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Another World, entirely in Javascript, News from GamePro

(author unknown) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:46:18 PST

@arikfr wrote:
RT @gawd0r: Another World JS on GamePro!!!!! http://bit.ly/3MmTXL

News

Another World, entirely in Javascript

No Flash, no plug-ins, it's Delphine's impressive adventure game from 1991 running entirely in Javascript in your browser.

Game developer Gil Megidish states that he has "some kind of obsession with this game." Another World, released as Out of This World in North America, was a beautifully animated sci-fi adventure game first released in 1991 for the Commodore Amiga. Over the years Megidish has been a big part of the teams responsible for porting the game to other platforms, and he worked directly on the PC and 3DO versions, as well as the PSP, PS2, and Game Boy Advance iterations. His latest project is a browser-based interpretation of the game written entirely in Javascript. All the game requires to run is a modern web browser such as Safari, Firefox, Opera or Google Chrome. Though the project is not complete (and Megidish currently has no plans of completing it) it serves as an excellent proof of concept for what can be achieved with browser games now.

If you want to check it out for yourself point your (modern) browser right here.

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Game Info

Another World | PC

- Release Date: N/A
- Price: N/A
- Publisher: Telco
- Developer: Telco
- Platform(s): PC
- Genre: RPG
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If they don’t spot him, we’re doomed.

Cheezburger Network — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:00:51 PST

Career Fair Fail
Homeland Security, Terrorist

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Brad Fitzpatrick (of LiveJournal, now at Google) Talks About Programming

Philipp Lenssen — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:57:51 PST

Brad Fitzpatrick, born in 1980, started to learn programming at the age of 5. In high school he went on to create a voting booth script called FreeVote, which he says earned him as much as 27 cent per click on banner ads back then (making for 25, 27 grand per month). He went on to create blogging platform LiveJournal, thinking and implementing a lot to scale this to the traffic needs, and is currently working at Google. The following excerpt is from the book Coders at Work, in which Peter Seibel – himself a programmer – interviews many interesting programmers (some of them working at Google), asking a whole lot of interesting questions.

Seibel: You’ve done a lot of work in Perl, which is a pretty high-level language. How low do you think programmers need to go – do programmers still need to know assembly and how chips work?

Fitzpatrick: I don’t know. I see people that are really smart – I would say they’re good programmers – but say they only know Java. The way they think about solving things is always within the space they know. They don’t think ends-to-ends as much. I think it’s really important to know the whole stack even if you don’t operate within the whole stack.

When I was doing stuff on LiveJournal, I was thinking about things from JavaScript to how things were interacting in the kernel. I was reading Linux kernel code about epoll and I was like, “Well, what if we have all these long TCP connections that are going to this load balancer?” I was trying to think of how much memory is in each structure here. That’s still somewhat high-level, but then we were thinking about things like, we’re getting so many interrupts on the Ethernet card – do we switch to this NAPI thing in the kernel where rather than the NIC sending an interrupt on every incoming packet it coalesces them to boundaries that were equivalent to 100 megabits speed even though it was a gigabit NIC. We were collecting numbers to see at what point this made sense and freed up the processor.

We were getting a lot of wins for really low-level stuff. I had somebody recently tell me about something: “Java takes care of that; we don’t have to deal with that.” I was like: “No, Java can’t take care of this because I know what kernel version you’re using and the kernel doesn’t support it. Your virtual machine may be hiding that from you and giving you some abstraction that makes it look like that’s efficient, but it’s only efficient when you’re running on this kernel.” (...)

In practice, nothing works. There are all these beautiful abstractions that are backed by shit. The implementations of libraries that look like they could be beautiful are shit. And so if you’re the one responsible for the cost of buying servers, or reliability – if you’re on call for pages – it helps to actually know what’s going on under the covers and not trust everyone else’s library, and code, and interfaces. (...)

Seibel: Do you have any advice for self-taught programmers?

Fitzpatrick: Always try to do something a little harder, that’s outside your reach. Read code. I heard this a lot, but it didn’t really sink in until later. (...)

Seibel: What about code ownership? Is it important for people to own code individually or is it better for a team to share ownership?

Fitzpatrick: I don’t think code should be owned. I don’t think anyone really thinks that. The way it works within Google is that it’s one massive source tree, one root, and one unified build system across all of it. And so anyone can go and change anything. But there are code reviews, and directories have owners, always at least two people, just in case someone quits or is on vacation.

