O'Reilly News: Javascript

Developer Week in Review: Siri is the talk of the town - Voice-driven apps on the horizon, take Stanford CS courses on the house, and JavaScript flexes its muscles.

2011-11-30T19:00:00Z

Everyone either wants to be just like Siri or thinks it's (she's?) a waste of time. Stanford expands its free CS curriculum, and JavaScript gains encryption and a JVM implementation.

Four short links: 8 November 2011 - Cell Operating System, Search Savvy, Smiling Sliders, and Recommendation Tools

2011-11-08T11:00:00Z

Attempts to Make a Cell Operating System (Science Daily) -- finally we will be able to have the guaranteed quality of software and the safety of biological organisms. Why Kids Can't Search (Clive Thompson) -- kids need to be taught critical thinking skills about what they find on the web. Librarians are our national leaders in this fight; they’re...

Four short links: 27 October 2011 - Javascript Coverage, Cheap Tablets, Open Archive, ACTA vs TPP

2011-10-27T10:00:00Z

ScriptCover -- open source Javascript coverage tool. Using the $35 Tablet from India (VentureBeat) -- nice description of the tablet and what it's like to use. What makes the Aakash tablet different is that its creators didn't strive for perfection. Instead, the emphasis was on getting the product into the market quickly so it could be adopted, tinkered with,...

Four short links: 13 October 2011 - Memorable Indexes, Mobile Sensors, Augmented Reality Toys, and Collaborative Editing

2011-10-13T10:00:00Z

Memorable Indexes (Futility Closet) -- Carroll's index also includes entries for "Boots for horizontal weather," "Horizontal rain, boots for," "Rain, horizontal, boots for," and "Weather, horizontal, boots for". They're silly and whimsical, but the underlying problem of making multiple accessible entrypoints into a single corpus of content is with us today and only compounded by the vast growth of...

PhoneGap basics: What it is and what it can do for mobile developers - Joe Bowser on using PhoneGap to develop across mobile platforms.

2011-10-04T13:00:00Z

Joe Bowser, the developer of the Android version of PhoneGap, on the pros and cons of developing with the PhoneGap cross-platform application framework.

Four short links: 3 October 2011 - Mozilla Security Guidelines, Javascript Scroller, Botnet Techniques, and Password Humour

2011-10-03T10:00:00Z

Mozilla's Secure Coding Guidelines -- the Mozilla recommendations for web application security. See also OWASP, Google's Browser Security Handbook and Google's course. Scroller -- MIT-licensed Javascript library for accelerated panning and zooming, from Zynga. (via Hacker News) How Fast-Flux Service Networks Operate -- explanation of a technique used by botnets and other malware hordes to make it hard to...

Four short links: 23 September 2011 - Visualizing Populations, Hardware Futures, Radio Different, and Kooky Javascript

2011-09-23T21:45:00Z

How Many Really? -- project by BERG and BBC to help make sense of large numbers of people, in the context of your social network. Clever! (via BERG London) Why the Best Days of Open Hardware Are Yet To Come (Bunnie Huang) -- as Moore’s law decelerates, there is a potential for greater standardization of platforms. A provocative picture...

Four short links: 22 September 2011 - Feedback, Open Source Marketing, Programming in the Browser, and Twitter's Open Source Realtime Engine

2011-09-22T10:00:00Z

Implicit and Explicit Feedback -- for preferences and recommendations, implicit signals (what people clicked on and actually listened to) turn out to be strongly correlated with what they would say if you asked. (via Greg Linden) Pivoting to Monetize Mobile Hyperlocal Social Gamification by Going Viral -- Schuyler Erle's stellar talk at the open source geospatial tools conference. Video,...

Four short links: 16 September 2011 - Gamification Critique, Google+ API, Time Series Visualization, and SQL on Map-Reduce

2011-09-16T10:00:00Z

A Quick Buck by Copy and Paste -- scorching review of O'Reilly's Gamification by Design title. tl;dr: reviewer, he does not love. Tim responded on Google Plus. Also on the gamification wtfront, Mozilla Open Badges. It talks about establishing a part of online identity, but to me it feels a little like a Mozilla Open Gradients project would: cargocult-confusing...

Four short links: 15 September 2011 - DOSBox in Javascript, Augmenting Humans, Energy-efficient Computation, and Searchable Text

2011-09-15T10:00:00Z

Javascript DOSBox -- first cut at a DOS emulator in Javascript, capable of running Doom. As the author said in email to me, The ability to run arbitrary x86 code across platforms without a plugin is kinda cool. Blending Machines and Humans to Get Very High Accuracy (Greg Linden) -- use experts to train the models, provide tools for...

