Blogs
Four short links: 23 November 2009
By Nat TorkingtonNovember 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 JelliffeNovember 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
0 November 22, 2009Continuing 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 BlankenshipNovember 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 DrapeauNovember 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 BarkerNovember 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 MartinNovember 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 MalamudNovember 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 HooksNovember 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 LoricaNovember 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 TorkingtonNovember 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 AhierNovember 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 ZanottiNovember 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 BarlowNovember 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 CrumlishNovember 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 JanousekNovember 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 TorkingtonNovember 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 McLeanNovember 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 RotmanNovember 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 OramNovember 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 McCullaghNovember 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 OdewahnNovember 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 TorkingtonNovember 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 TretolaNovember 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 StanekNovember 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 StanekNovember 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 SuttleNovember 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 McLeanNovember 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 BarkerNovember 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 TurnerNovember 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 DrapeauNovember 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 TorkingtonNovember 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 McLeanNovember 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 TriceNovember 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 TriceNovember 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 DrescherNovember 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 SavikasNovember 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...
QOW: Top open source Flex projects
By Rich TretolaNovember 16, 2009
Question of the week: Open source projects are extremely important to the growth of a development community. The Flex community has always had a large number of open source projects and libraries that have been contributions from both community...
The War For the Web
By Tim O'ReillyNovember 16, 2009
On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active. It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday morning: Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links. if you’re...
URI Manager Utility
By Jesse FreemanNovember 16, 2009
Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over - URI Manager Utility. In the past I have talked about using RegEx to create a utility for replacing tokens in a string. My uri manager utility follows the same concept but helps you organize all of your URIs in a external file. Not only that but when you request them when, you can customize their values on the fly. Whether you are keeping track of 1 or 100+ URIs this simple utility will help make your life way easier.</p
Turning Predictions into Opportunities
By Nat TorkingtonNovember 15, 2009
The view from the eye of a recession isn't great. When companies are going bust, unemployment growing, and everyone's scouring their budgets for costs to cut, it can be hard to see opportunities. However, when Tim pointed to Stephen O'Grady's fine set of 2010 predictions I found myself popping with "oh, so naturally this will happen next ..." thoughts. Think...
Four short links: 16 November 2009
By Nat TorkingtonNovember 15, 2009
Choose Your Own Adventure -- numerical and visual analysis of the Choose Your Own Adventure novels. The distinguishing characteristic of My Kind Of People is that they appreciate the quantitative study of the commonplace. (via Bryan O'Sullivan) Tracking Droid Numbers -- uLocate, the makers of the Where app for Android, have been tracking the growth of the Droid phone...
Flex Template Components Rock
By Amy BlankenshipNovember 15, 2009
Flex comes with a full spectrum of components, but once in a while you get hit with a request to do something that is difficult to shoehorn into what already exists, but seems even more difficult to do as...
Ignite NYC on 11/16: Gov 2.0, Body Hacks, and Hi-Tech Craft
By Brady ForrestNovember 15, 2009
The Web 2.0 Expo starts tomorrow, 11/16, in NYC. We're kicking off the conference with an Ignite featuring 14 great speakers. The event is at the New World Stages. I'll be co-hosting with Ignite NYC organizer Tikva Morowati. As always each speaker gets just five minutes on stage. Their presentation will each be just 20 slides that each auto-advance...
E-Readers Up Close: Getting to know the Sony Readers, Part 3
By William StanekNovember 15, 2009
William Stanek here, continuing with the in-depth look at e-readers and e-books. The recap: In my earlier blog entries, I've explored the ins and outs of e-ink, electronic paper displays (EPDs) and e-readers. Now, I'm examining individual readers as a...
PyMOTW: sys, Part 6: Low-level Thread Support
By Doug HellmannNovember 15, 2009
sys includes low-level functions for controlling and debugging thread behavior.
TransKit : A New Translation SDK For Software and Web Developers
By Brian McConnellNovember 14, 2009
If you've had to build a multilingual website, or worse retrofit an existing website to be multilingual, you know this can be a time consuming and expensive process. The Worldwide Lexicon open source translation platform is now beginning to ship...
My feed
By Rick JelliffeNovember 14, 2009
A couple of people have asked again this week for the RSS feed address for my blog. Here is is: I believe you can get the individual feeds for other bloggers on OReilly sites using the same URL and the...
Schematron and time: complex event processing?
By Rick JelliffeNovember 14, 2009
I have been thinking a little bit about whether Schematron's pattern approach could be applied to complex event processing where the input is a stream of discrete XML documents, for example each one being a reading from a set of...
It's in the Bag! The Apple Tablet Computing Device
By Mark SigalNovember 13, 2009
In the past 25 years, the 'personal' computing revolution has evolved from tethered (desktop) to luggable (portable) to joined-at-the-hip (mobile). The author argues that the next wave of computing will extend this level of personal attachment to the bag-carrying consumer (think: purses, backpacks and briefcases) when Apple releases it’s much rumored Tablet Computing Device. Read more
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