To check in you need three conditions met: You need someone to review it and say it looks good. You need to be certified in the language – basically, you’ve proven you know the style of this language – called “readability.” And then you also need the approval from somebody in the owner’s file in that directory. So in the case that you already are an owner of that directory and you have readability in that language, you just need someone to say, “Yeah, it looks good.” And it’s a pretty good system, because there tends to be a minimum of two, up to twenty, thirty owners. Once you work on a code base for a while, someone just adds you to owners. I think it’s a great system.

[Photo CC licensed by Dan Farber. I embolded the questions from the interview.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Brad Fitzpatrick (of LiveJournal, now at Goog ... | Comments]

[Advertisement] Google books on Amazon

Hacking the senses

Jason Kottke — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:16:15 PST

Researchers have been able to create new human senses of a sort...and to cross-pollinate two different senses in order to, for example, see with your tongue.

With Arnoldussen behind me carrying the laptop, I walked around the Wicab offices. I managed to avoid most walls and desks, scanning my head from side to side slowly to give myself a wider field of view, like radar. Thinking back on it, I don't remember the feeling of the electrodes on my tongue at all during my walkabout. What I remember are pictures: high-contrast images of cubicle walls and office doors, as though I'd seen them with my eyes.

I am reminded of magnetic fingers and the boy who sees through echolocation. I wouldn't mind a sense of maps that worked via smell...follow the cinnamon scent to your destination or some such.

Tags: science senses

Introducing Closure Tools

(author unknown) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:12:49 PST

Shared by צפריר
This is huge

Millions of Google users worldwide use JavaScript-intensive applications such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps. Like developers everywhere, Googlers want great web apps to be easier to create, so we've built many tools to help us develop these (and many other) apps. We're happy to announce the open sourcing of these tools, and proud to make them available to the web development community.

Closure Compiler
Closure Compiler is a JavaScript optimizer that compiles web apps down into compact, high-performance JavaScript code. The compiler removes dead code, then rewrites and minimizes what's left so that it will run fast on browsers' JavaScript engines. The compiler also checks syntax, variable references, and types, and warns about other common JavaScript pitfalls. These checks and optimizations help you write apps that are less buggy and easier to maintain. You can use the compiler with Closure Inspector, a Firebug extension that makes debugging the obfuscated code almost as easy as debugging the human-readable source.

Because JavaScript developers are a diverse bunch, we've set up a number of ways to run the Closure Compiler. We've open-sourced a command-line tool. We've created a web application that accepts your code for compilation through a text box or a RESTful API. We are also offering a Firefox extension that you can use with Page Speed to conveniently see the performance benefits for your web pages.

Closure Library
Closure Library is a broad, well-tested, modular, and cross-browser JavaScript library. Web developers can pull just what they need from a wide set of reusable UI widgets and controls, as well as lower-level utilities for the DOM, server communication, animation, data structures, unit testing, rich-text editing, and much, much more. (Seriously. Check the docs.)

JavaScript lacks a standard class library like the STL or JDK. At Google, Closure Library serves as our "standard JavaScript library" for creating large, complex web applications. It's purposely server-agnostic and intended for use with the Closure Compiler. You can make your project big and complex (with namespacing and type checking), yet small and fast over the wire (with compilation). The Closure Library provides clean utilities for common tasks so that you spend your time writing your app rather than writing utilities and browser abstractions.

Closure Templates
Closure Templates grew out of a desire for web templates that are precompiled to efficient JavaScript. Closure Templates have a simple syntax that is natural for programmers. Unlike traditional templating systems, you can think of Closure Templates as small components that you compose to form your user interface, instead of having to create one big template per page.

Closure Templates are implemented for both JavaScript and Java, so you can use the same templates both on the server and client side.

Closure Compiler, Closure Library, Closure Templates, and Closure Inspector all started as 20% projects and hundreds of Googlers have contributed thousands of patches. Today, each Closure Tool has grown to be a key part of the JavaScript infrastructure behind web apps at Google. That's why we're particularly excited (and humbled) to open source them to encourage and support web development outside Google. We want to hear what you think, but more importantly, we want to see what you make. So have at it and have fun!

By the Closure Tools team

Peugeot Lion Fights Godzilla [LOLCars]

Ben Wojdyla — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:30:00 PST

A Peugeot lion fights a vicious battle against the dreaded cartoon Godzilla on the back of a dusty 307, which may be the only time a Peugeot anything beats a Godzilla. [Imgur via Reddit]

[ubuntu] On developing Lucid

(author unknown) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:15:00 PST

I was very pleased to see that for the next Long Term Support version of Ubuntu, it's going to be syncing with Debian Testing instead of Debian Unstable.

