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Chrome for Android finally arrives

frank — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:41:06 +0000

Just in from Google Mobile Blog: Chrome for Android is out in beta for ICS (Android 4) devices. I won’t bore you with the marketing video, but this “Under the hood” video is a lot more interesting:

Watch this video on YouTube or on Easy Youtube.

Looks like the superb Firefox for Android is (finally) getting some competition. I guess it really is time to upgrade my Galaxy SII to the recently leaked ICS rom!

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Fiesta: WP YouTube Lyte reaches 1.0.0

frank — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 07:23:24 +0000

I just released the one dot ohhhh dot ohhhhhhhhhh version of WP YouTube Lyte!

From the changelog:

new: also works on (manual) excerpts; just add a httpv link to the “excerpt” field on the post/page admin (based on feedback from Ruben@tuttingegneri)
new: if youtube-url contains “start” or “showinfo” parameters, these are used when playing the actual video. This means that you can now jump to a specific time in the YouTube video or stop the title/ author from being displayed (based on feedback from a.o. Miguel and Josh D)
update: javascript now initiates either after full page load or after 1 second (whatever comes first), thus avoiding video not showing due to other requests taking too long
update: bonus feature stops lockerz.com tracking by addtoany (you’ll still want to hide the “earn pointz” tab though)
bugfix: prevent the playing video to be in front of e.g. a dropdown-menu or lightbox (thanks to Matt Whittingham)
bugfix: solve overlap between player and text when option was set not to show links (reported by Josh D)

And an appropriate vid to go with this new release:

Watch this video on YouTube or on Easy Youtube.

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Is Lana del Rey een Meat Puppet?

frank — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:21:18 +0000

De Meat Puppets schreven het, maar Nirvana stal er de show mee:

Watch this video on YouTube or on Easy Youtube.

En Lana Del Rey, da’s ook een vleespop, luister maar;

Watch this video on YouTube or on Easy Youtube.

Dat horen van vage gelijkenissen is misschien een kleine afwijking, maar … seriously Lana?

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jailbreaking !== jail

frank — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:41:00 +0000

Jailbreaking is not a crime, but we shouldn’t take that for granted, because as Bunnie (XBox hacker) writes;

Three years ago, the [U.S.] Copyright Office agreed to create an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act so that folks could jailbreak their smartphones. But that exemption is about to expire.

Given the fact that the U.S. jailbreaking-scene is an important contributor, I signed the EFF petition which asks the Copyright Office for continued support for jailbreakers;

Being an avid Android-user, jailbreaking permits me to replace heavily customized (and in some ways crippled, think CarrierIQ) vendor-specific versions of Android with clean, crisp, fast and secure after-market “mods” such as CyanogenMod.

You should really sign this as well!

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Act up against ACTA

frank — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 08:57:55 +0000

The European Parliament will soon vote on ACTA, an international trade agreement that might have a huge impact on the internet as we know it. The YouTube video below explains some of the ramifications (in a propaganda-esque kind of way, but still) and this Wikipedia-article provides some more objective information and contains links to -a lot- more detailed reviews and criticisms.

The bottom-line: if you’re European and you were supporting the great anti-SOPA-protests in the U.S., this is the time to act yourself! Spread the word and sign one or more of these petitions against ACTA:

The video:

Watch this video on YouTube or on Easy Youtube.

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Toolbox: BrowserMob

frank — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 06:31:10 +0000

A month ago I added BrowserMob to my toolbox. I’m sure I’m the last web-guy in the world to discover BrowserMob (or “Neustar Web Performance”, as of yesterday), but just in case you don’t know them either, it is an online service that provides availability- and performance-monitoring for websites and -applications.

Great stuff, really; create a simple script by providing a URL, choose what datacenters you want the test to run from, set the interval and there you go. After a couple of minutes you can start gazing at charts & reports or check your mailbox for alerts. You can create more complex tests using a JavaScript-based syntax or you can import Selenium-scripts (hello Selenium IDE for FireFox). The free account I started out with offers a substantial amount of pageviews/ month (40.000) that tests can generate.

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AddToAny now includes Lockerz tracking

frank — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 11:20:03 +0000

AddToAny, one of the most popular sharing-widgets around, has had 3rd party tracking by Media6degrees for quite some time already. I wasn’t too happy about that, but it did have the no_3p option to disable this “functionality”. Half a year ago however AddToAny was acquired by Lockerz.com and it now includes tracking by Lockerz.com which cannot be turned off and does not check for navigator.doNotTrack either.

I’ve contacted the developer (Pat’s a swell guy, really) and he answered he would look into honoring the DoNotTrack header, which he wrote he’d love to include in Q1 somewhere. In the mean time, if you have AddToAny on your site, you can already hide the Lockerz “Earn” tab. And if you’re on WordPress, you could install (or upgrade) WP DoNotTrack, which I’ve updated to stop the Lockerz tracking (make sure lockerz.com is your blacklist).

If there’s a Drupalista out there that uses AddToAny and would like to stop Lockerz tracking; I’d be happy to co-author a Drupal DoNotTrack module, do get in touch!

