Warning - Addictive Time-Sucking Distraction

As some folks know, I can have an, er, attention maintenance issue from time to time.  No thanks to Tycho at Penny Arcade, I foundered up on and am ground up tight astride the reef that is Play Auditorium. 

I originally wrote this post in December 2008, when I was haunting my home office waiting for open-heart surgery to get done and I could get on with my life.  Anyway, I just came back this way and - cool!  Play Auditorium is still happening, now out of its pupal stage.  Check this thing out and see how cool it is.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Bullets for California

Wired Magazine is reporting the progress in California on construction of a high-speed transport connecting North and South.  Anyone want to travel 220 MPH over CA fault lines?  Great idea, but like lasik surgery, I'll pass until release 2.0.

You-Tubing at Work? Read This....

There is new villany afoot in You Tube space.  Someone has figured out how to spoof youtube pages.  Read about it here

Tired of Working at the Microsoft Office?

Have we got a sweet new shop for you:  OpenOffice 3.0 is now available, and it looks pretty sweet.  I have been trying out the previous version and it works, but, well, I can't really get excited about it because I have a copy of M$ORIFICE2K3.  When the next iteration of Office comes out, making '03 so outdated no one uses it (read:  2012 or later) ....or when M$ figures out a way to force me to purchase an upgrade (read: any minute - they're losing their shirts right now up in Redmond)... I'll probably chuck office and stay with Open.  You should check it out right away!

Your Rights Online (If you're in Europe)

So, The NY Times recently reported that the European Commission released a proposal to guarantee consumer rights across the 27-nation member bloc, in an effort to spur online, cross-border shopping.

The legislation would require retailers to make product information available before sale, guarantee delivery within 30 days and allow a 14-day “cooling off” period in which purchasers could change their minds.

Consumers would also be entitled to full refunds within seven days if goods failed to arrive, and companies would be banned from using “get out” clauses that allow them to supply products different from those advertised.

What might be next for North America?  Is there a possibility (remote nonetheless) that the US could enhance the Uniform codes to be inclusive of these new rules?  Perhaps to expand our markets in a less "in your face" kind of way?

So, what exactly is Clickjacking?

Thought you had heard it all? How about a technique where just visiting a "bad hat" site's page can make you click on any link the baddie wants you to? Welcome to Clickjacking.

The worst part? Can't stop it. Nope. Unless your turn off ALL scripting capabilities in your browser. Which means disabling most of the functionality on many of the pages most people go to.

The "more worst" part? Get ready for many, many, many "critical" updates from all of your favorite vendors - Adobe, MicroSoft, etc.

Glad to make your Friday! Ciao.

Chrome as IE-Killer

Excellent article from Wired magazine on the subject of Chrome's birth and objectives.  They really put some work into the thing.

Because Chrome was supposed to be optimized to run Web applications, a crucial element would be the JavaScript engine, a "virtual machine" that runs Web application code. The ideal person to construct this was a Danish computer scientist named Lars Bak. In September 2006, after more than 20 years of nonstop labor designing virtual machines, Bak had been planning to take some time off to work on his farm outside Århus. Then Google called.

Bak set up a small team that originally worked from the farm, then moved to some offices at the local university. He understood that his mission was to provide a faster engine than in any previous browser. He called his team's part of the project "V8." "We decided we wanted to speed up JavaScript by a factor of 10, and we gave ourselves four months to do it," he says. A typical day for the Denmark team began between 7 and 8 am; they programmed constantly until 6 or 7 at night. The only break was for lunch, when they would wolf down food in five minutes and spend 20 minutes at the game console. "We are pretty damn good at Wii Tennis," Bak says.

They were also pretty good at writing a JavaScript engine. "We just did some benchmark runs today," Bak says a couple of weeks before the launch. Indeed, V8 processes JavaScript 10 times faster than Firefox or Safari. And how does it compare in those same benchmarks to the market-share leader, Microsoft's IE 7? Fifty-six times faster. "We sort of underestimated what we could do," Bak says.

Chrome (yawn) smudges

I thinks its kinda funny that the tech pundits are all about calling out Chrome errors, even as this new and cool browser is in it's second day of introduction.  Not Production code, not even Beta code.  Inerr-duckshun!

You can tell it's the 'silly season' in techland as it is in Politics-land:  why else would writers talk about the potential for bad-hats writing nasty code for this new browser?  The code's still wet from the wash fer heaven's sake.

"OK, Knox, you smarty pants.  What should they be talking about?"

Well for starters, it wouldn't hurt to talk up what's actually different in Chrome - features that users could benefit from and that other browser supporters could incorporate.

Duh?!