Ajax Girl

Mog, a platform for music blogs with backing from Universal and Sony BMG, is launching an ad network dubbed MOG Music Network. In conjunction with the announcement, MOG is also adding experienced record producer Rick Rubin to its Board of Directors.

MOG Music Network will allow partner blogs to embed widgets that display content from other blogs, and will also allow bloggers to have their own posts syndicated to Mog.com. The network will also allow bloggers to customize the ads that appear on their sites, and to generate revenues greater than what they’d get from a typical ad network like Google AdSense. Partners will be able to participate in a 50/50 rev share agreement on a CPM basis.

MOG Music Network, which CEO David Hyman has described as a “Federated Media for music sites”, will include 30 partner sites at launch. MOG is instituting an application process to help ensure the quality of partner sites, though it intends to cater to small and large sites alike.

MOG’s network will allow it to increase its ad impressions to drive further revenue (up until this point, its primary source of income has been from direct visits to its site). MOG’s news comes only a few weeks after the launch of iLike’s ad platform, which allows advertisers to place their own ads on iLike. Competitor imeem expected to announce its own advertising service in the near future.

Rubin, who is joining the company’s board, is currently co-head of Columbia Records and has been named by MTV “the most important producer of the last 20 years.” His appointment isn’t surprising, given the site’s affiliation with two big-name record labels (though he isn’t representing Columbia on the board).

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/wM8H1VJ_g5U/

LivePlace.com has posted a video displaying a very impressive render of a 3D virtual world called City Space. At this point very little is known about LivePlace, other than that the WHOIS lists the domain’s owner as Brad Greenspan, one of the co-founders of MySpace. Note: It appears that in the 20 minutes since I spoke to Greenspan about this post, someone was told to take LivePlace down (apparently nobody was supposed to find it).

Update: They’ve taken the video down. We’ve republished a copy, below.

The other nugget of information found in the video is that the game is running on OTOY, the 3D engine that renders graphics in the cloud. The technology allows relatively weak computers (or even mobile phones) to display incredibly detailed graphics comparable to those seen in Hollywood movies.

The video shows a massive virtual city filled with towering skyscrapers, parks, user-customized apartments and houses, public meeting places, subways, and everything else you might expect in a metropolitan area, all beautifully rendered by the OTOY engine. The game also features impressive real time lighting, reflection, and weather effects that rival those seen in detailed 3D games (and even some movies).

At this point it appears that gameplay will be focused on human avatars, who can own their own living spaces and offices, buy and sell goods at a virtual mall, and interact with each other in public places.

While there are a number of online games that offer impressive graphics (though none of this caliber), the real potential behind LivePlace and the OTOY engine is the cloud-based rendering engine, which allows games on almost any computer to play without needing a powerful graphics card. OTOY has been developed to work in any browser without a plugin, which makes the barrier for entry into this virtual world much lower than Second Life. Of course, we have no idea when City Space will actually launch, so it’s far to early to hail it as the second coming of social online worlds.

Update 2: According to this comment, portions of the video are taken from an artist’s portfolio that may not be related to LivePlace (the video he linked to is identical to the first 10 seconds of the clip above). It’s possible that the artist works for LivePlace, but it certainly doesn’t sound like it was rendered in real time…

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/3OS5Bpy7UkY/

Video advertising network YuMe is bringing in a Canadian to run the place: Montreal-born Michael Mathieu, a former President at Freedom Communications, showed up for work today as CEO, we hear.

Founding CEO Jayant Kadambi, who took the company through two rounds of financing and a big partnership with Microsoft, has stepped down to the President position. That Microsoft deal brings YuMe video ads to cover excess inventory across Microsoft sites.

Comscore says 134 million people view their ads monthly.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/DXYDK_eCWyg/

How’s this for tenacity? John Dane is 58 years old and has been trying out for the Olympic sailing team for 40 years. He finally made it this year with his son-in-law, Austin Sperry.

Dane missed qualifying for the Olympics 4 separate times, each by a few minutes. He didn’t give up after each loss, he just improved his sailing skills. It would have been too easy to give up after losing one or two qualifying races. John Dane took the more difficult route and persevered.

You can watch him sail with his son-in-law to hopeful victory August 15-20.

(Here’s a fun video of their team practicing.)

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1192-olympic-inspiration

Mark’s new license plate! Who knew you could get an @ sign on a license plate?

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1191-root-37s-license-plate

Drew McLellan has written a post on Coping With Internet Explorer’s Mishandling of Buttons which delves into browser differences with respect to <button> versus <input type="submit" ...>

First, buttons themselves:

One of the more exasperating quirks of Internet Explorer is the way it mishandles BUTTON elements. If you’re not all that familiar with HTML buttons (and don’t be ashamed, it’s not all that widely used) it’s a very useful element. Unlike regular the INPUT with its type set to submit which displays its value as a textual label on the UI element, a BUTTON can have both a value and contain a mixture of text, images and what have you.

Let’s look at an example:

PLAIN TEXT

HTML:

1.  
2. <button type=“submit” name=“delete” value=“1234″><img src=“delete.gif” width=“16″ height=“16″ alt=“Delete” /> Delete message</button>
3.  

When a user activates the button, the form would be submitted containing an item named “delete” with a value of “1234”. On the server side, you can then pick up that a delete button has been activated, and from the value you know which item you should be deleting. All the while, the user interface displays an attractive button with an icon and some call-to-action text.

