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Steve Jobs is the closest thing to Walt Disney since Walt Disney

By Mark Sigal
November 24, 2009

Steve Jobs is the closest thing to Walt Disney since Walt Disney, now forever bound by Pixar. If you believe in karma, how can you not think that it's pretty cool that Jobs ended up as the largest individual shareholder in Disney, an active board member who now is helping Disney re-boot its retail efforts!

Velocity 2010: Fast By Default

By Jesse Robbins
November 24, 2009

We're entering our third year of Velocity, the Web Performance & Operations Conference.. Velocity 2010 will be June 22-24, 2010 in Santa Clara, CA. It's going to be another incredible year. Steve Souders & I have set a new theme this year, "Fast by Default". We want the broader Velocity community & to adopt it as a shared mission &...

New knowledge exchange for Flex/Flash/AIR developers

By Yakov Fain
November 24, 2009

There are about 250K developers working with Flex and AIR. If you add an army of ActionScript developers, this number will grow substantially. Where do you go if you have a technical issue while developing RIA? As of today, there...

Inside the E-Book Wars: The Nook in Depth (Part 2)

By William Stanek
November 24, 2009

William Stanek here, continuing the e-reader discussion with an in-depth look at the Nook from Barnes & Noble. Anyone who's been watching the e-reader and e-book market knows, the Nook is the latest entry in this highly competitive space where...

Four short links: 24 November 2009

By Nat Torkington
November 24, 2009

English Shellcode (PDF) -- paper presented at ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, showing how to encode arbitrary x86 shell code (the payload in a malware or other attack that elevates privileges and pwns your machine) as something that looks, at first glance, to be English text. Impressive piece of work. (via Slashdot) The Twelve Scams of Christmas...

How far can documentation go?

By Rick Jelliffe
November 24, 2009

SAMBA's Jeremy Allison has a great post Why writing a Windows compatible file server is (still) hard. What leaps out to me? First, that the method of requiring complete documentation outside a formalized QA process doesn't work real well: The...

Schematron at the Associated Press

By Rick Jelliffe
November 24, 2009

Stuart Myles has a quick slide presentation Schematron and Other Useful Tools at the IPTC Autumn Meeting about how the Associated Press reduced manual checking & QA of incoming iAtom feeds using open source tools. They convert the incoming iAtom/XHTML...

Dan Zarrella on Social Media Marketing - Advice from "The Social Media & Marketing Scientist"

By Mary Rotman
November 24, 2009

Are you looking to take advantage of social media for your business or organization? With easy-to-understand introductions to blogging, forums, opinion and review sites, and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, The Social Media Marketing Book will help you choose the best--and avoid the worst--of the social web's unique marketing opportunities.

More that sociologist Erving Goffman could tell us about social networking and Internet identity

By Andy Oram
November 23, 2009

Reactions to Frame Analysis, a wide-ranging interpretation of experience by leading sociologist Erving Goffman. Although the Internet tends to strip away the external meanings Goffman recorded, we still bring our real-life frameworks into online interactions.

Tonight: Radar/Ignite/Laughing Squid Meetup in Philadelphia

By Brady Forrest
November 23, 2009

Scott Beale of Laughing Squid and I are going to be in the Philadelphia area today. We want to meet up with people while in town, so we're having a Drinkup at Triumph Brewing Company in the Old City area of Center City starting at 7PM. Facebook has the details. If you are involved in Ignite Philly, read Radar...

Inside the E-Book Wars: The Nook in Depth (Part 1)

By William Stanek
November 23, 2009

William here, continuing the e-reader discussion with an in-depth look at the Nook from Barnes & Noble. Anyone who's been watching the e-reader and e-book market knows, the Nook is the latest entry in this highly competitive space where Sony,...

QOW: Call for Topics, What do you want from InsideRIA?

By Rich Tretola
November 23, 2009

InsideRIA is all about community. Our authors are all active community members and leaders in then industry. Our readers are faithful and demand excellence from our authors. Every so often, I like to put out a request to the InsideRIA...

