Planet Chris

Posts from interesting people from today, yesterday, and the day before.

Today — Sat, 13 Mar 2010

HTML5 video, canvas accessibility, microdata

Bruce Lawson

As I sit here in Austin, Texas munching a breakfast of bafflingly-termed foodstuffs like “eggs medium over-easy”, “white omlette” and incorrectly-pronounced tomatoes, I thought I’d update you on a few HTML5 tidbits. The first is the news that Google will start indexing content marked up using microdata. No browser does anything with data it finds in pages, but the voodoo magicians that do SEO will presumably find the chance of extra googlejuice compelling. I w...

Plasticine Art Showcase: Shape Your Imagination

Smashing Magazine

Do you remember?.. The first time you played with pieces of modeling clay, melting them in your hands and going deeper and deeper into the colourful plasticine world where your imagination was the only limit. Since the 19th century, when Franz Kolb and William Harbutt independently of each other invented plasticine (modeling clay), it has been used in almost all fields of art: illustration, web design, typography, claymation, installation design.Plasticine artworks can be foun...

flashblockdetector

Simon Willison

flashblockdetector. Mark Pilgrim’s JavaScript library for detecting if the user has a Flash blocker enabled, such as FlashBlock for Firefox and Chrome or ClickToFlash for Safari. One good use of this would be to inform users that they need to opt-in to Flash for unobtrusive Flash enhancements (such as invisible audio players) to work on that page.

Facebook Adds Code for Clickjacking Prevention

Simon Willison

Facebook Adds Code for Clickjacking Prevention. Clever technique: Facebook pages check to see if they are being framed (using window.top) and, if they are, add a div covering the whole page which causes a top level reload should anything be clicked on. They also log framing attempts using an image bug. ...

A review of Foursquare, Layar and the Foursquare Layer

Ivo Jansch

Location Based Services are hot Ever since phones have been equipped with GPS devices it's been possible to provide applications with information about the user's location. I used to have a Nokia N95. It had a GPS but other than Google Maps, I never did anything useful with it. When I switched to the iPhone a couple of months ago, I started to use more and more apps that are location aware. The main reason why it works for me on the iPhone is that the iPhone just always seems to know where I...

Big Bed Cushions

Lorna Mitchell

This week I finally got around to making the big cushions for our bed. We do have some but they were cheap and are now old - and I reallocated Kevin's onto my office chair about a year ago. Since we do often read or use the laptops in bed, cushions would be a good thing to have, but I just didn't have the time to make them! Work was less crazy in February and I found I had the mental space to think of these things, so I bought two big fluffy cushions, and dug out the fabric I had left fro...

Handpicked

Web Standardistas

Offering a selection of “handpicked posts for web designers”, Relpost, in their own words: …diggs deep to bring you fresh content from the hottest web designers and the coolest blogs serving you juicy, related goodness. With curated links on Code, Design, Process, Typography and User Science, it’s well worth a bookmark. [Via Ms de León.]...

Photos from SXSW

Jeffrey Zeldman

SXSW 2010: A photo set on Flickr (in progress). The festival began this afternoon at 2:00 PM Central. Lots more photos will appear over the next few days. ...

Reddit is now running on Cassandra

Simon Willison

Reddit is now running on Cassandra. Migrating their persistent cache over from memcacheDB to Cassandra took one developer just ten days.

Redis weekly update #1 - Hashes and... many more!

Simon Willison

Redis weekly update #1—Hashes and... many more!. Hashes were the big missing data type in Redis—support is only partial at the moment (no ability to list all keys in a hash or delete a specific key) but at the rate Redis is developed I expect that to be fixed within a week or two.

Yesterday — Fri, 12 Mar 2010

Introducing the PyPy 1.2 release

Simon Willison

Introducing the PyPy 1.2 release. It’s been a long time coming, but 1.2 is the first PyPy release to ship with a Just-in-Time compiler! Performance looks pretty impressive.

Search without the Database

Paul Reinheimer

I gave my second talk at #ConFoo today, this one was on Searching without the Database. This talk was based on a situation at work where I replaced a MySQL search solution with a Sphinx + Memcached solution for higher performance. If you're interested, here's the slides: Search without the DB - ConFoo 2010.pdf. If you attended my talk, you can rate it on the Joind.in Page...