This was something I brought up in a discussion at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona. I always found it somewhat silly that from a development standpoint, an LTS version of Ubuntu was created no differently from a non-LTS version. It still synced from Debian Unstable, it still stabilised over the same 6 month period. They just toned back the release goals so it wasn't quite so full of new, crazy stuff. A high-quality, long-term supportable Linux distribution this does not necessarily make.

As Steve points out, the downside of this new approach is that bug fixes will take longer to appear in Debian Testing, and thus in Ubuntu. I'll be watching how this development cycle pans out with much interest.

I’m assuming Elayna is also posting this exact message on...

(author unknown) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:10:00 PST

I’m assuming Elayna is also posting this exact message on MySpace, Twitter, Bebo…I mean this gent could be anywhere. Let’s not forget Elayna slept with a lot of guys in March of ‘08 AKA ‘March Madness.’ Some bets were made, a few strip poker games were lost…you know how it is.

Elayna’s solution to her predicament sounds like a great idea for a popular reality TV series. Maybe she’s a secret genius. Think of it: You bring all of the potential baby daddies to one place, order what…a dozen pizzas? and just let everything play out naturally. There’ll be some bonding, some fighting, maybe a few tears. And all the while a revolving door of ‘swab tests’ will be administered in the bathroom. At the end of the series, the father is revealed! Sounds like an enthralling hit to me. It’s so much more fun to throw Paternity Parties than cross guys off a list one by one. That would take 4EVER!

(submitted by Anonymous)

**Update: To confirm the authenticity of this post - and for fun - I’d like to add the words of the submitter: “Elayna is insane. She posts all her personal business on Facebook. She recently broke up someone’s marriage, got engaged, and then married to said man all in the same week. Of course now they broke up. She is certifiable.” Indeed!

Engineers Tell How Feedback Shaped Windows 7

MightyPete — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:21:03 PDT

Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"
by tenzig_112 (213387)

I get the impression that the Windows 7 launch is a lot like seeing an old girlfriend suddenly show up on your doorstep wanting to get back together. She's had some work done, apparently: stomach stapling to take off some of the weight, breast augmentation, and a radical nosejob to make her look as much like your current girlfriend as medical science will allow.

She's pretty, of course, almost too pretty. She still wears far too much makeup and carries that desperate look in her eyes. The fragrant haze around her is the perfume she overuses to mask the scent of failure.

Pre-Order Giveaway Madness!

(author unknown) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:48:33 PST

Those of you who pre-ordered Left 4 Dead 2 (PC)on Steam or at participating retailers now have exclusive access to the momentous event they said would never happen. For the first time in history, two separate Valve universes collide. That's right: it's a Left 4 Dead/Team Fortress crossover! This is not fan fiction! This is not a dream sequence! The characters from Team Fortress 2 will team-up with Bill's hat from Left 4 Dead 1!

Why do we have an IMG element?

Mark — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:38:59 PST

On February 25, 1993, Marc Andreessen wrote:

I’d like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:

IMG

Required argument is SRC="url".

This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull over the network and interpret as an image, to be embedded in the text at the point of the tag’s occurrence.

An example is:
<IMG SRC="file://foobar.com/foo/bar/blargh.xbm">

(There is no closing tag; this is just a standalone tag.)

This tag can be embedded in an anchor like anything else; when that happens, it becomes an icon that’s sensitive to activation just like a regular text anchor.

Browsers should be afforded flexibility as to which image formats they support. Xbm and Xpm are good ones to support, for example. If a browser cannot interpret a given format, it can do whatever it wants instead (X Mosaic will pop up a default bitmap as a placeholder).

This is required functionality for X Mosaic; we have this working, and we’ll at least be using it internally. I’m certainly open to suggestions as to how this should be handled within HTML; if you have a better idea than what I’m presenting now, please let me know. I know this is hazy wrt image format, but I don’t see an alternative than to just say “let the browser do what it can” and wait for the perfect solution to come along (MIME, someday, maybe).

Xbm and Xpm were popular graphics formats on Unix systems.

“Mosaic” was one of the earliest web browsers. (”X Mosaic” was the version that ran on Unix systems.) When he wrote this message in early 1993, Marc Andreessen had not yet founded the company that made him famous, Mosaic Communications Corporation, nor had he started work on that company’s flagship product, “Mosaic Netscape.” (You may know them better by their later names, “Netscape Corporation” and “Netscape Navigator.”)