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Choosing a CDN in a whim

frank — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 06:18:52 +0000

I had to look into CDN’s some time ago, to find a suitable temporary solution for a problem at work. There are a lot of players in this field, Akamai and Amazon (Cloudfront) being market leaders of some sort, but there’s also Microsoft with their Azure CDN (which we already had some experience with), other big guns such as Rackspace and Level3 and specialized shops such as CacheFly, CDNetworks and NetDNA as well. So how to choose?

Results only relevant for Belgium (and even then …)	avg. speed (ms) for 64kB	speed delta % from fastest
softlayer	121.3	100%
gogrid	123.0	101%
microsoft azure	132.0	109%
level3	132.0	109%
amazon cloudfront	133.3	110%
maxcdn	136.7	113%
cotendo	138.7	114%
cachefly	147.3	121%
rackspace	156.3	129%
highwinds	226.3	187%
voxcast	227.7	188%
flexiscale	317.3	262%
amazon s3 eu	417.3	344%
~~cloudflare~~ invalid result	~~575.0~~ NA	~~474%~~ NA
google appspot	668.0	551%
voxel nl	814.0	671%
amazon s3 us	932.0	768%
voxel ny	942.0	776%

Well, if you’re in a hurry, you could compare price and features via cdnplanet.com. The info might not always be complete, but it does give you a good first idea and you can always visit the CDN’s proper site for more details, can’t you?

After comparing features & pricing, you really should get an idea of the speed of these CDN’s, of their performance relative to your customers. I found this CDN Speed Test on cloudclimate.com very useful; it performs a live test of approximately 20 CDN providers, requesting a 64 kilobyte file 10 times for each CDN from within your browser. So if you can get a sample of your customers to perform that test and provide you with the results, you’ll have some very useful information about performance. Together with your overview of features and price, you should be able to make at least a vaguely educated decision, no?

To have an idea about performance for our market (Belgium), I asked some Facebook-friends to provide me with the results of the CDN Speed Test. Most data I received was for Telenet or Skynet/Belgacom, not coincidentally the biggest ISP’s here. You can see the aggregated results in that ugly table on the left (or a couple of paragraphs up, if you’re subscribed to the RSS-feed).

My conclusion: as I was looking for a pay-as-you-go (no obligations, no monthly fee) CDN for static files, with support for Origin-Pull, HTTPS and some administration features (for example to purge the cache and watch nice graphs), MaxCDN fit the picture pretty well. With a great introductory price ($40 for the first Terabyte and even less if you find the coupon code) and performance that is at 113% of the fastest competitor, they seem to have found somewhat of a sweet spot for my specific context.

The only problem; I’ve got to wait for a “GO” from some people higher up the food chain. Maybe I should already implement it on my blog, just for the fun of it?

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Some 2011 numbers and 2012 goals

frank — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 11:28:03 +0000

This blog:

121 blogposts (69 “real” posts and 52 aggregated lifestream-events)
75,913 pageviews, the most popular individual article being Kate Bush live (en bijna bloot) (7209 views). Off all new 2011 blogposts, Audio-only YouTube embedding with WP YouTube Lyte 0.7 was read most (2683 views).
317 comments (approx. half of which are bound to be my own replies to other people’s comments)
Main goal for 2012: keep on learning, sharing and enjoying myself while doing so

WP YouTube Lyte, my WordPress plugin to do “lazy load YouTube embedding”, really took off:

8 minor and 3 major releases (from 0.6.5 to 0.9.4), introducing support for features such as audio-only YouTube, embedding playlists, changing player size on the fly and translations in 6 languages (thanks to those six great contributors).
48260 downloads
Main goal for 2012: stabilize and reach the magic 1.0.0 (which will probably include an optimized initialization-mechanism)

My WP DoNotTrack plugin is somewhat … younger:

2 releases
336 downloads
Goals for 2012:

stop more types of tracking (a.o. by including black- or whitelist filtering of the HTML using the output buffer)
improve filtering
integrate (and possibly automate) tracking-detection using the webpagetest.org API
promote the idea of “DoNotTrack” in general and for WordPress and WP plugins & themes in particular (the plugin is just a means, not an end in itself)

But enough with all the navel-gazing, thanks for b(e)aring with me & have a great 2012 guys & girls!

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Iframe sandboxing support coming soonish

frank — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:02:30 +0000

Did you know you can limit the damage an iframe can do by adding the “sandbox” attribute? And that you can add a value to that attribute to loosen your grip if you choose to do so?

I remember reading about this a couple of years ago or so, but forgot as support for this html5 spec was limited to Chrome (Apple added support in Safari as well). But while investigating a problem a WP DoNotTrack-user was facing, I re-discovered iframe sandboxing (it effectively stopped the javascript-based tracking inside the iframe) and noticed that support for it is to be included in Internet Explorer 10 and that Mozilla is finally working on an implementation as well.

So yeah, the option to sandbox iframe’s pointing to blacklisted (or non-whitelisted) hostnames will probably be in a future version of WP DoNotTrack. Stay tuned!

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