Ajax Girl

Brobeck, Pleger & Harrison LLP was a well known law firm in silicon valley during the first Internet boom. They had thousands of startup and public company clients and handled all aspects of their legal needs. Their client list included Cisco. None of that mattered in the end though - the law firm dissolved in 2003 due to financial mismanagement after the downturn.

But now the nightmare could be beginning for Brobeck’s former clients. In a bizarre story, the bankruptcy court handling the Brobeck case, citing the historical value of the records, has given permission to turn over all confidential client documents to the Library of Congress and put on display in a new public archive. The project even has its own website and will have advertisements published in the Wall Street Journal and the San Francisco Chronicle.

The court is sending out notices to former clients, asking them to Opt-In or Out of the process (copy of notice is here). If the client is unreachable, the documents will be included in the new archive. Documents relating to clients who do not opt in will be available in a closed archived only, and the public will have only limited access (see more here).

This is one off the stupidest things I’ve seen in a while. First of all, these documents remain the property of the clients, not the law firm or anyone else. Those rights are being completely ignored by the court. Many of these documents will also contain extremely confidential information of third parties that were not clients to Brobeck and will therefore not be getting notice.

If you were the subject of a personal dispute with a startup represented by Brobeck, you may want to hire an attorney now to protect your rights. Documents relating to employment relationships are supposed to be purged, but given the huge volume of material that has to be sorted through, it is very likely that things will slip through. And I guarantee that journalists will be waiting eagerly to dig through these documents as soon as they possibly can.

This is just absurd. Thanks Tom for the tip.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/65333400/

Francois Orsini showed us his proof of concept for Embedding Derby in Mozilla Firefox.

David Van Couvering has updated the community with the news that Giorgio Arata has got this working in IE land by using Sarissa the pre-Ajax Ajax library.

Is anyone trying to do anything with this method?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/embedding-a-database-in-ie

Frank Sommers has interviewed Scott Blum of Google on the compilation process that GWT goes through to get your Java code to convert to JavaScript.

Scott answers:

• Could you start by giving us an overview of the GWT development process?
• What are the biggest differences in the JavaScript the GWT generates for the various browsers?
• What happens to a Java class when it’s compiled into JavaScript?
• What are prototype-based objects?
• What types of Java code are the hardest to translate to JavaScript?
• You mentioned that browser-specific functionality is brought into the compile process from external libraries. Can you explain how that works?
• Once you have those browser-specific versions, how do you deploy them so that each browser gets only the code aimed for it?
• You said earlier that JavaScript is more flexible than Java. In what way do you take advantage of more flexibility in JavaScript to get, say, better performance, or more concise code?
• In addition to excellent Java developer tools, what do you think are the biggest differences for a developer between writing a browser-based application in Java versus writing that app directly in JavaScript?
• What are the GWT compiler’s current limitations in translating Java code to JavaScript?

A lot of fantastic detail in there for you. What else would you like to know from Scott?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/gwt-compilation-details

The mean-spirited tone of online forums is getting more attention lately…

Whatever Happened to Online Etiquette? (David Pogue)

Instead of finding common ground, we’re finding new ways to spit on the other guy, to push them away. The Internet is making it easier to attack, not to embrace.

Beware the Online Collective (Jaron Lanier)

I remember the first time I noticed myself becoming mean when I left an anonymous comment on a blog. What is it about that situation that seems to bring out the worst in people so often?…Blogs often lead to such divisiveness that people end up caring more about clan membership than truth after a while.

The blog commentor’s gaze (Jason Kottke)

interacting via text strips out so much social context and “incidental information” that causes some people to display psychopathic behavior online and fail to develop an online moral sense.

Blogosphere 2.0: civility strikes back (profile of Mena Trott)

Trott has an interesting golden rule that she would like to see bloggers adopt. “If you aren’t going to say something directly to someone’s face, than don’t use online as an opportunity to say it,” she says. “It is this sense of bravery that people get when they are anonymous that gives the blogosphere a bad reputation.”

Pogue just published some reader responses to his lament about online etiquette. Some of the more interesting offerings…

+ “Why is everyone so angry?!! It appears there is so much suppressed anger these days. Nearly everyone is so much richer in material things, but so much poorer in a philosophical sense, i.e. living a meaningful life.”