“MIME, someday, maybe” is a reference to content negotiation, a feature of HTTP where a client (like a web browser) tells the server (like a web server) what types of resources it supports (like image/jpeg) so the server can return something in the client’s preferred format. The Original HTTP as defined in 1991 (the only version that was implemented in February 1993) did not have a way for clients to tell servers what kind of images they supported, thus the design dilemma that Marc faced.

A few hours later, Tony Johnson replied:

I have something very similar in Midas 2.0 (in use here at SLAC, and due for public release any week now), except that all the names are different, and it has an extra argument NAME="name". It has almost exactly the same functionality as your proposed IMG tag. e.g.

<ICON name="NoEntry" href="http://note/foo/bar/NoEntry.xbm">

The idea of the name parameter was to allow the browser to have a set of “built in” images. If the name matches a “built in” image it would use that instead of having to go out and fetch the image. The name could also act as a hint for “line mode” browsers as to what kind of a symbol to put in place of the image.

I don’t much care about the parameter or tag names, but it would be sensible if we used the same things. I don’t much care for abbreviations, ie why not IMAGE= and SOURCE=. I somewhat prefer ICON since it imlies that the IMAGE should be smallish, but maybe ICON is an overloaded word?

Midas was another early web browser, a contemporary of X Mosaic. It was cross-platform; it ran on both Unix and VMS. “SLAC” refers to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (now the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory). SLAC hosted the first web server in the United States (in fact the first web server outside Europe). When Tony wrote this message, SLAC was an old-timer on the WWW, having hosted five pages on their web server for a whopping 441 days.

Tony continued:

While we are on the subject of new tags, I have another, somewhat similar tag, which I would like to support in Midas 2.0. In principle it is:

<INCLUDE HREF="...">

The intention here would be that the second document is to be included into the first document at the place where the tag occured. In principle the referenced document could be anything, but the main purpose was to allow images (in this case arbitrary sized) to be embedded into documents. Again the intention would be that when HTTP2 comes along the format of the included document would be up for separate negotiation.

“HTTP2” is a reference to Basic HTTP as defined in 1992. At this point in early 1993, it was still largely unimplemented. The draft known as “HTTP2” evolved and was eventually standardized as “HTTP 1.0” (albeit not for another three years). HTTP 1.0 did include request headers for content negotiation, a.k.a. “MIME, someday, maybe.”

Tony continued:

An alternative I was considering was:

<A HREF="..." INCLUDE>See photo</A>

I don’t much like adding more functionality to the <A> tag, but the idea here is to maintain compatibility with browsers that can not honour the INCLUDE parameter. The intention is that browsers which do understand INCLUDE, replace the anchor text (in this case “See photo”) with the included document (picture), while older or dumber browsers ignore the INCLUDE tag completely.

This proposal was never implemented, although the idea of text-if-an-image-is-missing is an important accessibility technique which was missing from Marc’s initial <IMG> proposal. Many years later, this feature was bolted on as the <img alt> attribute, which Netscape promptly broke by erroneously treating it as a tooltip.

A few hours after that, Tim Berners-Lee responded:

I had imagined that figues would be reprented as

<a name=fig1 href="fghjkdfghj" REL="EMBED, PRESENT">Figure </a>

where the relation ship values mean
EMBED	 Embed this here when presenting it
PRESENT	 Present this whenever the source document is presented
Note that you can have various combinations of these, and if the browser doesn’t support either one, it doesn’t break.

[I] see that using this as a method for selectable icons means nesting anchors. Hmmm. But I hadn’t wanted a special tag.

This proposal was never implemented, but the rel attribute is still around.

Jim Davis added:

It would be nice if there was a way to specify the content type, e.g.

<IMG HREF="http://nsa.gov/pub/sounds/gorby.au" CONTENT-TYPE=audio/basic>

But I am completely willing to live with the requirement that I specify the content type by file extension.

This proposal was never implemented, but Netscape did later add arbitrary embedding of media objects with the <embed> element.

Jay C. Weber asked:

While images are at the top of my list of desired medium types in a WWW browser, I don’t think we should add idiosyncratic hooks for media one at a time. Whatever happened to the enthusiasm for using the MIME typing mechanism?

Marc Andreessen replied:

This isn’t a substitute for the upcoming use of MIME as a standard document mechanism; this provides a necessary and simple implementation of functionality that’s needed independently from MIME.

Jay C. Weber responded:

Let’s temporarily forget about MIME, if it clouds the issue. My objection was to the discussion of “how are we going to support embedded images” rather than “how are we going to support embedded objections in various media”.