Four short links: 13 September 2011 - Lie with Research, Learning as You Teach, 3D Printing, and Future of Javascript

2011-09-13T10:00:00Z

Dan Saffer: How To Lie with Design Research (Google Video) -- Experience shows that, especially with qualitative research like the type designers often do, two researchers can look at the same set of data and draw dramatically different findings from them. As William Blake said, "Both read the Bible day and night, But thou read'st black where I read...

Four short links: 6 September 2011 - Javascript Primitives, Test Backups, Learn Triples, and Scale Javascript

2011-09-06T10:00:00Z

The Secret Life of Javascript Primitives -- good writing and clever headlines can make even the dullest topic seem interesting. This is interesting, I hasten to add. Backup Bouncer -- software to test how effective your backup tools are: you copy files to a test area by whatever means you like, then run this tool to see whether permissions,...

Four short links: 26 August 2011 - 9/11 Footage, Finland's Schools, Javascript Presentations, and Hollowed-Out Manufacturing

2011-08-26T10:00:00Z

911 Footage -- the Internet Archive has published a great collection of video from Sep 11 2001. A tremendous boon to researchers. Why Are Finland's Schools Successful? (Smithsonian Magazine) -- not sure if why they're successful is ever definitively anointed, but the article is fascinating reading. deck.js -- Javascript presentation library. Why Amazon Can't Make a Kindle in the...

Four short links: 19 August 2011 - Javascript Scraping, Molecular Visualization, Document Conversion, and Humanities Digitization

2011-08-19T11:00:00Z

pjscrape -- Javascript scraping framework. (via Joshua Schachter) CanvasMol -- molecular visualization in HTML5. (via Aimee Whitcroft) Docvert 1.5 -- new version of the code to convert Office files to DocBook and HTML. Seven Important Digitization Projects in the Humanities (BrainPickings) -- check out The Republic of Letters from Stanford, a very nifty visualization of relationships between Enlightenment thinkers....

Four short links: 11 August 2011 - Bad Web Sites, Gold Farming for Evil, Sensing Bicyclists, and Javascript Statistics

2011-08-11T10:00:00Z

Why Restaurant Web Sites Are So Bad -- The rest of the Web long ago did away with auto-playing music, Flash buttons and menus, and elaborate intro pages, but restaurant sites seem stuck in 1999. North Korean Government Partly Funded by Gold Farming (Gamasutra) -- alleges a special group of hackers built automation software for MMOs and sent part...

Four short links: 27 July 2011 - Coverflow Javascript, Voice APIs, Liberal Acceptance Ruins Everything, and Mobile HTTP Pipelining

2011-07-27T10:00:00Z

ContentFlow -- Javascript library to provide CoverFlow-like behaviour. Twilio Client SDK -- 1/4 cent/minute API-to-API calls, embeddable in browser apps. Postel's Principle Reconsidered (ACM) -- The Robustness Principle was formulated in an Internet of cooperators. The world has changed a lot since then. Everything, even services that you may think you control, is suspect. Excellent explanation of how interoperability...

Four short links: 26 July 2011 - Advertising Keywords, Javascript Koans, Etsy Open Source Testing, Wieldy Selections

2011-07-26T10:00:00Z

Google Keyword Advertising -- interesting infographic about the most lucrative advertising categories for Google. #20 is an eye-opener! Javascript Koans (GitHub) -- an interactive learning environment that uses failing tests to introduce students to aspects of JavaScript in a logical sequence. (via Javascript Weekly) Etsy AB (GitHub) -- Etsy's framework for A/B testing, feature ramp up, and more. (via...

Four short links: 21 July 2011 - Javascript Helpers, 3D DOM, Hadoop Graph Optimizations, and Future Scenarios

2011-07-21T10:00:00Z

Sugar -- a Javascript library that fixes inconsistencies in built-in classes (Strings, Arrays, etc.) and extends them with much-needed time-saving functionality (e.g., automatic iterators over regular expressions; Date creation from strings; binding scopes to functions). Tilt -- clever Firefox plugin that lets you view the DOM on your page in 3D. Excellent for visually understanding the structure and layout...

Four short links: 19 July 2011 - Async Javascript, PDF Malware, 2D Games, and Reinventing Textbooks

2011-07-19T10:00:00Z

Tame.js -- async programming library for use with node.js and other V8 projects. (via Hacker News) The Rise of PDF Malware (Symantec) -- detailed whitepaper showing the incident rate, techniques, and evasion techniques of PDF malware. Despite the fact that the number of PDF CVEs [Common Vulnerability/Exposure] are close to Microsoft Office’s numbers, the amount of nonunique PDF attacks...

