Published at 25 February 2009
in linkdump.
PhpQuery Brings jquery css selectors to php, negating the need for static in-place html file manipulation or heavy lifting with xml libs (bearing in mind SimpleXml only offers read-only access) . For those well-versed in the original client side library, anything that brings the tools of the two tiers closer together must be a good thing.
How to remove the stripe from my plasma.
DIY Broker/Dealer - surely only a matter of time before government begins to give out grants for any such financial innovators?!
Watched an old Hacker Defender rootkit vid while cleaning out my main laptop last night. Doesn’t appear to be active any longer? What’s the leading (in)security tool in a post-Vista world? The Bluepill poc was the closest to ‘new’ & ‘works’ (well, maybe) that I could find. I’m obviously not moving in the right circles…
Thummit Twitter powered sentiment engine. Not sure how it works at this stage and it’s a US-only beta for now.
Noted how Scalr’s feature set is ahead of Amazon’s own management console, for now at least. It uses preset Amazon Machine Images to setup a self-scaling environment.
User/Developer interaction widget. Not a new idea apparently but the Scalr site was the first I’d seen of one.
TechCrunch recently covered the phenomenol rise of FB photos over existing well established image stores such as Flickr. First mover advantage was always a big draw in the first dot com rush, yet the debate around FMA and what is termed ‘fast second‘ is a mature one in other industries. Size versus speed. I wonder is the web conforming to a more balanced ratio in this regard? A look around gives mixed signals -
- Twitter One of the hottest web properties today. A resounding success thanks to FMA. Just don’t mention the business plan.
- Friendster Big in the Asia-Pacific region (I’m not sure if that’s the web equivalent of stating a musician is “big in Germany”) but has fallen behind FB & MySpace in Western online society. Imo FB’s rep for being a college student’s thing got it viralling and the API sealed it’s dominance in the long term.
- iPhone App Store Certainly got developers excited, but then wouldn’t the devs who like to be known as creatives already have iPhones in the first place? The proliferation of announced app stores for the various mobile platforms since merely means the commoditisation of the idea and another wall around each silo. First mover advantage will mean little in this regard.
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Amazon went at it full pelt – access to root, command line, the whole server OS. A brave move. Second out of the blocks was Google’s App Engine, offering a much more restricted/simplified Python-based service depending on how you look at things. Crucially though it allows devs to play for free – that together with the “it’s Google” factor give it a much greater monthly pageview traffic than EC2’s homepage. But it’s cpu cycles that measure the success here and EC2 already bears the hallmarks of an enterprise-ready app in a production environment with a standard SLA in place. Too early to call then, but investors have been asking for more visibility on Amazon Web Services in general, so definitely a future battleground.
Has first mover advantage disappeared then from the web? Although many breakthrough applications have been superceded by bigger and better alternatives with a far greater leverage, none are by any means rendered dead in the water because of it. And neither are the fast seconds always some massive corporation throwing money at the latest buzzwords; Zooomr established itself by providing a slightly more interactive interface for what is in effect an online storage bucket. So I guess the answer is “it depends”.
So after killing my runaway IE processes for the nth time yesterday I decided to download Google Chrome. I was extremely sceptical of their ‘faster browsing’ claim, believing it would amount to illusions similar to their tricks in Gmail – actioning requests onmousedown, etc.
I was wrong.
24 hours into my first Chrome session it still only uses up 50meg of memory – and stayed at ~20 yesterday for most of the day. It refused to choke in an IE-like manner over sites like Ebay, YouTube & Gmail. Flash videos loaded up closer to my PS3 browsers speed (i.e. like something approaching acceptable performance), and as I say, no memory leak. Internet Explorer would have hogged anything up to 600meg of space by now, thus requiring me to save all my current tabs on notepad/to memory kill it then start the shoddy thing up again.
Granted Gmail and other javascript-heavy sites did not seem to run any faster. But they didn’t stall either. It doesn’t come with Java support built in, but I don’t think I’ll risk adding it on – Chrome is my new speedy browsing experience from now on. Firefox still gets the heavy-lifting vote due to the overwhelming array of plugins I’ve slapped onto it.I’ve been critical in the past towards Google and their useless feature-bloat, particularly in Gmail’s case. But with Chrome they seem to have done good.
Update: Too much hope I guess. No sooner had I posted this than I found a bug. Over and above the annoying textbox glitch that seems to be posing quite a problem. It’s treatment of textbox input is faulty when it sends to the server – It removes newline formatting in Wordpress 2.2.1. Thus my blog post came out as one long blurb. Bug report submitted.
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