Drew then goes into the IE issue of posting innerHTML instead of the value of the element. He shows a work around, and then others chip in with other solutions such as:

• Separate forms each time, to prevent IE sending all delete buttons up even if not clicked
• Using the name to share the info (name=delete_10293)
• Using a hidden element for the data, and the button just sends the form

There is good news. IE 8 has fixed it, so as soon as everyone on IE upgrades to IE 8 we will be fine

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/361965881/button-versus-inputtypesubmit-in-ie-and-beyond

Johannes Link is an Agile fellow who wasn’t 100% happy with the existing JavaScript unit test frameworks, and he explained why. He gives an example:

It works, but he discusses how this changes the global world, which is a bad thing. Would it be nicer to spy and end up with:

This is an example from his new framework, MockMe, which has the main features:

• The basic granularity of mocking should be the function. If I want to, I can fake the behaviour of a single function without influencing the rest (of an object or a prototype or the global namespace or whatever).
• Most of the time, spying is a better idea than mocking because it’s simpler. Spying basically means that, instead of specifying the expected interaction with your mock spy object before doing the test, you use the mock spy object to spy into the interaction as it happens and verify that afterwards. In that respect I borrowed heavily from mockito, a spying framework that’s gaining more and more attention in the Java world.

A few other examples:

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/361939856/mockme-a-new-javascript-mocking-framework

Allan Jardine has created Conditional-CSS, a tool that allows a style sheet author to place IE style conditional statements inline with CSS to target multiple different browsers.

Expanding the IE conditional statement syntax we get:

PLAIN TEXT

CSS:

1.  
2.    [if {!} browser]     or
3.    [if {!} browser version]     or
4.    [if {!} condition browser version]
5.  

Of course, browsers are getting better and better with their CSS rendering, but in this way those annoying little CSS bugs which always seem to crop up can be worked around. It can also make maintenance of style sheets much easier since it is no longer necessary to maintain separate ‘hack’ files for the various IE versions. For example the following block can be used to overcome some of the issues faced with the button tag:

PLAIN TEXT

CSS:

1.  
2. a.button_active, a.button_unactive { 
3.      display: inline-block; 
4.      [if lte Gecko 1.8] display: -moz-inline-stack; 
5.      [if lte Konq 3.1] float: left; 
6.      height: 30px; 
7.      [if IE 5.0] margin-top: -1px; 
8.        
9.      text-decoration: none; 
10.      outline: none; 
11.      [if IE] text-decoration: expression(hideFocus=‘true’); 
12. }
13.  

Conditional-CSS is an open source project and is currently available in three different source languages: PHP, C and C#, all with identical feature sets. It can readily be deployed on Apache, IIS or any other web-server with a CGI interface. Conditional-CSS can also be run from the command-line such that a style sheet with conditional statements in it can be pre-parsed for IE and included using standard conditional comments in the HTML.

Allan has generators for PHP, C, and C#. You upload the CSS and it spits out what you need. There are also advanced usage.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/361895549/conditional-css-inline-browser-specific-css

Codecs. Codecs. Codecs. Having <video> and <audio> tags in HTML 5 is great and all, but what formats can be played?

If you want something that everyone could play (everyone == not just people who pay the MPEG licenses) what do you have left? Ogg? Some argue about the quality of Ogg, and others play the fear card (holy law suit batman).

Robert O’Callahan of Mozilla puts it out there in his post on why Ogg matters.

He covers a few questions, starting with:

Why would Firefox want to ship this?

Our goal is to enable unencumbered, royalty-free, open-source friendly audio and video playback on the Web. Shipping Vorbis and Theora will achieve that for over 100M Firefox users — not everyone yet, but a good start! To reach the rest, we will keep turning people into Firefox users, and pressure Apple, Microsoft and other vendors to support Vorbis and Theora. Vendor pressure must come from content providers dedicated to making compelling content available in free formats (coupled with a superior playback experience in Firefox). Wikimedia has stepped up and hopefully others will follow.

In fact, we’d love to be able to ship open-source codecs for H.264 and VC-1, but that can’t happen until the MPEG LA’s patents expire, or MPEG LA decides to give up its patent licensing fees, or software patents are struck down by the US Supreme Court (and possibly other jurisdictions). It would be unwise to wait.

Aren’t the Ogg formats inferior?

Theora isn’t bad on an absolute scale — look at some demos to see for yourself. There is ongoing work to improve the encoder so it’s even better. Even if it’s slightly lower quality than H.264 at some bit rates, it’s still going to be very useful to people who favour free formats on principle, or who need an open-source solution, or who want a solution that Just Works across platforms without plugins, or who just want a solution without licensing fees — for example, if you just want a convenient way to use a video clip in a Web app. Look at modern bank ATM interfaces, for example, to get an idea of what people could be doing in Web apps.

Isn’t a plugin enough?

Because the value to content providers and the pressure on other vendors depend entirely on these codecs being available to a lot of users — and most users don’t download codec plugins.

This is a great example of why Mozilla and Firefox are important. The Web needs a high-market-share browser vendor committed to free software and open standards across the board.

And finally, the big one:

Will you get your pants sued off?

We’ve taken legal advice. I don’t know if we will talk about the results, but our actions speak loudly enough. Cutting Ogg support remains as a last-resort option.

We got a few comments about the new Open Web Podcast asking for an OGG format, so here it is.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/361822196/do-you-want-some-ogg-in-your-or