Google+’s Circles feature to organize your contacts into distinct groups is generating a lot of discussion about how to best use this new tool. Some people are exited to finally have a degree of privacy and publishing control not found in Twitter, Facebook or other social sites. But is this privacy control or merely “privacy [...]
Feb 092011
Mike Davies recently posted a scathing review of everything Lifehacker did wrong that led up to their recent site-wide outage. The root culprit, according to Davies: converting their site from using normal URLs to address content pages to using hash-bang URLs instead. I have no opinion on whether hash-bang URLs are the new root of [...]
Oct 222010
Maarten Balliauw wrote a nice piece (with lots of pretty pictures and diagrams ;> ) about using Azure cloud infrastructure to take up excess load during periods of peak traffic beyond what your in-house hardware can handle. The idea is you can run your server app on your existing hardware most of the time, but in [...]
Oct 142009
Thawte has announced it will discontinue its “Web of Trust” peer to peer identity assertion program later this year. Web Of Trust enables individuals to obtain personal digital certificates without having to go through costly corporate or government paperwork. The idea is that if several trusted WoT members (notaries) assert that they have met the [...]
Oct 022009
Dion Almer and Ben Galbraith, cofounders of the Ajaxian web development news portal, have left their digs at Mozilla to head up the developer relations team for Palm‘s webOS. Dion and Ben moved to Mozilla just short of a year ago to work on Bespin, a project to develop tools for building cloud applications. Share/Bookmark
Oct 022009
When you’re writing a rich Internet application (RIA) in HTML and JavaScript, sometimes you need to programatically place a DOM element relative to the right or bottom edge of the visible browser window. For example, if you want to popup a help balloon near an item of interest, you probably want to make sure that [...]
Congratulations to Miguel de Icaza and his team at Novell for the completion and release of Moonlight 1.0! Moonlight is an open source implementation of Silverlight for the Linux platform developed in a joint effort between Novell and Microsoft. Silverlight was the primary deployment vehicle for live online video coverage of the Olympics last summer, [...]
Jan 152009
Adrian Bateman of the IE8 team has posted a video showing how to use IE8′s new XDomanRequest object to request data from a URL that is not in the current HTML page’s domain. He also shows how to make an (almost) equivalent cross-domain call in a beta build of Firefox 3.1. This makes use of [...]
Microsoft’s Live Mesh was awarded top honors in the “Best Technology Innovation/Achievement” category at the Crunchies Awards on Jan 10, beating out other nominees in the category including Facebook Connect and Google Chrome. Live Mesh is a file sharing application that enables users to access their data from a variety of devices, while online or [...]
Dec 302008
Microsoft’s Live Mesh platform has been nominated for the 2008 Crunchies “Best Technology Innovation/Achievement” award! The winner will be determined by public vote, so get yourself over to http://crunchies2008.techcrunch.com/votes/ to cast your vote for your favorite technologies of 2008. The Crunchies competition and award ceremony recognizes and celebrates the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations [...]
About two days ago, my Google homepage suddenly became hostile toward me. By hostile, I mean my IE7 browser is suddenly reporting a bunch of JavaScript errors and faults when loading the Google homepage that it wasn’t reporting before. Whenever I visit my Google homepage now, I have to wade through 5 or 6 JavaScript error [...]
I’ll be speaking at the next Bay.NET user group meeting this Wednesday Dec 17 on Live Mesh application development using Live Frameworks. There will be a few slides, mostly for the infamous but necessary system stack diagrams, but the majority of the session will be spent showing and running code. I’ll open by exploring the different types of applications [...]
Dec 112008
The Amazon Sellers online order processing system (AOB) has been offline since early Thursday (Dec 11, 2008) morning, after intermittant outtages and poor response times starting the day prior. Amazon reports that customers can still place orders for merchandise, but the orders are not showing up on Amazon’s order fulfillment web page for third party sellers [...]
Nov 192008
Scott Guthrie gives us a status report on the Silverlight 2 deployment and key design wins worldwide. 100 million downloads of Silverlight 2 in the past 4 weeks. Silverlight is now on 1 in 4 PCs on the web. BlockBuster and Netflix both use Silverlight for their online movie players. Scott also sketches out some details [...]
Dare Obasanjo has written up his characteristically frank first impressions of Live Framework and how it compares to Google’s GData API. It’s a good read: Live Framework (LiveFx): Is It Microsoft’s GData or Something More? Dare closes the article with this: On the flip side, the client-side Live Operating Environment is a technology whose benefits [...]
Nov 172008
I dropped by the Computer History Museum today to check out this year’s Mashup Camp and see what’s hot and what’s not. Turnout was good, about the same as what I remember at Mashup Camp in 2006 (or was it 2007?) – roughly 150 people milling about. Today was pretty much sponsor’s day – the [...]
Nov 142008
A few folks I’ve talked to in the Live Frameworks CTP forum or in email have expressed a little bit of confusion or a lot of surprise at what you can do with the Live Mesh platform and Live Frameworks. Let’s run through a few of scenarios to give you an idea of the breadth of options you have to leverage Live [...]
Dion Almer of Ajaxian fame has announced he is leaving Google to head up a new developer tools group at Mozilla with longtime friend and Ajaxian cofounder Ben Galbraith. The two are quite the dynamic duo in the web development sphere and should bring a lot of energy and fresh ideas to the table in [...]
Oct 142008
The second major version of Microsoft’s Silverlight web platform, featuring new UI controls and a lot more, has been released. Read all about it in Scott Guthrie’s post. Share/Bookmark
Scott Guthrie has announced the availability of Silverlight 2 Release Candidate. Scott’s post also delves into some of the details of this release, including new controls and near-final UI skins for the entire Silverlight control set. Check it out! Share/Bookmark