Guido van Rossum and other speakers on today’s schedule. The web services team plans to post video and possibly audio, but the summaries are an interesting enough read regardless. Some excerpts: Joel Spolsky: “[P]eople won’t understand where their emotional reactions are coming from. Use this info in real life. Do same thing with software, put people in control, good emotional response, good physical feel, remind them of mom. Make it pretty,…
I wrote an AppleScript for NetNewsWire that allows a user to subscribe to the Technorati cosmos for any individual item within NetNewsWire. Users now have a quick and easy way of staying informed about the latest information related to items of interest from the convenience of NetNewsWire. You do not even have to be online to subscribe to the cosmos! This code is the second AppleScript I have ever written — the first was to export my feeds as OPML and FTP the to my server. I almost did not submit it to the Technorati developers’ contest but I won…
Attention.xml is an open standard to track attention metadata such as what you read and what you would like to learn more about. So far there has been a lot of talk around the idea and what it could mean for synchronization, resource discovery, and social networking. Technorati and Steve Gillmor have talked about the idea but there has been no implementation to show how you could use this open format with existing applications such as web browsers and feed aggregators to make sense out of your daily activity. Until now. I wrote an AppleScript that exports all of your…
Nathan Yergler announced ccPublisher, a tool that allows content creators to upload Creative Commons licensed audio or video files to your site or to the Internet Archive for free hosting. ccPublisher will embed a license claim in MP3 audio files. The OS X version is a whopping 60 MB. The application is written in Python and is a part of the Creative Commons Tools project on SourceForge.net….
Sun Microsystems hosted a programming summit yesterday with many big names in programming in attendance. Tim Bray has a good write-up about the day, the process putting together the event, and some of the outcomes. GroovyJames Stachan JavaGraham HamiltonGilad BrachaMartin Buchholz ParrotDan Sugalski PerlLarry Wall PythonGuido van RossumSamuele PedroniSean McGrath Good to see so many major coders in one spot to share ideas. Tim predicts “that as time goes by, more and more of the code written in the Java ecosystem won’t be in Java. This is a good thing.”…
Python 2.4 is now available. Unification of integers and long integers, better floating point number support, multiple calls per XML-RPC operation, cookie support, and a subprocess module for spawning platform-independent processes are just some of the new features….
Koders is a search engine for source code. Very useful when you want to see how other projects have implemented the code you are considering. You can even check out an estimation for how much money you will save by integrating the existing code or project versus building it yourself. Some examples: Google reference in java code GAIM costs more than HTTPD?…
Programmers at LexisNexis have a creative method of expiring outdated code: it is buried in a graveyard. There are at least eight grave markers and some funerals include the playing of “Taps” and eulogies. To make sure really hated sites are banished forever some employees drive a stake through the printed pages of code….
Novell released version 1.0 of Mono today. Mono is an open source implementation of the .NET framework for use on Linux, Unix, MacOS X and Windows system. Release notes….
Microsoft released beta versions of its Visual Studio 2005 product, including a new line of low cost Express products. All downloads are free for now, but Microsoft does plan to charge for the products in the near future….
The P2P Weblog posted an e-mail from Bram Cohen listing the some of the features of the BitTorrent 2 protocol. Merkle hash trees, UDP trackers, and more….
Annalee Newitz writes about geek approaches to online romance in the June 2004 issue of Wired magazine. The article starts on page 156, and is now online. Christopher Filkins and his FOAF-based Dating Syndicate. Marc Canter’s People Aggregator is mentioned as another dating engine built on FOAF. Kevin Burton is named “The Sniffer” for his use of AIM Sniffer to pick up women in wireless Internet enabled San Francisco cafés. Jonathan Moore is profiled as “The Stalker” for his use Unix shell scripts and Netcat to pull e-mail addresses from wireless networks and match the data with a Friendster profile….
Technorati released a new version of its APIs tonight. Details are available on the Technorati developers wiki. Use apibeta.technorati.com for now but, if there are no major issues, beta will end in about a week. Technorati will now return your query as RSS if you specify your format parameter. Data are returned in UTF-8 format. The new API has better error handling, including appropriate HTTP responses for bad data or no data. Outbound links are sorted by dates and duplicate links stripped. The new API also allows you to limit the number of returned items….
Scott Rosenberg of Salon attended the Systems and Software Technology Conference to research the military’s dependence on software code. The average acquisition cycle for a military product, according to conference speakers, is 10 years — and that’s an optimistic figure. Between the time the Pentagon commissions a system and a contractor delivers it, whole generations of private-sector computing software and hardware have come and gone. XML and Web services are crucial for protecting America. If you’re writing software today for a system that’s going to take years to deploy, you have no choice but to plan on everything changing around…
Microsoft is giving away a free copy of Visual Basic .NET 2003 Standard Edition to users that view and rate 5 VB movies. There will not be 5 movies available until May 17, but there is already a Data and XML tutorial online. Free offer valid in U.S. and Canada only….
Macromedia officially introduced Flex today. Rich UI through Flash, similar to Laszlo. Later this year Macromedia plans to release a new Flex development tool code-named Brady with visual layout, code editing, debugging, and data connectivity tools for creating Flex applications in Dreamweaver. IBM already has a Flex WebSphere Studio plugin. Runs on Java app servers and you can download a free developer version on the Flex site….
This week’s Software Development Conference & Expo featured a panel of software experts discussing the past and future of software engineering. Susan Lammers, author of Programmers At Work, chaired the panel. Panelists were Dan Bricklin, Robert Carr, Andy Hertzfeld, Scott Kim, Jaron Lanier, Ray Ozzie, Jef Raskin, and Charles Simonyi. Scott Rosenberg has a pretty thorough write-up on Salon.com….
Slashdot reviewed Spidering Hacks, giving it good reviews. I even got a highly modded recommendation. Very cool….
Eric Sink has some really good analysis of looking at acquired knowledge over a career span. I agree that learning over time is vitally important, there needs to be someone there to realize the value of your cluefulness. There are also free ways to increase cluefulness. I look to user groups and their SIGs. Java user group, Microsoft regional site. If you are interested in more San Francisco Bay area resources let me know. I check out conferences in the area I may be able to browse during a lunch break or an evening. Exhibition passes and keynotes are usually…