Metadata and the Flash Platform

By Russ Ferguson
November 23, 2009

Readers of this site are familiar with the concept of metadata. Meta tags in websites for example, describe the site and the individual pages within. Files can also have meta data, this can be anything from where in the world that picture was taken and that kind of camera, to the track number of the mp3 your listening to.

Four short links: 23 November 2009

By Nat Torkington
November 23, 2009

Top E-Tailers Profiting From Scams -- Vertrue, Webloyalty, and Affinion generated more than $1.4 billion by "misleading" Web shoppers, said members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. [...] The government says the investigation shows that [the companies] "trick" consumers into entering their e-mail address just before they complete purchases at sites such as Orbitz, Priceline.com,...

How fuzzy should a date be?

By Rick Jelliffe
November 23, 2009

From Bruce D'Arcus' Darcusblog comes a pointer on a U.S. Library of Congress initiative for a better date format Extended Date Time Format (EDTF). ISO 8601's problem is that almost anything is a date: if my memory serves me, some...

Top Drupal Gotchas, #2: White Screen / Not Enough PHP Memory

By Spencer Critchley
November 22, 2009

Continuing my effort to spare newcomers to Drupal from falling into this powerful content management system's most common traps, this time I look at a frequent cause of white screens - the sudden and scary devolution of a previously healthy...

Are Coders Nice?

By Amy Blankenship
November 22, 2009

A few months ago, the team my husband works on was hiring a new developer, and I overheard my husband talking to a friend he was considering recommending for the position. I surprised myself by my gut reaction which was,...

Watching the Retweeted Get Retweeted-er: Power User Secret Retweetist Love

By Mark Drapeau
November 22, 2009

When Twitter decided to slowly roll out a new, official retweeting feature, people waited in anticipation. When they let their users know what it might look like, people debated whether that was the right way to deploy it. When it actually became available, people almost universally disliked it. But my post is about why I love the new Twitter retweet...

Work Flow Optimizations for Short Development Cycle Team

By Tom Barker
November 22, 2009

One of the responsibilities of being a technical manager is to optimize work flows and create self sustaining systems for the teams that you manage. One of my teams operates on an extremely short development cycle. They begin coding in...

The Problem With The Linux Community

By Caitlyn Martin
November 20, 2009

While I'm very positive about the openSUSE team I must say that I am a lot less sanguine about some in their community. Some fans (or really fanatics) came out in force ready to attack the reviewer (me), to question my skills and even my sanity, to attack Ladislav Bodnar for posting the review, to blame the hardware, anything at all but the distro code which is, according to some, "the best release ever".

Robots.Txt and the .Gov TLD

By Carl Malamud
November 20, 2009

The robots.txt file should be used sparingly by government organizations and only in a non-discriminatory fashion.

Validation in Flex with Hamcrest-AS3

By Joel Hooks
November 20, 2009

Hamcrest? No, it isn't a fancy sandwich topping. Hamcrest is a framework for creating matchers, allowing matching rules to be defined declaratively (from Wikipedia). Hamcrest has been used by many popular unit testing frameworks including JUnit and FlexUnit 4. Hamcrest-AS3...

Asia Continues to be Facebook's Strongest Growth Region

By Ben Lorica
November 20, 2009

With Facebook topping 330 million active users over the past week, the company's strongest growth region continues to be Asia. Over the last 12 weeks, Facebook added close to 17M active users in Asia alone. Since my previous post, the share of active users from Asia grew by 2% (to 13.5% of all users), and roughly 1 in 7 users...

Four short links: 20 November 2009

By Nat Torkington
November 20, 2009

Spokeo -- abysmal indictment of society, first prize in mankind's race to the bottom. Uncover personal photos, videos, and secrets ... GUARANTEED! Spokeo deep searches within 48 major social networks to find truly mouth-watering news about friends and coworkers. PS, anybody who gives their gmail username and password to a site that specializes in dishing dirt can only be...

Health gets personal in the cloud

By Brian Ahier
November 19, 2009

Healthcare is one of the biggest industries in the world. The United States spends over 17% of its GDP on healthcare and the issue of the industry's future is being hotly debated in Congress. Whatever happens to other elements of health reform, health information technology will play a key role in moving us towards the goal of bending the cost...