Password Managers, is this the best option user’s have?

Jeremiah Grossman

Before reading the following, ask yourself if you’d recommend to the average user that they store their passwords in a local password manager.Today there are four primary ways users lose control over their web-based passwords. Phishing Scams (email or SEO), Malware (installing malware or drive-by-downloads), website break-ins (SQLi, RFI, misconfiguration, etc.), and website brute-force attacks. For a user to protect themselves I’ve outlined the client-side technologies they can deploy (...

45 Fresh Useful JavaScript and jQuery Techniques and Tools

Smashing Magazine

Yes, this is another round-up of fresh and useful Javascript techniques, tools and resources. But don’t close the tab yet, as you might find this one very useful. In this selection we present calendars, forms, buttons, navigation, debugging, optimization and compatibility tables as well as handy resources and tools. We also cover various jQuery-plugins that will help you extend the functionality of your website and improve user experience with ready components or coding ...

Book By Its Cover

Jeffrey Zeldman

Book By Its Cover is a glorious new blog devoted to the beauty of books. ...

Solar 1.0.0 Stable Released

Paul Jones

Yesterday, I announced the release of the 1.0.0 stable version of the Solar Framework for PHP on our mailing list. (I tagged the release four days ago on Monday, but wanted to time the announcement to go along with my Solar presentation at ConFoo.) You can see the change notes here. The highlights are: Added [...]

Geek Meet Gothenburg March 2010

Roger Johansson

It's been over three years since Geek Meet Gothenburg February 2007, so it's about time for another one. Like last time, this event will take place at the NetRelations office in Gothenburg, Sweden. The date is March 24, 2010. We’ll be talking about the usual web geek stuff, likely with a bit of emphasis on HTML 5 and other up-and-coming web things. Check out Geek Meet Göteborg – the sequel! on the NetRelations blog for the details and to sign up.Read full postPosted in Web General. ...

@font-face Generator

Web Standardistas

Setting licensing issues aside, one of the biggest obstacles to using @font-face, is the royal PITA that is converting fonts from your format of choice into Microsoft’s proprietary EOT (Embedded OpenType) format for our friends stuck with Internet Explorer. Until recently, the cumbersome process involved converting from OpenType format to TrueType format, using a service like FontForge (which helpfully sports a UI designed to make your eyes weep), then making a follow-up trip to one...

Ambilight Sample; video and canvas

Ajaxian

Sergey Chikuyonok gets his Philips Ambilight foo on as he created a HTML5 video + canvas sample that mimics the TV effect. As the video runs, a snapshot is sent over to JavaScript land where colors are worked out: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: function getMidColors(side) { var w = buffer.width, h = buffer.height, lamps = getOpti...

Opera Meets CSS3

Web Standardistas

As an excuse to explore CCS3 properties across a variety of browsers, David Desandro has created Opera’s brand using only CSS (and no images) and documented the process. Desandro provides a useful overview of how different browsers handle the task at hand: Firefox 3.6, Safari 4 and Chrome 5 perform valiantly; Opera 10.5, ironically, struggles just a little; IE6, 7 and 8, unsurprisingly, handle the rendering, well… see for yourself....

Four short links: 12 March 2010

O'Reilly Radar

Flickr Flow -- a "season wheel", showing the relative popularity of colours in Flickr photos at different times of the year. Beautiful. (via gurneyjourney) Light Peak -- optical peripheral cabling and motherboard connections. (via timoreilly on twitter) British Museum Pilots "Wikipedian in Residence" -- Liam's underlying task will be to be to build a relationship between the Museum and the Wikipedian community through a range of activities both internally and public-facing. (via straup o...

RE2: a principled approach to regular expression matching

Simon Willison

RE2: a principled approach to regular expression matching. Google have open sourced RE2, the C++ regular expression library they developed for Google Code Search, Sawzall, Bigtable and other internal projects. Unlike PCRE it avoids the potential for exponential run time and unbounded stack usage and guarantees that searches complete in linear time, mainly by dropping support for back references. ...

