Ajax Girl

It’s not the 4th of July without the Coney Island Hot-Dog Eating Contest (that’s how we celebrate in Brooklyn, by stuffing our faces with as many hot dogs we can fit). This year’s winner is defending champion Joey “Jaws” Chestunt, who won in overtime from six-time champion Takeru Kobayashi.

Both ate 59 hot dogs during the 10 minute contest (down from 12 minutes in the past), and then the contest went into overtime to see who could eat five additional hot dogs the fastest. CNN has all the details, but Kurt Dietrich’s wonderful Flickr photos tell the story best.

Happy 4th of July everyone. Try to go easy on those hot dogs.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/326893374/

The launch of Twitter clone Identi.ca earlier this week caused a bit of a blogstorm because it appears to have a solution to Twitter’s all-too-regular downtime. (That problem has reached comical proportions, with the familiar Twitter Fail Whale now appearing on T-shirts and kitschy art).

Identi.ca’s answer to Twitter’s scaling issues is by open-sourcing its code and encouraging others to host Identi.ca on their own servers, thus distributing the load. The service also supports other open standards, such as OpenID and a new one called OpenMicroblogging. Based on OAuth, the OpenMicroblogging standard is aimed at making it easy for people on other messaging services to subscribe to Identi.ca users and vice versa.

Identi.ca is the brainchild of Canadian developer Evan Prodromou, who explains the thinking behind the project here. He has a lot of good ideas. In particular, we agree that decentralizing Twitter is the key to making it scale better, although there are other ways to do that as well. The service is also based on the idea that you can take your data with you at any time to any other microblogging service.

But for now, Identi.ca is only for super-early adopters. It lacks some basic functionality, such as the ability to search for other users to follow or to import your contacts from other services. (I guess you are supposed to e-mail all your friends the link to your Identi.ca profile so that they can subscribe to you or just hope they find your name on the public feed). These problems are easy enough to address, and Identi.ca has along list of features it is working on.

The bigger problem with Identi.ca is simply that it is not Twitter. However annoying Twitter’s erratic outages may be, it still has the advantage of having many more users than any other competing service. If everyone is on Twitter, what’s the point of going to Identi.ca? That can change over time, obviously, especially if Twitter does not get its act together. But the inconvenience of switching means that it still has time to fix itself.

That does not mean Twitter can afford to ignore the excitement generated by Identi.ca. In fact, it should adopt some of its ideas, like decentralizing its messaging system and making it easy for people to export their friends and data to other services.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/326774008/

Google Earth is turning out to be a great resource for scientists to visualize and communicate the phenomena they study. You can see the migration patterns of endangered and other threatened animals, based on data collected by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. (The image above shows the range of both the Northern spotted owl and the Mexican spotted owl).

Anybody can take geographical data and turn it into a layer on Google Earth. Scientists are doing this in droves. You can also track storms, the paths of solar eclipses, volcano activity, arctic ice melting, bird flu mutations and biomaps of emotional stress levels in different cities (see this Popular Science article for more info).

Since these are all KML files, they could be made into layers on the regular Google Maps as well. Although they wouldn’t look as cool, more people would see them.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/326691492/

Mario Heiderich has released qUIpt, a library that uses the window.name property to store away useful data, in this case JavaScript.

How does it work?

• It checks for the contents of window.name while your page is being loaded.
• If there’s nothing inside the window.name cache the JS files defined by you are fetched via XHR
• The same happens if the users enters your site for the first time of his current browser session or if document.referrer is off-domain or empty
• After that the contents of window.name are being evaluated
• If the user requests the next page on your domain the JS files are directly taken from window.name - no more requests necessary

You can check out an example of it at work

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/326662324/quipt-caching-js-in-windowname

Microsoft has come out with a road map for the Ajax side of ASP.NET, which has been simplified to be just: Framework and tools in one versioned package; Ajax components will be released separately on Codeplex.

There is a bold goal at the beginning of the document (why is the doc a PDF/.doc and not just HTML!!!):

Make ASP.NET Ajax the first-class choice for all Web 2.0 developers

They are going to be catching up with richer CSS selection and DOM manipulation:

We have got some animation going on:

What else?

• Accessibility
• Drag & Drop
• Client-side Controls and Behavior
• Interoperability: OpenAjax hub support
• Tooling, tooling, tooling

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/326624146/microsoft-aspnet-ajax-road-map

What does your CEO do? Paul Colton, CEO of Aptana, gets his fingers dirty. He just wrote a post about accessing COM objects from JavaScript with Jaxer.

This is possible as the JavaScript is running on the server, and this server is running on Windows. You can download the source code to check it all out.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/326599893/talking-to-net-on-the-server-with-jaxer

What if you could encode a Jar file as an image and trick the browser to run it? This is what Ben Lorica reported from a black hat briefing webinar:

During a recent webinar to promote the upcoming Black Hat briefings in Las Vegas, a group of hackers announced the creation of a hybrid file that can potentially bypass a browser’s same origin policy. They created a GIF file that also happens to be a JAR file ( a “GIFAR” file). Once uploaded onto a web site, and assuming the web server runs a JVM, it allows one to run a malicious java applet on someone else’s web server.

Details were not provided, since the hackers claim that Sun is still working on a patch. For more on hybrid (image) files as attack vectors, go to minute 41:23 of the webinar.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/326396803/evil-gifs-hiding-java-in-your-image