Google Closure: a new way of developing in JavaScript

By Davide Zanotti
November 19, 2009

Preface Every day million people make use of Google products and these products are written mainly using one well known language: JavaScript! What makes this online software stable, fast and responsive is a good use of the language and an...

Using Google Analytics With AJAX

By John Barlow
November 19, 2009

A couple months ago I wrote an article on how to use Dojo to create a rich UI for websites. One of the key points of the article was how to support all users -- those with JavaScript enabled and those without. The purpose of this was to enable basic browsers like search engine spiders to go through your site without JavaScript, while enabling the rich interface for your regular users.

Open for Business - Designing Social Interfaces

By Christian Crumlish
November 19, 2009

This is an excerpt from Designing Social Interfaces. From the creators of Yahoo!'s Design Pattern Library, Designing Social Interfaces provides you with more than 100 patterns, principles, and best practices, along with salient advice for many of the common challenges you'll face when starting a social website. Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone share hard-won insights into what works, what doesn't, and why. You'll learn how to balance opposing factions and grow healthy online communities by co-creating them with your users.

RIA Unleashed Boston Conference - My thoughts

By Scott Janousek
November 19, 2009

Kevin Shuttle already beat me to the proverbial punch with his review, but I'd to share some of my thoughts on a recent Boston based conference called RIA Unleashed. This developer focused event was recently held at Bentley College, Waltham,...

Four short links: 19 November 2009

By Nat Torkington
November 19, 2009

Chumby One (Bunnie Huang) -- new Chumby product released. In addition to being about half the price of the original chumby, the new device added some features: it has an FM radio, and it has support for a rechargeable lithium ion battery (although it’s not included with the device, you have to buy one and install it yourself). There’s...

Using UDP socket connections for low-latency and loss-tolerant scenarios in AIR 2 (Part 3)

By Ian McLean
November 19, 2009

Now that we have a client built that will send and receive packets we need a server for it to communicate with. Lets walk through a quick implementation of a basic Java UDP socket server. Some familiarity with Java is...

Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo Explain How to Engage the Facebook Community - An Excerpt from Friends with Benefits: A Social Marketing Handbook

By Mary Rotman
November 18, 2009

In today's networked world, connecting with customers has never been easier. Savvy marketing professionals know that they must engage with individuals directly on the Web, and smart businesses know that their customers can be their best friends--with benefits. Darren...

Success of a Broadcast Medium: The Muzak Transmission Process

By Andy Oram
November 18, 2009

Muzak grew from constant technological innovation and originally succeeded as a broadcast medium using spare spectrum, a business model rarely examined today.

Lightroom 3 Beta Help Now Available

By Gene McCullagh
November 18, 2009

Adobe today launched the help system for Lightroom 3 Beta! You can access it by pressing F1 while in Lightroom 3 Beta or by pointing your browser at http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Lightroom/3.0/Using/index.html . Commenting will be enabled shortly so get ready! for more...

Visualizing Stackoverflow's data dump

By Andrew Odewahn
November 18, 2009

This post reveals the relationships among the top topics on stackoverflow by visualizing their monthly data dump.

Four short links: 18 November 2009

By Nat Torkington
November 18, 2009

Memento: Time Travel for the Web -- clever versioning hack that uses HTTP's content negotiation to negotiate about the date! Ordnance Survey Maps to Go Online -- The prime minister said that by April he hoped a consultation would be completed on the free provision of Ordnance Survey maps down to a scale of 1:10,000, (not the scale of...

Flex Indiapolis UG Meeting tonight

By Rich Tretola
November 18, 2009

The Flex UG in Indianapolis has been "offline" for a while but is back tonight 11/18/09 for its first meeting under new UG manager Mick Keily. Joe Johnston and Peter Buick from Universal Mind making an appearance in Indianapolis. "We'll...

E-Readers Up Close: Using the Sony PRS-700

By William Stanek
November 18, 2009

The Sony PRS-700 has an internal storage capacity of 420 megabytes (MB) and two expansion slots: One expansion slot for Sony Memory Stick Duo or Pro Duo cards up to 16 GB One expansion slot for SD, SDHC, or...