Four short links: 14 July 2011 - Microchip Archaeology, OSM Map Library, Feedback Loops for Public Expenditure, and Mind-reading Big Data

2011-07-14T10:00:00Z

Digging into Technology's Past -- stories of the amazing work behind the visual 6502 project and how they reconstructed and simulated the legendary 6502 chip. To analyze and then preserve the 6502, James treated it like the site of an excavation. First, he needed to expose the actual chip by removing its packaging of essentially “billiard-ball plastic.” He eroded...

Getting started with HTML5 apps - Zachary Kessin on the skills you need to build apps with HTML5 and JavaScript.

2011-07-12T13:00:00Z

"Programming HTML5 Applications" author Zachary Kessin discusses the tools, technologies, and knowledge that help developers build HTML5 apps. Plus: Learn the most common app development mistakes and how to avoid them.

Four short links: 11 July 2011 - Scammers Banks, DX, Scientific MTurk, and Teaching CS in Javascript

2011-07-11T10:00:00Z

Which Banks are Enabling Fake AV Scams? -- some nice detective work to reveal the mechanisms and actors who take money from the marks in AV scams. (via BoingBoing) Developer Experience -- new site from ex-Google developer evangelist Pamela Fox, talking about the experience that API- and software-offering companies give to the developers they're wooing. Pros and Cons of...

What is Node.js? - Node isn't always the solution, but it does solve some important problems.

2011-07-06T13:00:00Z

Learning Node might take a little effort, but it's going to pay off. Why? Because you're afforded solutions to your web application problems that require only JavaScript to solve.

Four short links: 4 July 2011 - God Games, Digitised History, git Database, and App Framework

2011-07-04T15:00:00Z

Let There Be Smite (Pippin Barr) -- simple diversion for the 4th of July. It won't be easy for God to save America. (via Pippin's blog) Basel Wear -- to answer the question I know was burning on your lips: "what *did* the Swiss wear in 1634?" Impressively detailed pictures from a 1634 book that is now online. One...

Four short links: 1 July 2011 - Vector Graphics, Processing Maps, Augemented Senses, and Graph Analysis

2011-07-01T10:00:00Z

paper.js -- The Swiss Army Knife of Vector Graphics Scripting. MIT-licensed Javascript library that gives great demo. TileMill for Processing -- gorgeous custom maps in Processing. (via FlowingData) Research Assistant Wanted -- working with one of the authors of Mind Hacks on augmenting our existing senses with a form of "remote touch" generated by using artificial distance sensors, such...

Four short links: 30 June 2011 - Buying a Micro, Education Entrepreneurship, Faceted Search, Vector-Graphics Scripting

2011-06-30T10:00:00Z

Electric Dreams - The 1980s 'The Micro Home Computer Of 1982' (YouTube) -- from a reality show where a gadget-using family are forced to relive 30 years of technology invention, one year each day. This clip is where they're forced to choose a microcomputer from the rush of early hobbyist machines in the 80s: Spectrum, Dragon-32, etc. (via Skud)...

Radar's top stories: June 20-24, 2011 - HTML5's influence on web development, data and genetic secrets, and how to build big JavaScript apps with big teams

2011-06-24T19:30:00Z

This week on Radar: We looked at the how HTML5 is shaping web development, scientist Charlie Quinn revealed how open source and big data are advancing life sciences, and Nicholas Zakas explained how big teams can build big JavaScript apps.

Scale your JavaScript, scale your team - The challenges of building big JavaScript apps with big teams.

2011-06-23T13:00:00Z

"High Performance JavaScript" author Nicholas Zakas discusses the issues that pop up when you build big JavaScript apps with big teams.

How is HTML 5 changing web development? - Remy Sharp on whether HTML is ready for prime-time production.

2011-06-21T13:00:00Z

In this interview, OSCON speaker Remy Sharp discusses HTML5's current usage and how it could influence the future of web apps and browsers (hint: in time, we may not notice browsers at all.)

Developer Week in Review: Are .NET programmers going extinct? - Microsoft embraces HTML5, selling a startup at 15, and a new version of Java looms.

2011-06-15T16:30:00Z

For Microsoft programmers, the week brought fear, uncertainty and doubt regarding their future as an elite class of developers. For a lucky teen, it brought a big paycheck. And for fans of Java, it brought a new version of the popular language one step closer to release.