+ “I’ve been reading Slashdot since 1996 and UseNet since 1982, and I can’t agree that there has been a decline in civility. The same low standards we see today have been more or less constant. We can and should bemoan those standards, but if there is a downward trend, I sure don’t see it.”

+ “The smaller [sites] have less jerks, and different sites attract different sorts of audiences.”

+ “Netiquette in public forums has a lot to do with the content around which the community is centered. Lifehacker’s posts set out to help folks, so in kind, our readers want to help us and each other back. Digg is a popularity contest of one-upmanship. Gawker is all about making fun of things, so its readers mock each other and it. Karma’s a boomerang.”

What do you think? Are there any solutions or is the negativity just something we’ve got to accept?

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/171-why-do-blog-comments-seem-to-bring-out-the-worst-in-people-so-often

Fletcher Moore has created QuickMuse, a site that is using Ajax techniques to capture and regurgitate — in real time, with all the warts intact — the process of writing prose and poetry.

Watch the playback of poems as they were written. Poet Charles Bernstein put this to best use so far, but if you are in more of a humourous mood you could try Neal Pollack.

Technically the site uses the PeriodicalExecuter of Prototype, TinyMCE for the rich content, and Dojo’s dojo.io.bind().

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/quickmuse-ajaxified-poetry

There are many sites that sell customized casino chips (just do a search), but we haven’t found any that have an online design tool to allow you to create the chip itself. TheChipLab has take the extra step and has created a very nice Flash tool for designing your own casino-grade chip. The creation tool is very flexible and layer based. It’s not as powerful as new online image editor Fauxto, which is also Flash based, but it does the job.

So my question is, why don’t CafePress and Zazzle implement Flash tools to help people create customized products as well? Zazzle’s Ajax tool is pretty nice and allows some basic resizing and movement of images, plus the addition of text. Imagecafe is stuck in the nineties - their product creation tool has next to no flexibility at all. Neither are anywhere near offering what TheChipLab does.

Adobe has created awesome tools that tiny ecommerce companies like TheChipLab can use to provide a cool service to customers. It’s time for the VPs of Product at CafePress and Zazzle to wake up and reinvent their products, too. Adobe has done all of the heavy lifting, all they have to do is implement it.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/65105553/

Zingku is a new service that offers many convergence features for the mobile phone and web browser.

With Zingku, things you wish to promote or share, can easily be created and fetched via mobile, instant messenger, and web browser. Our service integrates your mobile phone with a personalized web site so that you can easily move (zing) things back and forth between the web and and your mobile as well as powerfully connect with friends and optionally their friends.

Under the hood on the web side of things, you see Prototype and Script.aculo.us abound.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/zingku-making-mobile-count

Simon Brüchner has created an Ajax WYSIWYG Imagemap Creator using Prototype, Scriptaculous, JavaScript Vectorgraphics Library, dp.SyntaxHighlighter, YUI Reset CSS, and YUI Fonts CSS.

As you build the image map with clicks, you see the HTML for it generate on the fly.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/wysiwyg-imagemap-creator

Mario Heiderich wonders if being able to do this is a bad thing:

With this one line of code (test page here) you can keep a user around against their will, other than killing that tab/window.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/backbutton-overloading

AllPeers, a Firefox P2P file sharing plugin, had incredible hype when it launched in August (the rumors had been around for nearly a year at that point). People were calling it the “killer app” for Firefox, and the company is backed by early investors in Skype, Mangrove Capital Partners and Index Ventures. And since AllPeers is a Firefox extension, it works across all platforms.

But some of the hype was lost as AllPeers found itself among a flock of competitors - we compared four of them here. We named it the best, but noted that all parties to the transfer had to have AllPeers installed, something some of the others didn’t require.

Today they released a new version of AllPeers. There are a number of minor tweaks, including the way they handle file organization. But the exciting update is that they added a pop up chat feature. This would be extremely popular as a stand alone plugin, and adding it to AllPeers is a no brainer. You can now chat with friends as you send files, or just chat with friends without sending files.

I’m still disappointed that AllPeers and Flock haven’t gotten around to porting this to the Flock browser yet. Flock needs a P2P file sharing feature, and AllPeers is all ready to go.

More details about the release on the AllPeers blog, and check out the video below.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/65078949/