Otherwise, next week someone is going to suggest ‘lets put in a new tag <AUD SRC="file://foobar.com/foo/bar/blargh.snd">‘ for audio.

There shouldn’t be much cost in going with something that generalizes.

With the benefit of hindsight, it appears that Jay’s concerns were well-founded. It took a little more than a week, but HTML5 did finally add new <video> and <audio> elements.

Responding to Jay’s original message, Dave Raggett said:

True indeed! I want to consider a whole range of possible image/line art types, along with the possibility of format negotiation. Tim’s note on supporting clickable areas within images is also important.

Later in 1993, Dave Raggett proposed HTML+ as an evolution of the HTML standard. The proposal was never implemented, and it was superceded by HTML 2.0. HTML 2.0 was a “retro-spec,” which means it formalized features already in common use. “This specification brings together, clarifies, and formalizes a set of features that roughly corresponds to the capabilities of HTML in common use prior to June 1994.”

Dave later wrote HTML 3.0, based on his earlier HTML+ draft. HTML 3.0 was also never implemented (outside of the W3C’s own reference implementation, Arena), and it was superceded by HTML 3.2. HTML 3.2 was also a “retro-spec” — “HTML 3.2 adds widely deployed features such as tables, applets and text flow around images, while providing full backwards compatibility with the existing standard HTML 2.0.”

Dave later co-authored HTML 4.0 and developed HTML Tidy, and went on to help with XHTML, XForms, MathML, and other modern W3C specifications.

Getting back to 1993, Marc replied to Dave:

Actually, maybe we should think about a general-purpose procedural graphics language within which we can embed arbitrary hyperlinks attached to icons, images, or text, or anything. Has anyone else seen Intermedia’s capabilities wrt this?

Intermedia was a hypertext project from Brown University. It was developed from 1985 to 1991 and ran on A/UX, a Unix-like operating system for early Macintosh computers.

The idea of a “general-purpose procedural graphics language” did eventually catch on. Modern browsers support both SVG (declarative markup with embedded scripting) and <canvas> (procedural direct-mode graphics API), although the latter started as a proprietary extension before being “retro-specced” by the WHATWG.

Bill Janssen replied:

Other systems to look at which have this (fairly valuable) notion are Andrew and Slate. Andrew is built with _insets_, each of which has some interesting type, such as text, bitmap, drawing, animation, message, spreadsheet, etc. The notion of arbitrary recursive embedding is present, so that an inset of any kind can be embedded in any other kind which supports embedding. For example, an inset can be embedded at any point in the text of the text widget, or in any rectangular area in the drawing widget, or in any cell of the spreadsheet.

“Andrew” is a reference to the Andrew User Interface System (although at that time it was simply known as the Andrew Project).

Meanwhile, Thomas Fine had a different idea:

Here’s my opinion. The best way to do images in WWW is by using MIME. I’m sure postscript is already a supported subtype in MIME, and it deals very nicely with mixing text and graphics.

But it isn’t clickable, you say? Yes your right. I suspect there is already an answer to this in display postscript. Even if there isn’t the addition to standard postscript is trivial. Define an anchor command which specifies the URL and uses the current path as a closed region for the button. Since postscript deals so well with paths, this makes arbitrary button shapes trivial.

Display Postscript was an on-screen rendering technology co-developed by Adobe and NeXT.

This proposal was never implemented, but the idea that the best way to fix HTML is to replace it with something else altogether still pops up from time to time.

Tim Berners-Lee, March 2, 1993:

HTTP2 allows a document to contain any type which the user has said he can handle, not just registered MIME types. So one can experiment. Yes I think there is a case for postscript with hypertext. I don’t know whether display postcript has enough. I know Adobe are trying to establish their own postscript-based “PDF” which will have links, and be readable by their proprietory brand of viewers.

I thought that a generic overlaying language for anchors (Hytime based?) would allow the hypertext and the graphics/video standards to evolve separately, which would help both.

Let the IMG tag be INCLUDE and let it refer to an arbitrary document type. Or EMBED if INCLUDE sounds like a cpp include which people will expect to provide SGML source code to be parsed inline — not what was intended.

HyTime was an early, SGML-based hypertext document system. It loomed large in many early discussions of HTML, and later XML.

Tim’s proposal for an <INCLUDE> tag was never implemented, although you can see echoes of it in <object>, <embed>, and the <iframe> element.

