Ajax Girl

Florida based PayPerPost just launched a new site called RockStartup, which chronicles the birth (and I hope, ultimate failure) of their ethically-challenged startup.

RockStartup seems to be heavily influenced by the movie Startup.com, which tracked Kaleil Tuzman and his team (and multiple girlfriends) through a web 1.0 startup. Some of the scenes in the first two episodes of RockStartup are near duplicates of scenes from Startup.com. Of course, RockStartup is being consumed real time, whereas Startup.com wasn’t released until after the company folded.

I can’t wait for the episode where Ted (the founder) goes to jail.

I’m not going to go into the whole payperpost argument again. Not after seeing a naked guy in bed trash me on YouTube. If you want to know my opinion on PPP, see our previous posts and listen to our interview with the founder after their financing.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/56910604/

I just caught this on CrunchGear: Digg’s Kevin Rose told me a few weeks ago that he had some good inside information on the upcoming iPhone, but he wouldn’t tell me anything. Well, after a couple of beers he spills the beans on Diggnation, and the clip is embedded below.

According to Kevin there are two models, 4 GB and 8 GB, priced at $249 and $449. No word on whether they’ll be shipping an unlocked version of the phone as Om Malik recently reported, but Kevin says Apple is adding both GSM and CDMA radios into the iPhone, making it truly carrier-independent. The device will have a slide out keyboard, a touch screen and two batteries (one for the MP3 player, one for the phone).

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/56887865/

Tenni Theurer, a performance engineer at Yahoo!, has written a post on What the 80/20 Rule Tells Us about Reducing HTTP Requests.

It focuses on looking at the entirety of a page load, using the example of yahoo.com:

ASIDE: I have been using the beta of Firebug to see exactly this kind of data when I go to my own pages. It is invaluable, and I couldn’t live without the current Firebug beta.

Our experience shows that reducing the number of HTTP requests has the biggest impact on reducing response time and is often the easiest performance improvement to make.

There is a lot more to this of course. Setting up the correct cache-control settings for items that do not change often is important. The backend is also important. A few architecture changes and you can spend magnitudes more time in the backend processing. We obviously want to start shoving HTML back down the pipe as quickly as possible.

It also shows how much of a difference parallel downloads can make. If you can tweak your browser to do more at once, it can make a big difference (as chances are your bandwidth isn’t the bottleneck).

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/yahoo-performance-engineers-discuss-what-the-8020-rule-tells-us-about-reducing-http-requests

What Hat Security digs deep into the mess of “Ajax is insecure” hype with their article on Myth-Busting AJAX (In)security.

They discuss:

• Does AJAX cause a larger “Attack Surface”? No.
• Does AJAX make the “Attack Surface” harder to find? Yes and No.
• Can AJAX cause “Denial of Service”? Not really.
• Does AJAX rely on client-side security? No.
• Does AJAX lead to poor security decisions? Sort of.
• Does AJAX make Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks worse? I hope not.
• Does AJAX change security best practices? No.

Does this article exhibit common sense? Yes. Does it answer its own questions like Donald Rumsfeld? Yes.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/does-ajax-cause-a-larger-%e2%80%9cattack-surface%e2%80%9d-no

Yahoo took a beating by users angry over the new Yahoo TV product in the comments to their own blog post announcing it. Even a former head of Yahoo Entertainment, Erik Schwartz, chimed in with his own bashing and suggesting that Yahoo has lost its way.

Sal Taylor Kydd from Yahoo was active in the comments as well, responding to complaints and later giving a status update on changes that were made.

Dave Winer calls this fascinating and I agree. It’s hard for companies to open themselves up to user feedback - particularly when the feedback is anonymous, unmoderated and hosted on their own site. And giving employees the ability to respond directly, permanently and in real time takes guts and a commitment by senior execs to embrace users, even when they hate you.

So while I agree that the new Yahoo product isn’t great, I like how Yahoo is handling things. They’d quickly win more points with users if they brought back the old site as an option for those that loved it. We’ll see.

And I also note that Google doesn’t allow comments on their corporate blogs. Why?

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/56712928/