Firefox

In his famous pragmatic style, Rasmus Lerdorf has shared an article on his Toys blog that will walk you through what he calls a "no-framework PHP MVC framework." The task is a simple rich Web application, with SQLite and PDO for data abstraction, Ajax and JSON for data validation (input sanitation is achieved through the PECL filter package), and several components from the Yahoo! User Interface Library. All tied together with PHP, JavaScript and HTML, just like you'd expect.

The solution was to implement the integration using AJAX techiques. A handler was developed in PHP. This handler receives methods from the Javascript calls, determines the appropriate course of action based on the methods, gets the XML from the appropriate contribution, uses XSLT to translate the XML into HTML, and finally returns the target location and the HTML to the calling page.

I posted a couple of days ago about my problems debugging HTML source code when working with AJAX and also how I planned to solved it with Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. It worked, it allowed me to inspect the actual DOM and see how it changed my original source... but it was too slow to debug it that way.

Today, I found an even cooler one called Wufoo (not Hufu) over on a sweet Chinese blog that previously linked to me. Wufoo uses a heavy union of Ajax and Flash techniques. It may be a little heavier on the Flash than I would have gone, but it is still really cool.

La Web 2.0 es la palabra de moda. Se ha repetido ya muchas veces que no significa nada en concreto; se utiliza para agrupar una serie de novedades tecnológicas que se han producido en Internet y que tienen escaso valor si no se combinan entre sí. Blogs, redes sociales, wikis, RSS, Ajax, tags, Google Maps y otras palabrotas están dando un nuevo significa a la Web, la 2.0.

Now by the time I read this message, Google has temporarily stopped leting more users to signup on Google Pages, so will have to try it out later. But looking at their "about page" gives us some indication. It says that the editor is AJAX based. When you sign up your Google page would be http://yourgmailaddress.googlepages.com .You will be given 100 MB of space to store your contents on Google servers and although there is no mention of bandwidth I am sure it will be enough to serve the cause if used wisely (ya, see it as a problem if you are going to run it as a software and video sharing tool).

Google hat heute einen neuen Dienst gestartet und zeigt mit dem Page Creator, dass mit AJAX einiges möglich ist. Mit dem Page Creator bietet Google einen Dienst an, der es jedem Anfänger ermöglicht, einfach eine Homepage zu erstellen - 100 MB freier Webspace runden das kostenlose Angebot ab. Zwar kann der Page Creator nicht mit einem vollwertigem Editor wie NVU mithalten, muss aber auch nicht gesondert installiert werden - der Anwender benötigt einfach nur seinen Browser.

Una gran herramienta es WuFoo, con la cual crear un formulario es cosa de niños. Y nunca mejor dicho ya que usa la ajax (¿como no? ) para darle dinamismo y una apariencia digna de cualquier aplicación de escritorio.

Author Roger Johansson goes on to explain how you actually save money by doing effective website design testing. They key is to test how visitors will use your site.

Anyone who has built rich web sites will know that there are a lot of problems around the area of displaying dialogs. Aggressive popup blockers, no cross platform compatible modal dialogs and simplistic, inflexible confirmation and alert popups all limit what a developer can do when creating a UI. WebDialog is designed to solve many of these issues:

There’s a nifty little Firefox extension that lets you skin Gmail. Features include:

AJAX (or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is one of the latest buzz-words in Internet programming.

RSS feed discussion. What do you use for RSS to stay mobile? Did you know that you can even read RSS feeds on Windows Media Center? We discuss Onfolio, Bloglines, GreatNews, FeedDemon, NewsGator and more.

Me ha encantado esta aplicación con la cual puedes generar tus propias galerías de fotos de forma facil y rápida. El uso de Ajax hace que el rendimiento de la aplicación sea máximo y que la carga de imagenes sea la única carga de la aplicación. Además el diseño cuidado y minimalista me encanta, a ver si me monto uno para poner fotos.

I’ve been using the Firefox View in IE Extension for about a year or so now and I love it. Like a lot of companies, Yahoo has a ton of web based applications that I rely on to do my day to day looking up orders, looking at contracts, accessing marketing materials, etc. Unfortunately, a lot of these applications are a bit dated and don’t necessarily play well with Firefox. Therefore, I have become extremly reliant on the View in IE Extension. If I find a page that isn’t working, simply right click and a new IE window opens up. It was great.

FTKernelAPI is an open source library for connecting to the bittorrent protocol trackers. With this library, it's simple to write a torrent app... or you can just use a third-party prepackaged solution, like uTorrent, but where's the fun in that?

Another key quote

Google's corporate mantra, "Don't Be Evil," lost some of its resonance last month when it started a Chinese version of its popular search engine that doesn't provide links to content deemed unacceptable by the government.

points out the irony and double-speak that these companies use. It makes me ashamed to say that I use Yahoo! DSL and Gmail.

Web Developer Extension is an extension for open source Mozilla Firefox and Flock browsers. It provides two categories of utilities - one which will dissect the HTML page that has been visited - analyse each and every component, and a set of tools to test compliance to standards. Because of this combination, it provides critical value in the convenient form of a toolbar.

Take WordPress for example. It is a predecessor of b2, which became dormant in the past. Netscape and its evolution towards Mozilla and Firefox resulted in what is arguably the best Web browser, among many browsers in existence. AbiWord, KOffice, OpenOffice and StarOffice share some common fundamental codebase and they all (if not most) are here to stay. This comes to show the power of looking upon the shoulders of others, constantly extending in this code-driven community.

This was found in a comment on Eric's post on open source and IDE's which refelected on Delphi for sale. There is an online petition asking Mark ShuttleWorth to buy Delphi and release it as free software. Nice. But.......

