Yeah, she thought, looking up at the endless rush of imagery along Archie’s distal surface, River would fly, in Tokyo.

Spook Country, by William Gibson

Meme from Leah Culver via Eric Florenzano’s Blog.

Book Meme:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it at page 56.
• Find the 5th sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence on your blog along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favourite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

The closest book was the one on top my mini-library in my desk, which I’ve been meaning to transport home from the office. William Gibson’s Spook Country is a book I’ve been meaning to finish reading for a while, but got sidetracked by Neal Stephenson, Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow!

Future of Web Apps 2008 kicked off yesterday, and I was there to enjoy the proceedings…

As we arrived to register and pick up our passes, we were treated to a “surprise” courtesy of the crew from Carsonified:

• A Carsonified-branded jute bag — cool, but not sure I’d want to keep my laptop in there due to the total lack of padding.
• A numbered journal, pencil and sharpener — woo!
• A handwritten note from Gill Carson thanking us for attending — pretty nice considering the size of the event.

First we had the introduction from Ryan Carson, and the conference chairs, Simon Willison and Simon Wardley… including an acapella RIck Roll in honour of Ryan’s birthday!

Next up was Kevin Rose on “The Future of News”, which surprisingly didn’t get much of a crowd response. He talked about the ways in which he wants to grow Digg, and improve its relevance to its users. I thought this was pretty much on the money, as I used to be a heavy user of Digg, but got a bit turned off it when they broadened the scope of the site, allowing non-tech content to come in. I felt like it kind of diluted amount of news that was relevant to me. However, Kevin’s talk on the improvements they are making to their recommendation engine and taxonomy seem like they are thinking about exactly the same problem: how do they keep the site relevant to the largest number of users possible, whilst still taking into account people’s niche interests.

Other talks I enjoyed today included Blaine Cook and Joe Stump’s “Languages Don’t Scale” (language choice insignificant, concentrate on IO!); Stefan Fountain’s “Future of Mobile Web”; and the TechCrunch dragon’s den style startup pitches.

Looking forward to today’s sessions, and of course the live filming of Diggnation in the evening! I’ll be tweeting throughout the day (http://twitter.com/jimmahnow), so follow me and keep an eye on the #fowa search trend on twitter!

Future of Web Apps 2008

With Future of Web Apps 2008 just under 3 weeks away, I’ve been thinking about the bits I’m most looking forward to.

Day One

• 10:15 - 10:50: Kevin Rose (digg) on the future of news.
• 11:45 - 12:20: Blaine Cook (ex-Twitter) and Joe Stump (digg) - “Languages don’t scale”.
• 12:30 - 12:50: Kevin Marks (Google) on the future of enterprise web apps.
• 14:20 - 14:55: Stefan Fountain (Soocial) - “The future of the mobile web is going to change everything”.
• 17:10 - 17:30: Francisco Tolmasky (280 North) on Building Desktop Calibre Web Apps with Objective-J and Cappuccino.
• 19:30 - 00:00: Party@FOX kindly sponsored by Media Temple (Open Bar… oh dear…).

Day Two

• 10:45 - 10:55: Adam Gross (salesforce.com) on Cloud Computing in the Enterprise.
• 11:35 - 11:55: Chris Messina (Vidoop) on oAuth and Data Portability in your web app.
• 13:50 - 14:25: Beyond Google Maps with Andrew Turner (Mapfacture).
• 14:30 - 15:05: Tony Lucas (XCalibre) and Jeff Barr (AWS) - Cloud Computing (The Imporant Bits).
• 15:45 - 16:15: How to Build a Desktop App for your Web App with Jeremy Baines (Howard Baines).
• 16:45 - 17:00: Make the Web More Social with Facebook Connect - Dave Morin (Facebook).
• 17:20 - 17:50: Fireside chat with Facebook Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
• 19:30 - 20:30: Diggnation!
• 20:30 - 00:00: FOWA wrap party/digg meetup.

I went to the conference last October and it was fantastic, I enjoyed spending a couple of days listening to best and brightest in the industry, and I’m sure it’ll be as good if not better this year! The expo was great last year too (SWAG!) and from the looks of things looks much bigger this time around!

I’ve got my hotel and train tickets booked and can’t wait to be on my way! Is anyone else going, and if so, what are you looking forward to the most?

Cal Henderson delivered a keynote titled Why I Hate Django at the first annual DjangoCon. Django is an open source BSD licensed web framework written in Python. Google has posted the keynote in its entirety to YouTube, which you can find embedded above. While the talk is humorous (and takes many jabs at Rails developers) it does provide insight into what makes a good web framework.

Cal notes that Django has no mascot, “I could take a framework seriously that had a mascot with magical powers.”

I’d like to propose that ASP.NET MVC renames itself to ‘ASP.NET MVC: Powered by Unicorns and Kitten Farts”

photo credit: roland

My friend (+ colleague) Rob has a fairly insightful post on resistance to Unit Testing/Refactoring in the development world. (http://www.electricbiro.co.uk/2008/09/17/pushing-for-change/)

I don’t know whether its our relative “newbie” status in the development world (2 years and counting), but whenever we suggest introducing testing or refactoring, a look of panic crosses the faces of our peers and superiors. Why?

