Month: July 2006

Categories
Hardware In The News

What does AMD the ATI deal mean for mobile computing?

There are not to many out there who think AMD is serious about mobile computing (laptops mainly). AMD still hasn’t figured out how to keep performance, thermal, and power management all under control, giving Intel a somewhat strong lead in that market. It seems most Intel laptops have been using ATI graphics chipsets, since they are relatively low power, and in general very compatible.

So now that AMD is buying ATI, and Intel cuts ties with ATI, where does that leave mobile computing? Are we going to see all Intel Integrated systems? Or Intel/Nvidia?

I have this feeling it’s going to get messy before things stabilize. I just hope we don’t have to see a generation of pathetic laptops before things rebound.

Categories
Apple Around The Web

Steve Jobs Presents the Macintosh, and Life

Steve Jobs 1984

Today’s video clip is Steve Jobs presenting the Macintosh in 1984. The video early on is slightly dark, but bare with it, the important parts to see are fine. Remember while watching that this was 1984 back when monochrome and DOS were king. The Mac was reading text back and using a GUI.

Another video worth watching is of Steve Jobs Commencement Speech at Stanford (2005). Just make you wonder what you’d see if you step back and looked at the dots you connected over the years.

Categories
Around The Web Politics

Mister Rogers Senate Testimony

Fred Rogers

[Google Video | YouTube]

Here’s a great video clip of Fred Rogers aka Mister Rogers testifying before the United States Senate Subcommittee on Communications on May 1, 1969. President Nixon wanted to cut the funding for the new Corporation for Public Broadcasting in half to allocate more money for the Vietnam War. Fred Rogers went to Washington to change that. The senator seen throughout is Senator John O. Pastore. The end is really quite great, but don’t just skip through it, watch it.

This series of video’s on him seem to also be really good. I’ve only watched parts, and intend to see them all at some point. One thing I noticed is that his puppet voices were really somewhat pathetic they really don’t sound to different from his own voice, especially that of King Friday XIII, yet somehow they still rival Jim Henson. Some interesting little details in there too.

He’s also the latest inductee in my quotes database (off to the right hand side of this blogs homepage).

Categories
Funny Internet

Web 2.0 Start Wars Quiz

Ok, this quiz is pretty funny. Actually it’s really funny since it’s pretty hard to tell the difference between a Star Wars character name, and a Web 2.0 name.

[Hat tip: Alex Eckelberry @ SunbeltBLOG]

Categories
Open Source Programming Security Web Development

Enhancing Security With Nonce

A little while back I read about how WordPress was implementing Nonce to help enhance security. What I like about this technique is that it doesn’t rely on referrer checking (which is faulty at best).

Today I implemented that on a project I’m working on, rather similar in style to WordPress. I think overall it’s a better approach to referrer checking. It seems the nonce approach is actually quite popular on the web looking at commercial sites, but not a technique often talked about.

Well done by the WordPress team. My implementation is pretty similar to theirs (my variables and salting is a little different based on the app) since it was pretty hard to improve upon. Not sure how long to make the Nonce, so I stuck with 10, which is what I believe they did as well. Not sure if I should go with something longer.

One of the great things about open source is the discussion of best practices and techniques. It also benefits closed source projects who can gain influence and knowledge from those discussions.

Categories
Google Internet

eBay Blocks Google Checkout

I had just finished writing up some code to implement PayPal into a billing system, when Google launched “Google Checkout”. While reading up on the implementation guide, I was wondering how long until eBay felt threatened by it. PayPal is extremely stagnant. It doesn’t handle many of the cool things Google Checkout can (PayPal cart is virtually useless).

Well, I have my answer. eBay decided to just block it. Rather lame. This will either up being settled very quickly, or end up in court.

I guess my next question “can they standardize the interfaces so programming to use a service is just a matter of a new url?” is something I can answer myself.

Categories
Mozilla

GeoLocateFox 0.1.2 Released

I released a small update to GeoLocateFox that contains the following changes:

  • Update to use Yahoo Map API v. 3.0 (Yahoo now supports more non-North American Locations!!!).
  • Add support for newer Flock.
  • Slightly better compressed images.
  • Updated some url’s to project page.

I should also note that Yahoo’s maps are a improved (a TON).

You can find the latest release here.

And in even bigger news…
I have a new beta release available (here) that contains support for Host IP lookup using the Hostip.info database. This will find tons more locations (and the database improves all the time).

To enable the Hostip feature, open the extensions manager (Tools Menu –> Extensions) and right click on GeoLocateFox and select “Options”. There is checkbox on the right side to enable this feature. It’s off by default because it requires sending the IP address of the website you visit to the Hostip.info server.

This is a beta, though I’d love to know how it works for people.

Categories
Mozilla Open Source

The Road To Firefox 2

John Carey and Matt Shichtman have started putting some video up as part of their efforts to document the “Mozilla experience”. Definitely something to check out. and keep an eye on. The first is Mike Connor EXPOSED! (odd title, but likely a better choice than “Mike Connor Gone Wild”).

Hopefully at some point they will adopt the Conan O’Brien “Celebrity Secrets” style and format. That’s right, I want the dirt ;-).

Make sure to check out The Road to Firefox 2, and keep an eye on it (RSS feed).