A Ajax application is an implementation where a user would have no expectation to be able to copy URLs and interact with the applicatoin using many of the web conventions. GMail is an excellent example of this. Should you choose to forward an email to a friend, you wouldn't copy the URL.

Today I wrote an e-mail to Becky using links, like I am doing during this very blog. It made writing the e-mail more fun because if I was unsure whether or not she would know of something or someone in my e-mail, I just linked to that thing or person. For example, I told her about a dream I had where Christopher Walken was a conquistador. I linked “Christopher Walken” to a page listing his works from Internet Movie Data Base, and conquistador to a web site about Spanish Conquistadors. Not only did writing in this way serve as a means of information, it was also fun. I linked normal words to online dictionary definitions and wikipedia entries. I wrote about a friend of ours and linked to a picture of her on my blog. I did it using gmail, but I bet other mail services enable linking as well. I strongly recommend that everyone try it.

Oooh. The alure of an Aqua interface is too much for me. I just downloaded Camino for my Mac. It’s made by the people who make FireFox and uses the same rendering engine except they made it look more like a native Mac app. I’m already loving it. It just looks nicer. To me it’s just FireFox with a nicer looking outside. Plus it has integration with a bunch of Mac apps. If you have a Mac, I highly recommend you check out Camino.

There are a few interesting links. One is the lookup service at http://www.lashback.com/register/UnsubsafeLookup.aspx and another is a downloadable blacklist at http://lashback.com/ubl.htm which is available in different formats. They also have an SDK and a web service but you need to have a client key number to use it which I doubt is something you can get for free. If it was free to use then I think a Firefox plugin would be nice for submitting and checking. Perhaps there is a way to use the free stuff though. Something to look at in the future. Almost forgot, they also have a blog but it doesn't get updated much.

So what am I going to do? I'm not boycotting television shows, just television. The PVR is going back to Rogers. I'm getting all my discovery shows and 24 episodes using bittorrent from now on, commercial free.

Even Microsoft wants a piece of the pie. They have their Windows Media Center that does the same thing as a TiVo but in an ugly azz computer. But why bother with all those pay-for options when all you need is your broadband connection and a BitTorrent client. I’ve spoken about BitTorrent before but every week it becomes more and more of a god-send.

Google announced the upcoming linking of GoogleTalk and GoogleMail, thus allowing Gmail users to quickly send instant messages to their contacts, without the need for a heavy, platform dependant chat application. A Gmail chat help page is available, showing basic features of this GoogleTalk integration within Gmail.

今天登出Gamil時才發現的這個消息..Google已把及時對談(chat)的功能加進Gmail當中..網路信箱中相當革命性的改進，誰會想到要讓信箱也能當通訊軟體般說話聊天？

Oops, make that 4, I forgot this one: Fixing Patents, Open-Source Style - Free Software devotees decry any and all software patents and the proprietary world can’t get enough of them. This editorial by an ex-VP of Red Hat seems to be a call for compromise. Yes, another ugly word.

From the Mozilla wiki page,the alpha version of Firefox 2.0 is coming out February 10, 2006.

With this technology new applications pop-up all around the web, made with Ajax, Atlas or Rails on Ruby. Some of the applications are already wellknown. Like GMail and Flickr.

The first bit of software I use on a regular basis is Onfolio. This software is basically a collection tool. It has an integrated RSS feed reader (which is my main use for it) and the ability to create (and publish) ‘collections’ - this allows you to create a collection of files, notes and web snippets - either in a briefcase idea, or as a web research tool.

Okay…so I’m going to be trying the whole “comments” thing again. The reason I haven’t allowed comments is because most of the time the only comments I get are just spam. And not even the good kind of spam with dirty words and shit, just some lame crap about poker. But I’m trying some comment-spam blockers to as a trial run. So feel free, all three of you out there reading to try them out. We’ll keep you posted on how the experiment is working.

email (person to person communications) -> hotmail -> gmail / live mail (nothing special here yet) -> ??

Google.vc is “very cool”, ha ha. It contains an implementation of Google X, the latest articles from the Google blog, the Google press center, and Yahoo Finance on Google, as well as the top ten gainers from Zeitgeist, the Gmail storage counter, top Google News stories, and some Google stock tracking. It even has a link you can email for a Gmail invite.

I was going mad ... until I remembered s.th. about Onfolio...

So this stuff is some of my favorite geekage. I dig bootable CD’s: you make a CD you can boot your computer from and check out a Linux Operating System without having to install it. Get a taste of Linux with out hosing up yer Windows install. So if that’s not cool enough, newer PC motherboards can but from USB devices. So now you put the CD image on yer USB thumbdrive and set yer PC to boot from USB and it’s a whole new OS. This is indeed the ultimate rescue/hacker boot medium. I need to get a new bigger thumbdrive, like a 1gig, so I can put one of these on and have a little room left over. Cool Stuff. Go to my geek stuff page for links to some Live Linux CD’s. Ask me nice and I could make ya one. Here’s a link to the BitTorrent page for the actual USB files, mininova

Isn’t it smashing? I’ve always wondered how my blog friends got theirs but never thought to ask. Now I chance upon this.

And guess what, it hasn’t crashed or even slowed down. Its very very fast, maybe even faster than Firefox by my rekkoning. The interface isn’t the best but bares strong resemblence to Firefox. Its very lightweight and easy to run, plus since its an uncommonly used browser, its way safer than Firefox; more so than IE. K-Meleon uses the same gecko rendering engine found in Firefox so there won’t be any page incompatibility, viewing or rendering issues here.