I seem to hear the following words way too often:

Just bodge it

That just makes me die a little bit inside every time I hear it. Software development is a lot like building Frankenstien’s monster. You start out with a pile of useless ugly pieces, and try to turn it into something beautiful. Along the way, it’s a monstrosity, and tends to get uglier as you tack new bits onto it. Then it kills people.

photo credit: love not fear

I understand the difficulty of adding testing to Brownfield/Legacy systems, but the way forward is to write a test for each modification/bugfix as you go, not to mired in the endless task of unit testing a system written by committee of many years. And following, that think “is there a better way?”.

So, just as Rob says, “The only way to avoid this is to just refactor when nobody is looking.”

I too will resolve to avoid BDD (Bodge-Driven Development), unit test my code, and refactor where possible.

photo credit: jimmah

Hugely popular alternative metal band Tool, known for their epic, intense musical arrangements and killer visual arts, will also soon be known for their contribution to the upcoming Guitar Hero® World Tour. Guitar Hero fans from all over the world will be able to rock out to “Parabola” and Grammy-award winning “Schism” from Tool’s critically-acclaimed 2001 album Lateralus in addition to “Vicarious” from their 2006 Grammy-award winning album 10,000 Days. The game will also feature an all-new venue designed in collaboration with the band and highlighting the art style that has become a staple in their music videos, live shows and album artwork.

photo credit: andynahman

That is going to truly awesome!

[Via] Toolband.com

photo credit: zbowling

Mozilla has officially released the second Firefox 3.1 alpha. This release includes support for the WHATWG’s HTML 5 “video” element.

Mozilla has been planning the 3.1 roadmap since before the launch of Firefox 3. Version 3.1 is expected to provide a strong incremental improvement and will include many of the features that were deferred for various reasons during the 3.0 development cycle. The developers are refining the user interface for tabs and tagging and are also working on on important backend improvements to boost compatibility with emerging web standards like CSS 3 and HTML 5.

The latest alpha—codenamed Shiretoko—includes support for the new video element, one of the most highly-anticipated features of HTML 5. The feature didn’t make into the main tree in time for Firefox 3, but now it’s a high priority feature for the 3.1 release.

The HTML 5 video element offers some unique capabilities that can’t presently be achieved with Flash-based video players. For instance, it enables web developers to more seamlessly intersperse video with other web content, manipulate video playback with JavaScript, and access video elements directly through the document object model (DOM).

One of the most compelling demos shows translucent videos playing inside of SVG frames that a user can drag and resize. The demo is implemented entirely using standards-based web technologies and shows how web developers could soon deliver rich interactive video content without Flash.

Another significant feature that landed in this alpha release is support for web worker threads, a new scripting capability that allows computationally intensive JavaScript to be run in the background so that it doesn’t cause the Firefox user interface to hang. This feature and the significant JavaScript performance boost brought by the new TraceMonkey engine (which is still under development isn’t included in alpha 2) will give developers the ability to leverage client-side processing to create web applications of unprecedented sophistication.

Other, minor features were added in alpha 2 as well, including much-improved support for dragging tabs between windows. Dragging a tab from one window to another in alpha 2 will no longer cause the page to reload. This means that users can seamlessly move tabs between windows without disrupting page state or the contents of web forms.

Firefox 3.1 is shaping up to be an impressive release. The latest features in alpha 2 build on the intriguing user interface changes and visual tab switcher that were added in the previous alpha. Users can download the new version from the Mozilla web site.

photo credit: ronin691

After a day of using Google Chrome, I’ve gone back to using Firefox 3. My biggest complaint with Chrome is the lack of extensions (although it has been noted that these could appear in future). I find it much harder to do my job without Firebug, Web Developer Toolbar, et al.

I was perturbed by Google’s EULA for the browser, giving Google potential rights to everything posted via the browser, however they have since modified this to alleviate users’ fears.

I’ve also been put off by a couple of issues I’ve read about/discovered:

• A flaw in the version of the WebKit browser engine Chrome uses allows an attacker to use a Java carpet-bombing attack, whereby a user can be tricked into launching an executable Java file.
• Typing ‘:%’ into Chrome’s omnibar crashes the app hard, taking all tabs down with it. So much for tab process isolation!

However, I love the V8 Javascript engine:

It achieves great performance by compiling JavaScript to native machine code, rather than to a bytecode. Thus, JavaScript applications will run at the speed of a compiled binary.

photo credit: themaxsons

If you don’t know what Ubiquity is then watch the video.

Ubiquity is going to be awesome for Firefox power-users. One of the best things about Firefox is the extension eco-system and Ubiquity is going to make writing extensions much easier.

UPDATE: Modified my script to no longer require the type of feed, it will now just pick the first one it finds. Future ideas include listing the feeds available and allowing the user to choose one before adding it.

photo credit: gruntzooki

Google has released “Keyczar”, a cryptography toolkit that supports encryption and authentication for both symmetric and public-key algorithms.

Why Keyczar?

Cryptography is easy to get wrong. Developers can choose improper cipher modes, use obsolete algorithms, compose primitives in an unsafe manner, or fail to anticipate the need for key rotation.

Cryptography is a common problem for web programmers, and Google aims to alleviate some of these issues by giving programmers a simple API for these functions.

Keyczar abstracts some of these details by choosing safe defaults, automatically tagging outputs with key version information, and providing a simple programming interface.

Keyczar is designed to be open, extensible, and cross-platform compatible. It is not intended to replace existing cryptographic libraries like OpenSSL, PyCrypto, or the Java JCE, and in fact is built on these libraries.

To download Keyczar and for more information, please visit the Google Code project and discussion group.

[Via] Google Online Security Blog