E-Readers Up Close: Using the Sony PRS-505

By William Stanek
November 18, 2009

The PRS-505 has an internal storage capacity of 192 megabytes (MB) and two expansion slots: One expansion slot for Sony Memory Stick Duo or Pro Duo cards up to 8 GB One expansion slot for SD, SDHC, or miniSD...

Conference Review: RIA Unleashed Boston

By Kevin Suttle
November 17, 2009

Boston was home to the RIAUnleashed conference on Friday, November 13, and was jam-packed with Flex, AIR, ColdFusion and other RIA goodness. What was so unique to me about this conference was the fact that not only were the speakers...

Using UDP socket connections for low-latency and loss-tolerant scenarios in AIR 2 (Part 2)

By Ian McLean
November 17, 2009

So now that we understand the usage of UDP lets jump right into building a basic UDP client and server. We'll use the DatagramSocket class to send packets to a specific port at a specific address. We'll also bind our...

Microsoft DRM part 3

By Tom Barker
November 17, 2009

Next in my series describing my implementation of Microsoft DRM I will detail how I refined the work flow to a single process. This process is portable, can be run on any machine, so it negates the need to...

The iPhone: Tricorder Version 1.0?

By James Turner
November 17, 2009

The iPhone, in addition to revolutionizing how people thought about mobile phone user interfaces, also was one of the first devices to offer a suite of sensors measuring everything from the visual environment to position to acceleration, all in a package that could fit in your shirt pocket. On December 3rd, O'Reilly will be offering a one-day online edition of the Where 2.0 conference, focusing on the iPhone sensors, and what you can do with them. Alasdair Allan (the University of Exeter and Babilim Light Industries) and Jeffrey Powers (Occipital) will be among the speakers, and I recently spoke with each of them about how the iPhone has evolved as a sensing platform and the new and interesting things being done with the device.

What Does Innovative Social Engagement Look Like For Businesses and Governments?

By Mark Drapeau
November 17, 2009

I've been thinking about the topic of Government 2.0 a lot lately. Part of this topic deals with the multi-directional engagement between government and citizens. This is what the White House and others have termed a more transparent, collaborative, and participatory government. Unfortunately, the engagement for the most part is not very authentic nor meaningful. Boring "fan pages" on Facebook...

Four short links: 17 November 2009

By Nat Torkington
November 17, 2009

Digital Natives (Ze Frank) -- digital natives have grown up in a landscape where access to information and influence has been flattened. they have watched media distribution bottlenecks in the form of networks and studios lose influence to youtube and independent production houses. They have watched companies bow down to viral video critiques, and watched political systems get hacked...

Using UDP socket connections for low-latency and loss-tolerant scenarios in AIR 2 (Part 1)

By Ian McLean
November 17, 2009

Flash player has supported socket connections for some time but has lacked UDP specific support. Although there was the recent addition of RTMFP (a protocol utilizing UDP to enable low latency data transfer and P2P connections) it doesn't provide direct...

AIR 2.0 and FP 10.1 now Available on Adobe Labs

By Andrew Trice
November 17, 2009

The Adobe AIR 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1 betas are now available on Adobe Labs. You can download AIR 2.0 directly from: ttp://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air2/ You can download Flash Player 10.1 directly from: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

Flex 101: Customize Scrollbars

By Andrew Trice
November 17, 2009

Customizing scrollbars in Flex is something that I see requested all the time, and it's actually really easy to do. I see requests for things like getting rid of the buttons, or making the scroll bar less intrusive to the UI. In this post, we'll walk through some simple css style changes to customize scrollbar appearance.

CarTunes

By Peter Drescher
November 16, 2009

Green Technologies and Interactive Audio are two fields not generally considered related, but a new trend may change that: "Generated Sounds for Electric Vehicles", aka "EV Audio", aka "CarTunes".

Outperforming Books at Getting a Job Done

By Andrew Savikas
November 16, 2009

Clay Christensen talks about how people hire products to do jobs for them, and for a very long time books have been the best performers at doing certain types of...

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