Blogs

I’ve moved my blog over to http://ambiguiti.es from now on. Over there I’ll be talking about web and mobile development, and maintain a more general blog relating to events, conferences, job postings, and other such news in the industry.

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If you attended my talk at Max ‘08 and want the slides or code, get them here:

http://alexeiwhite.s3.amazonaws.com/max_presentation_08_dw_uis.zip

I’ll be giving a talk on JavaScript development in Dreamweaver CS4 a this year’s Adobe MAX conference in San Francisco. If you’re in for the conference come by and check it out! We’ll be going over a bunch of new features in DW, Spry, and some debugging stuff.

“Rich User Interfaces in Dreamweaver CS4” – Moscone West 2022 (2008-11-17) 3:30pm.

Recently, I have been doing some research into where all the modern JavaScript engines stand in terms of implementation of ECMA 3 and in cross-polination of proprietary features. I came across some rather interesting features of Microsoft JScript that I sure as hell didn’t know, and maybe you didn’t either.

First of all, it’s worth noting that some of these features may originally have been written for the server platform and not the browser. Because the JScript engine is modular, Microsoft uses it in a lot of places. Thats also why you can do browser scripting in VBScript, much like you can write ASP pages in VBScript or JScript, and similarly for .NET.

Feature 1: Enumerator

Standard: JScript 3.0+
Support: Internet Explorer 4.0+

Syntax:
var myEnumObj = new Enumerator([collection])

Description: Enables enumeration of items in a collection. JScript Only.

Feature 2: VBArray

Standard: JScript 3.0+
Support: Internet Explorer 4.0+

Syntax:
var myVBArray = new VBArray(vbarr)

Description: Provides access to Visual Basic safe arrays.

Feature 3: Debug

Standard: JScript 3.0+
Support: Internet Explorer 4.0+

Syntax:
Debug.write(string);
Debug.writeln(string);

Description: Used for sending debug messages to Visual Studio or Microsoft Script debugger. Early version of Console.log!

Feature 4: JSON

Standard: JScript 5.8+, ECMAScript 3.1+
Support: Internet Explorer 8.0b2+

Syntax:
JSON.parse(text [, reviver])
JSON.stringify(obj)

Description: Provides methods to convert JavaScript values to and from the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format.

OK this really wierd thing was happening to us in IE8 Beta 2 on a few of our machines. When we do a Google search we get a Google Checkout widget up in the top left corner of the results page. Any ideas why this might be happening?

The other day, this book ended up on Andre’s desk from O’Reilly: slide:ology – The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations. This book is less science and more art, but it’s full of inspiration and practical advice for people giving presentations. As someone who has seen a few talks, good and bad, a lot of this book rings true. In fact I think a lot of Nancy Duarte’s philosophy is similar to Edward Tufte, who is also a great presenter in his own right and a philosopher of the art of presenting – except maybe for the idea the Powerpoint is a tool to be tamed rather than one to be left out entirely.

Pick up a copy here.

When I saw this I breathed a huge sigh of relief. It looks like an upcoming version of Firefox will have run-time byte-code compilation of script, giving near-native code performance to some JavaScript. What does this mean? basically 5 to 6x improvements in performance for many JavaScript-intensive applications.

Read all about it here.

Today our video Live-Lessons came out featuring over 8 hours of video instruction with complete code samples covering topics in JavaScript and general Ajax development. We’re really proud of this package and think that many of our customers would probably enjoy this material. If you are interested in honing your JavaScript skills, understanding more about the language fundamentals, or techniques in debugging – you’ve got to check this out.

Get it here!

Here is the complete lesson plan:

8+ Hours of Video Instruction

1.        Introduction to AJAX Learning Objectives         7:06

2.        JavaScript Basics Learning Objectives   82:15

3.        Ajax Debugging Learning Objectives     25:20

4.        The XMLHttpRequest Object and Data Learning Objectives 29:15

5.        Introduction to Ajax Frameworks Learning Objectives    127:45

6.        Test-Driven Ajax Development Learning Objectives       49:40

7.        Offline Ajax Learning Objectives          47:45

8.        Ajax Security Learning Objectives         41:39

9.        Ajax Usability Learning Objectives        36:44

10.       Ajax User Interface Patterns Learning Objectives          38:51

There has been a LOT of buzz about Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’) – a brand new search engine. Unlike MSN / Yahoo / AskJeeves etc, it does not share any of the underlying technology with other search engines, and maintains entirely its own database of webpages. Apparently their database is multiples larger than Googles, and in fact, several of the key employees are from Google.

The media has been blasting Cuil as fizzling out on its launch day. Technical problems plagued the results pages – often replying with ‘No results found’ (which 99% of the time is rediculous). I can certainly forgive this type of problem on launch day as they figure out how to scale properly to the load. What is less forgivable are the lack of relevance in search results. Google has become quite good at filtering out the spammers and link-hoarders from SERPS. When I searched for ‘ajax grid‘ I got mostly shareware download sites (wrong!) all forwarding to the same 2 products.

A secondary issue is how the URL’s for search results are quite small and out of the way. I usually focus my attention on the URL as opposed to the page title – mainly because it helps me filter out the junk from the gems quickly.

I’m always willing to try something new, and I’ll definitely come back to Cuil after a few months – but they definitely need to address relevance in their SERPS. The good thing about search engines is that switching costs are ziltch so there are opportunities out there for people who want to compete – like Cuil. They would, however, join a long list of utter failures when it comes to the search space.

I was also thinking, one way for them to get a foothold maybe in the search space would be to sell a Google-appliance like device that competes favourably on features for enterprise search. My experience there tells me there are opportunities if they can compete on features and price – even if their SERPS’s are still being improved.

If you follow IT news you might have heard something about a ‘DNS exploit’ squirreling its way around the Internet. It’s true, there is one and its a doozy. Something like 52% of all DNS servers on the Internet are vulnerable. There’s a fix, but it’s not easy to implement and its not a ’silver bullet’ either. For an easy-to-understand english language explanation, check out this post. The summary is as follows:

What’s new is that the bad guy doesn’t actually have to wait [for a DNS request]. DNS is actually more of a relay race than a sprint. Remember, you send a request to a server, and you might get a reply that says “www.foobar.com? Sure, here’s the IP address to use.� Or, you might get a message that says, “www.foobar.com? I don’t know, ask ns1.foobar.com, here’s its address.� That’s recursion. It’s not a bug, or a rarely used feature. DNS is always sending you to different servers to find a record — this is how the servers that run .com work.

And so, the attack. If someone’s trying to attack www.foobar.com, he doesn’t pull out the starter pistol for that particular name. After all, the server might not be willing to go out looking for www.foobar.com for hours. No, he declares races for 1.foobar.com, 2.foobar.com, 3.foobar.com, and so on.