2010-03-12 Spike activity

Mind Hacks

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: The University of California has an interview with space psychiatrist Nick Kanas There's a thoughtful consideration of the recent New York Times article on whether depression has evolutionary benefits over at Neuron Culture. Time magazine discusses research finding that deaths from cocaine overdoses rise even when the weather warms up only slightly. We're slower at processing touch-related words than words related to the other sens...

The Day Before — Thu, 11 Mar 2010

NHIN Direct: Open Healthcare Records and Government as a Platform

O'Reilly Radar

In my advocacy around Government 2.0, I've been focused on the idea that government should act like a platform provider rather than a complete solution provider. That is, government should lay down rules of the road, create core functionality that others can build on, and then let the private sector compete to flesh out the offerings. You'd never think it from the right-wing media hysteria around the administration's health care initiatives, but some of the best thinking about minimal gove...

Reverse chronological order comments

Roger Johansson

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I don’t get why some sites display reader comments in reverse chronological order. It seems especially popular on newspaper sites, which also for some reason tend to use paging for comments. I think the combination of reverse order and paging makes trying to follow discussions very frustrating. Still, since more and more sites seem to display comments this way I guess there are some people who actually prefer comments displayed backwards, so it is probably h...

Cache Machine: Automatic caching for your Django models

Simon Willison

Cache Machine: Automatic caching for your Django models. This is the third new ORM caching layer for Django I’ve seen in the past month! Cache Machine was developed for zamboni, the port of addons.mozilla.org to Django. Caching is enabled using a model mixin class (to hook up some post_delete hooks) and a custom caching manager. Invalidation works by maintaining a “flush list” of dependent cache entries for each object—this is currently stored in memcached and hence has potential rac...

Using Parameter Pollution and Clickjacking to Aid Anti-CSRF Bypass

Robert Hansen

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about Clickjacking, with only a few exceptions here and there. Mostly because I haven’t seen it much in the wild - at least not yet. But there’s still a lot of research out there to be done. I got an interesting email the other day that talked about a way to use parameter pollution (or a mix of URL parameters and POST) to create a condition where you can defeat CSRF tokens: The technique, found by Lava Kuppan describes a scenario...

Module Bootstraps in Zend Framework: Do's and Don'ts

Matthew O'Phinney

I see a number of questions regularly about module bootstraps in Zend Framework, and decided it was time to write a post about them finally. In Zend Framework 1.8.0, we added Zend_Application, which is intended to (a) formalize the bootstrapping process, and (b) make it re-usable. One aspect of it was to allow bootstrapping of individual application modules -- which are discrete collections of controllers, views, and models. The most common question I g...

Hackvertor and JSReg

Gareth Heyes

I’m not a developer any more so I find it difficult to update the experiments I’ve been working on but I managed today to upload the work I’ve done with JSReg and update Hackvertor. They are both integrated closely together because Hackvertor allows untrusted Javascript using JSReg. The recent upgrade to JSReg allowed me to upload the Hackvertor changes I did a while ago, it is now very nice and easy to share code between users. At the moment registration is disabled but I ...

Listing Published Pages In Habari

Bedrich Rios

For the past few months, I've been using Habari to power my site, and so far the experience has been a good one. But, sometimes the documentation in the wiki lacks code examples and is therefore difficult to parse. Thankfully, the Habari community provides its users with several support channels to...

Personalization and the future of Digg

O'Reilly Radar

I recently talked to Joe Stump, CTO of SimpleGeo, about a number of topics related to location and databases. In the course of the interview, we also got around to discussing Digg. Previous to launching SimpleGeo, Stump was the lead architect at Digg, and he has a lot of insight into where the site is heading. We'll be running the rest of the interview soon, but what Stump told me about Digg got me thinking. We've all heard about citizen journalism. Digg, in principal, is citizen editing...

YQL Geo library – all your geo needs in pure JavaScript

Ajaxian

I just finished doing some talks on geo hacking (slides are available here) and how to use some of the Geo technologies Yahoo and Google provide as part of a University gig in Atlanta. As a lot of the students liked the idea of APIs like GeoPlanet and Placemaker but had a hard time getting their head around them I thought it a good idea to build a small JavaScript library that does the job for them. I give you the YQL Geo library (and its source on GitHub). Using this library you can do th...