Finally, on March 12, 1993, Marc Andreessen revisited the thread:

Back to the inlined image thread again — I’m getting close to releasing Mosaic v0.10, which will support inlined GIF and XBM images/bitmaps, as mentioned previously. …

We’re not prepared to support INCLUDE/EMBED at this point. … So we’re probably going to go with <IMG SRC="url"> (not ICON, since not all inlined images can be meaningfully called icons). For the time being, inlined images won’t be explicitly content-type’d; down the road, we plan to support that (along with the general adaptation of MIME). Actually, the image reading routines we’re currently using figure out the image format on the fly, so the filename extension won’t even be significant.

I don’t really know why I wrote this. It wasn’t what I set out to write. That happens. But I am extraordinarily fascinated with all aspects of this almost-17-year-old conversation. Consider:

HTTP still exists. HTTP successfully evolved from 0.9 into 1.0 and later 1.1. And still it evolves.
HTML still exists. That rudimentary data format — it didn’t even support inline images! — successfully evolved into 2.0, 3.2, 4.0. And still it, too, evolves. HTML is an unbroken line. A twisted, knotted, snarled line, to be sure. There were plenty of “dead branches” in the evolutionary tree, places where standards-minded people got ahead of themselves (and ahead of authors and implementors). But still. Here we are, in 2009, and web pages from 1990 still render in modern browsers. I just loaded one up on my Android phone, and I didn’t even get prompted to “please wait while importing legacy format…”
HTML has always been a conversation between browser makers, authors, standards wonks, and other people who just showed up and liked to talk about angle brackets. Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction. Anyone who tells you that HTML should be kept “pure” (presumably by ignoring browser makers, or ignoring authors, or both) is simply misinformed. HTML has never been pure, and all attempts to purify it have been spectacular failures, matched only by the attempts to replace it.
None of the browsers from 1993 still exist in any recognizable form. Netscape Navigator was abandoned in 1998 and rewritten from scratch to create the Mozilla Suite, which was then forked to create Firefox. Internet Explorer had its humble “beginnings” in “Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95,” where it was bundled with some desktop themes and a pinball game. (But of course that browser can be traced back further too.)
Some of the operating systems from 1993 still exist, but none of them are relevant to the modern web. Most people today who “experience” the web do so on a PC running Windows 2000 or later, a Mac running Mac OS X, a PC running some flavor of Linux, or a handheld device like an iPhone. In 1993, Windows was at version 3.1 (and competing with OS/2), Macs were running System 7, and Linux was distributed via Usenet. (Want to have some fun? Find a graybeard and whisper “Trumpet Winsock” or “MacPPP.”)
Some of the same people are still around and still involved in what we now simply call “web standards.” That’s after almost 20 years. And some were involved in predecessors of HTML, going back into the 1980s and before.
Speaking of predecessors… With the eventual popularity of HTML and the web, it is easy to forget the contemporary formats and systems that informed its design. Andrew? Intermedia? HyTime? And HyTime was not some rinky-dink academic research project; it was an ISO standard. It was approved for military use. It was Big Business. And you can read about it yourself… on this HTML page, in your web browser.

But none of this answers the original question: why do we have an <img> element? Why not an <icon> element? Or an <include> element? Why not a hyperlink with an include attribute, or some combination of rel values? Why an <img> element? Quite simply, because Marc Andreessen shipped one, and shipping code wins.

That’s not to say that all shipping code wins; after all, Andrew and Intermedia and HyTime shipped code too. Code is necessary but not sufficient for success. And I certainly don’t mean to say that shipping code before a standard will produce the best solution. Marc’s <img> element didn’t mandate a common graphics format; it didn’t define how text flowed around it; it didn’t support text alternatives or fallback content for older browsers. And 16, almost 17 years later, we’re still struggling with content sniffing, and it’s still a source of crazy security vulnerabilities. And you can trace that all the way back, 17 years, through the Great Browser Wars, all the way back to February 25, 1993, when Marc Andreessen offhandedly remarked, “MIME, someday, maybe,” and then shipped his code anyway.

The ones that win are the ones that ship.

קריוקי מצגות

אהוד — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:55:50 PDT

בקריוקי מצגות (Power Point Karaoke בעקרון, ו-Keynote Karaoke אם אתם מקיסטים מגניבים), שלא כמו בסתם קריוקי, לא צריך לשיר. כך שזה פחות צורם לאוזני הצופים והמשתתפים באירוע. למשחק הזה יש לו גירסאות שונות, אבל צריך, בגדול, להעביר מצגת מול קהל.

