Blog and Updates
Ubiquity: Mozilla Says ‘Launch It!’ And I Say ‘Yeah!’
A launcher in Firefox? Think QuickSilver or Launchy. I would have never thought of something like this! Well, I had tried to use the address bar to support a lighter version of this feature but not anymore. Ubiquity is plain awesome.
Continue to the Ubiquity tutorial at Mozilla Labs »
Google Chows Down Again, Bye OpenX?
Google has now managed to move its overweight self over OpenX’s market, providing custom ad campaigns through AdSense.
TraceMonkey, time to compare Javascript to native apps!
TraceMonkey, a new improvement to Mozilla’s Javascript engine. This is pretty exciting! What a great way to think about it, compare javascript’s speed to native C apps.
A fantastic new improvement to Mozilla’s JavaScript engine (SpiderMonkey) has landed. Code-named TraceMonkey this engine utilizes a techniques, called trace trees (PDF), which adds just-in-time native code compilation to SpiderMonkey.
Its Official With Hydra
I have been working with Hydra Studio for 3 months now. I have to say, it has been a great experience. Last week I got my final 90 day review and became an “official” employee of Hydra.
Through the past 3 months, I have worked in a variety of exciting projects. Most only involved small fixes, but there have been two projects that I have had the pleasure of developing myself. The first, is Atlantic Advisors (Pardon the speed, Media Temple’s grid-servers are not built for speed according to them). For the most part, it is a pretty small project. Most of the site is static pages. The media section is where the fun came in. This is the dynamic section of the site, with both private and public categories. Additionally, the search was built using Lucene for speed and accuracy. It all worked out pretty great.
The second project, which I am currently working on is JTA. We are basically recreating the whole site. So far, the project has been a great challenge but it is turning out pretty nicely. I can’t wait to release the new version of JTA and provide more information.
Lastly, I want to thank Hydra and the great team at Hydra for offering me such a great opportunity. I have really enjoyed working here.
Twitter down, can’t talk
I have a big issue with twitter’s issues. I mean, its a huge site, with a huge user base. I understand all that. My problem is that I have the desire to share my concerns about twitter being down but I can’t. I can’t post to twitter about twitter being down. I just can’t. And it hurts me. As a twitter user you get attached to sharing your concerns when you have them. You get this desire inside of you to just get your phone out, open your twitter client, or the twitter site, and just explain yourself in less than 140 characters. Its just like getting a strong desire to have chocolate. It just happens, and you want it. You want it then, not later either. That’s what I want, twitter.
Yeah, there are other services like pownce that are very similar to twitter, but they are not twitter. I’m not saying there is a brand attachment there… well maybe there is. Maybe that’s juts what it is. Brand attachment. I admit it. I love twitter. For its name, its look, its feel, its brand. I want twitter. Can I please have my twitter? Please?
Thank you.
Is this message under 140 characters? Oh woops… no. Ok. Well this isn’t twitter. I miss you twitter!
What twitter apps do you use?
I know there are many of them, in fact, take a look at Twitter Fan’s App list but I’m curious as to how everyone keeps themselves on the twitter grid as much as possible. Personally I use a few:
- Twhirl - Main client I keep open when I’m on a windows machine
- Twitterbin - I use it because its good and there twhirl runs horrible on Linux
- TinyTwitter - While on the go
Additionally, there are many services that connect to twitter available. Do you use any of these? If so, which? Out of the existing ones I have found myself using:
- HashTags - A great way to tag conversations and look them up later
- SnipUrl - Not exactly a twitter service, but plugs in right with that 140 character limit, also built-in to twhirl
So what do you use?
BarCampOrlando “One Sentence”
First of all, I would like to mention BarCampOrlando, a huge success! I only attended the dev day but I have to say it was great. I met a lot of people whom I had only previously seen or talked to through the internet (Twitter mostly), and heard great talks by great people in the area.
Now on to the topic of this post, I just read this from a local company, Less Everything: Find that one sentence… So I wanted to share my one sentence.
“An application should be the API, the web site or application should only be a marketing tool.” @sunir
Thanks @greggpollack, all the BarCampOrlando Sponsors, and everyone else who helped set up BarCampOrlando. It was great! I am excited and awaiting the next one.
Orlando Ruby User Group Meeting Tonight, Oh I’m So Late
I’m a bit late in announcing this but the Orlando Ruby User Group (ORUG) will be meeting tonight. I have asked myself a bit what I’m going to be there considering my Ruby knowledge is minimal. I have studied over the past two days because of a project I will be starting soon that I want to make in Ruby, because it makes more sense to do so. More about the project at a later date though. As for the ORUG meeting, I will be there.
Our next meeting is Thursday, March 27th, 7 PM at Devry in Room #121, sponsored by Veredus. We’ll have delicious dinner from Panda Express just like last time, and two talks that you don’t need to be a Ruby expert to understand.
Source: ORUG
I’m excited as I will be meeting quite a few whom I have shared conversations with through twitter. Hope to see some of you there!
Opera and Safari 3.1 Now Have Full 100/100 Acid3 Support (Sort of)
Acid3 is a browser test created by the Web Standards Project. It basically tests web standards for CSS and Javascript to see how the browser supports them and displays a rendered page with a score. Compliant browsers should see a smooth animation with a 100/100 score. The score is based on how many of these tests the browser passed. Currently no stable release of any browser fully passes the Acid3 test. The current scores are as follows:
- Firefox 3 beta 4: 68/100
- Firefox 2.0.0.13: 53/100
- Internet Explorer 7: 11/100
- Internet Explorer 6: 12/100
- Safari/WebKit: 75/100
- Opera: 36/100 - It seems that Opera currently crashes as well
Opera
Source: Opera Opera yesterday reported that it got a full 100/100 on the Acid3 test on their development version. It is the first browser to declare full Acid3 compliance. This is excellent news for the web community. But, today, the author of Acid 3, Ian Hickson, changed the Acid3 test to match the exact SVG specifications dropping Opera’s score to 99/100.
Safari
Source: Flickr Today, the WebKit team declared a full 100/100 score on the Acid3 test as well. On top of that, Safari is the first to publicly release a version of a fully Acid3 compliant browser. That means that you can download a copy of the test version from their SVN and run the Acid3 test yourself. On the other hand, Safari’s result is not completely smooth and very slow. On their blog post, the WebKit team has mentioned that they are working on fixing the animation problems.
Both browsers that have declared support for Acid3 still have their drawbacks. Opera’s now 99/100 support because of a previous bug on the Acid3 test and Safari’s speed at rendering the animation. I am happy that browsers are trying to compete neck to neck to be compliant though. This is great news. I cannot wait until the majority of users start using compliant browsers. Until then, we can stay excited about news like this and hope for the best!
BarCampOrlando is Approaching!
I’m really excited about BarCampOrlando. It will be the first of this kind of event I attend. The event is mainly a hub for developers and designers (and other media professionals) to get together and share. That being knowledge, time, ideas, and much more. It is also a great event to meet people around the area who do the same things you do. It will be happening on April 5th and 6th on Wall St Plaza in Downtown Orlando. Watch the video below for more info.
See you all there!