ModSecurity Handbook shipping soon!

Ivan Ristić

It's been an adventurous journey, but we are nearing a major milestone: the official publication of the first book published by our publishing company, Feisty Duck! We've just received a batch of ModSecurity Handbook paperbacks and we're enjoying them in all their glory. Two further batches are on their way to our warehouses (one in the US and one in the UK), from where they will be shipped to early adopters. (If you're one of the early adopters, you will soon get an email fr...

How crowdsourcing helped Haiti's relief efforts

O'Reilly Radar

Tech-minded volunteers quickly pitched in with a variety of communication and data services in the days following the Haiti earthquake. One company -- crowdsourcing platform CrowdFlower -- repurposed its service as a text-message translation tool to aid Mission 4636. CrowdFlower founder and CEO Lukas Biewald shares his story in this guest post. Before January 12, I knew little to nothing about Haiti or the role of crowdsourcing in disaster relief. My company, CrowdFlower, offers a crowdsou...

Popular Science Archives

Jeffrey Zeldman

Popular Science has partnered with Google to offer its entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Posted via web from Does This Zeldman Make My Posterous Look Fat? ...

Automate EC2 Instance Setup with user-data Scripts

Simon Willison

Automate EC2 Instance Setup with user-data Scripts (via). I knew about EC2’s user-data feature—what I didn’t know is that the Alestic and Canonical images are configured so that if the user-data starts with #! the instance will automatically execute it as a shell script as soon as it boots up (after networking has been configured). ...

The Jungle Book, Part 3

Rich Bowen

The Jungle Book, Part 3, in which Mowgli hunts Shere Khan and returns to the pack.Listen to it HERE, or subscribe to my podcast.

Forms On Mobile Devices: Modern Solutions

Smashing Magazine

Mobile forms tend to have significantly more constraints than their desktop cousins: screens are smaller; connections are slower; text entry is trickier; the list goes on. So, limiting the number of forms in your mobile applications and websites is generally a good idea. When you do want input from users on mobile devices, radio buttons, checkboxes, select menus and lists tend to work much better than open text fields.But constraints breed innovation, and mobile forms are no d...

Four short links: 11 March 2010

O'Reilly Radar

Digital Inclusion: How Do You Tell? -- [N]either means nor skills are simple binary states. A while ago, I was talking to a young man looking for a job, and asked him why he didn’t look online. Because it’s two buses to get to the public library and you only get half an hour, was his reply. Or being in a library myself and watching an older man asking a bit tentatively if he could use one of the computers and being firmly told that he could book a slot for three days time. H...

SVG Wow!

Ajaxian

Erik Dahlström and Vincent Hardy have put together a cool website, called SVG Wow!, that showcases SVG doing things you didn't expect SVG can do: There are alot of unique demos on there. One of my favorites uses SVG, HTML5 Audio, Web Fonts, and YUI to play music accompanied by flying animated lyrics (Chrome and Safari only): There are lots of other great samples for you to play with and study! ...

Bangkok Unrest

Matt Mullenweg

In celebration of my arrival in Bangkok the opposition party is apparently planning a million person “red shirt” rally. Exciting! On the bright side, “The UDD [United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship] can only afford to keep its protest going for three to five days. If the government has not fallen by that time, it will have to withdraw and draw up a new strategy.” I always pick the best times to travel. (Mom, don’t worry. I’ll stay safe!)...

Ext JS 3.2 beta: stores, components, transitions, and themes

Ajaxian

The Ext JS team have announced the 3.2 beta which includes new components and goodness. Take the animated DataView transitions for example: On top of that, the release includes: Multiple sorting and filtering on Ext.data.Store Composite Fields Slider improvements Toolbar plugins: ToolbarReorderer and ToolbarDroppable New Accessibility Theme: compliant with Section 508 of the Disabilities Act. Quality Assurance: Unit Testing: over 180 bug fixes and enhancements over 3.1 ...

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