אז מה פה בדיוק הקריוקי? צריך להעביר מצגת שלא ראיתם מעולם על נושא שלא מבינים בו. הנושא גם לא חייב להיות נאמן למצגת עצמה. בדרך כלל המצגת נלקחת במקום מהאינטרנט. כפי שלמדנו, אם יש משהו שהאינטרנט טובה בו, אז הוא קומיקסים מצחיקים (אם כי הבדיחה הצפויה והמתבקשת היא לכתוב “פורנו”).

מעבר לזה, הרשת טובה גם במציאת כל דבר אחר בעולם, ובפרט מצגות. כאלה שלא ייאמן, אחת – שמישהו הכין אותן וחשב שהוא יצליח למכור משהו או להרשים מישהו עם אפקטים זולים וקלישאות, ושתיים – שאותו מישהו גם חשב שלהעלות אותן לרשת, תחת שמו, יועיל למוניטין שלו ולקריירה שלו. לא מעט מהמצגות הן התמונות הכי מטופשות שרצות במייל כבר משנת 85. פחחח. ג-ד-ו-ל. לא יכול להיות שזה אמיתי!!111!. תעבירו לכולם. לפתוח רמקולים. וכיוצא בזאת.

בהיותנו חנונים קיימנו ערב קריוקי מטופש כזה ונעזרנו במצגות הקריוקי של סליידשייר. בדיחות המתכנתים בו לפעמים הגיעו לקיצוניות מדאיגה, אבל במצגות שכללו בעיקר תמונות ולא טקסט משמים שאין משהו מצחיק להגיד עליו, נשמרה רמה הגיונית של הומור וטמטום.

המצגת הראשונה שהוטלה עלי הייתה על התוכנית העסקית של IBM לשנה הבאה, שמישהו העלה לרשת. האמת, ניסיתי להגיד דברים מצחיקים על הגרפים והתמונות שהוכנסו לשם, אבל אז קראתי את הטקסטים וראיתי שפשוט עשו את העבודה בשבילי ולא הייתי צריך להתאמץ.

מי שהכין אותה הוא כנראה סוג של גאון. בגלל שהוא העלה אותה לרשת, אני אחשוף את התוכנית העסקית גם בפני קוראי אהודק.קום והמתחרים של החברה: החברה תמכור יותר, תשקיע בחברות שמרוויחות, ותעשה ים כסף ב-2010.

חמש תכונות נסתרות ב-Windows 7

(author unknown) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:16:02 PDT

Shared by צפריר

לאובונטו יש את 1, 2, 3, 5 כבר עידני עידנים

Windows 7 מציעה כמה תכונות אשר נחבאות מן העין באופן יחסי.

1. זכוכית מגדלת. תכונה חביבה נוספת ב-Windows 7 היא זכוכית המגדלת, המאפשרת להגדיל את התצוגה הנוכחית באופן זמני על מנת לקרוא טוב יותר. על מנת לפתוח את זכוכית המגדלת בדרך הפשוטה ביותר הקלידו "זכוכית מגדלת" בשורת החיפוש של תפריט ההתחלה ולחצו על שם היישום שיופיע על המסך.

בתוך "תצוגות" ביישום זכוכית המגדלת אפשר לבחור באפשרות "עדשה", המאפשרת לכם להגדיל אזור מסוים על גבי המסך כדי להתמקד בו ולקרוא אותו בתצוגה מוגדלת – זו תכונה מגניבה ושימושית גם יחד.

אם תרצו להפוך את הקריאה מהמסך לנוחה יותר באופן קבוע, בחרו בלוח הבקרה>מראה והתאמה אישית>תצוגה ובמסך שייפתח בחרו באפשרות "בינוני – 125%".

2. צריבה נוחה יותר. Windows 7 תומכת בתכונה שמשתמשים חיכו לה זה זמן רב: האפשרות לצרוב קובצי ISO ישירות לתקליטורים או DVD מבלי להשתמש בתוכנות עזר חיצוניות. כדי לצרוב, פשוט הקליקו פעמיים על קובץ ה-ISO, בחרו בכונן אליו הכנסתם את הדיסק הריק, בחרו ב"צרוב" וזהו זה.

3. סטנדרטים פתוחים בכתבן: הכתבן, אותו מעבד תמלילים בסיסי ונחמד זכה לשדרוג קטן אך חשוב עבור מי שמשתמש במעבדי תמלילים שאינם של מיקרוסופט. אפשר לפתוח ולשמור מסמכים בפורמט OpenDocument, המיושם במעבד התמלילים Open Office וגם במוצרים של IBM וסאן.

