Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

Google has recently upped their profile in regards to security and privacy. Last week Google made the subtle change of adding a privacy link to the homepage. This is common on most sites, but avoided by Google because they are very strict about cluttering their homepage. Privacy groups have wanted this for [...]

There’s an announcement on the Safari blog about SquirrelFish, their new JS interpreter. To sum it up:

SquirrelFish is a register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention. It lazily generates bytecodes from a syntax tree, using a simple one-pass compiler with built-in copy propagation.

Some performance data can be found here, [...]

A few days ago, various websites noted a change in the recently released Mac OS X 10.5.3 that Apple replaced hard coded references of .mac with a variable, as if they plan to change the name at some point in the near future (WWDC 2008 is just around the corner).
Now it appears Apple [...]

As a frontend developer I’ve long argued the magic formula for a good website is:

Usefulness + Speed = Users

This is based on the fact that the best websites on the internet are pretty spartan in appearance. When you look at many of the successful ones (Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, Facebook), they’ve all taken the approach [...]

I’m not sure who thought it would be a good idea to invert Google Reader’s “read” checkbox, but it’s confusing, and in my opinion an unnecessary UI change. Way to obscure. Before it “checked” meant it was read, unchecked was unread. Now it’s just the opposite. It could have went either [...]

Google announced the project lists for Summer Of Code 2008. Some of the more interesting projects from my perspective:
Adium

Data Detectors for Adium

Dojo Foundation

Native cryptography API for Google Gears
Dojo-Charting improvements
Dojo GFX Enhancement

FFmpeg

AAC-LC Encoder
MLP/TrueHD encoder
Apple Lossless Encoder for FFmpeg

Gallery

Facebook / Flickr Style Image Region Based Tagging

Inkscape

SVG Fonts

Joomla!

Multi-DB support, and Database abstraction layer implementation for Joomla!

The Mozilla [...]

I wonder if Google’s privacy policy applies to the settings on their bathroom gadgets. That said, I still don’t feel comfortable with any toilet that has an oscillating button.
[Photo Credit: Eszter]

As usual, my list of April Fools that I saw today:

Google’s Project Virgle the first permanent human colony on Mars.
Google’s Gmail Custom Time lets you choose when to send mail. Never be late again.
Google’s gDay™ with Mate™ lets you search content on the internet before it’s created.
Google Talk to convert conversations to IM speak [...]

To raise awareness for Earth Hour, Google took the bold step of making the page black. I can’t remember the last time they made a change this bold. They did the same thing for the Google Israel site the other day (who participated a day early to prevent conflicts with the Sabbath). [...]

Google released the API for contacts. How long before someone comes up with a Thunderbird plugin to sync up with it? Any takers?
I’d love to know why they decided the API route, rather than use LDAP. It can be secured using TLS, and require a bind DN and bind password. If [...]