4. קופסה שחורה: מכירים את התופעה המרגיזה כאשר אינכם מצליחים לשחזר תקלה במחשב? אתם סובלים מבעיה, אך כשמישהו מנסה לשחזר אותה, היא לא נשנית. הקופסה השחורה של Windows 7 או בשמה הרשמי "מקליט שלבי בעיות" אמורה לפתור את הבעיה.

כדי להפעיל את היישום הקלידו psr בשורת החיפוש בתוך תפריט ההתחלה. מדובר בכלי פשוט המאפשר לכם להקליט סדרה של פעולות שתבצעו. לאחר שתלחצו על "התחל הקלטה", הכלי יעקוב אחר פעולות העכבר והמקלדת שלכם ובמקביל ילכוד צילומי מסך בליווי הערות שתצרפו להן. כאשר תפסיקו להקליט, היישום יאפשר לכם לשמור את הפלט בקובץ ZIP ובו קובץ HTML של מצגת, אשר ניתן לצפות בה בקלות.

5. מחשבון משופר. יישום המחשבון שופר ב-Windows 7. אחת התכונות החדשות היעילות היא המרה בין יחידות. כדי להציג אותה בחרו ב"המרת יחידות" מתוך התפריט "תצוגה", שתאפשר לכם לבצע המרה בין יחידות מידה שונות. למרבה הצער, לא נוספה אפשרות של המרה בין אזורי זמן שונים. אולי תוכלו להתנחם בתכונה "חישוב תאריך", המחשב כמה שנים, חודשים, שבועות וימים נותרו בין שני מועדים. תכונה נוספת מאפשרת לחשב שיעור החזר משכנתא חודשי כולל ריבית, עלות חכירת רכב וצריכת דלק (תחת "גיליונות עבודה")

גילוי נאות אודות סדרת הכתבות על Windows 7

בלוג חלונות 7 באתר MSN ישראל

Kitty Wishes there was

Cheezburger Network — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 03:00:55 PDT

Happeh National Cat Day 2 awl teh kittehs!

Kitty Wishes there was a little less love.

but i missed u sew much!

Picture by: dunno source Caption by: dunno source via Our LOL Builder

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Can simultaneous prayer take God offline?

Evgeny Morozov — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 06:57:26 PDT

I don't care if it's "slacktivism" but this Facebook campaign is incredibly funny: launching DDOS attacks on God by simultaneous prayer

As you may already be aware, recently the Atheist Founation of Australia and the Global Atheist Convention websites were the target of a significant DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, which began on Monday 19 October.

This is a call to all non-believers and advocates for freedom of speech to join us in a global co-ordinated minute of prayer with the aim of inundating God (in this context, the Christian god, God, as distinct from the Greek god, Zeus, the Egyptian god, Ra etc etc) with so many useless prayers that it causes his divineness to go offline as as result of our own DDOS ('Divine' Denial of Service).

The prayer minute will be at exactly 8pm (Eastern Standard Time) and 9am (Greenwich Mean Time) on Sunday 8 November 2009.

Replace "watch.swf" with "warp.swf" in YouTube and see the results

(author unknown) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 02:01:11 PDT

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Matt: After the Deadline now Open Source

Matt — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:28:25 PDT

After the Deadline, the intelligent spell- and grammar-checking service Automattic acquired a few months ago, is releasing its core technology under the GPL. There’s also a new jQuery API that makes it easy to integrate with any textarea. Ostatic writes about it here.

strip for October / 26 / 2009

(author unknown) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Forums > The Lounge > Pictures that have just made you laugh hysterically :: What.CD

ichorid — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 06:29:43 PDT

via http://what.cd/forums.php?page=3&action=viewthread&threadid=10516

HEY!

Cheezburger Network — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 17:00:43 PDT

HEY! that fish waz still good!

iz ok. i gotz an xtra wun heer.

Picture by: dixiecat Caption by: kittehgirl08 via Advanced Lol Builder

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Another World, entirely in Javascript, News from GamePro

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If they don’t spot him, we’re doomed.

Brad Fitzpatrick (of LiveJournal, now at Google) Talks About Programming

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I’m assuming Elayna is also posting this exact message on...

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Pre-Order Giveaway Madness!

Why do we have an IMG element?

קריוקי מצגות

חמש תכונות נסתרות ב-Windows 7

Kitty Wishes there was

Can simultaneous prayer take God offline?

Replace "watch.swf" with "warp.swf" in YouTube and see the results

Matt: After the Deadline now Open Source

strip for October / 26 / 2009

Forums > The Lounge > Pictures that have just made you laugh hysterically :: What.CD

HEY!