Ajax Girl

I discussed my worries about JavaScript 2 recently. I could only do so as I saw some light at the end of the tunnel. That light came from an ECMA meetup in Oslo where it seems people came together to rally behind the idea that something needs to be done.

Brendan Eich posted to a mailing list on the work, and I think I will let him talk below:

It’s no secret that the JavaScript standards body, Ecma’s Technical
Committee 39, has been split for over a year, with some members
favoring ES4, a major fourth edition to ECMA-262, and others
advocating ES3.1 based on the existing ECMA-262 Edition 3 (ES3)
specification. Now, I’m happy to report, the split is over.

The Ecma TC39 meeting in Oslo at the end of July was very productive,
and if we keep working together, it will be seen as seminal when we
look back in a couple of years. Before this meeting, I worked with
John Neumann, TC39 chair, and ES3.1 and ES4 principals, especially
Lars Hansen (Adobe), Mark Miller (Google), and Allen Wirfs-Brock
(Microsoft), to unify the committee around shared values and a common
roadmap. This message is my attempt to announce the main result of
the meeting, which I’ve labeled “Harmony”.

Executive Summary

The committee has resolved in favor of these tasks and conclusions:

1. Focus work on ES3.1 with full collaboration of all parties, and
target two interoperable implementations by early next year.
2. Collaborate on the next step beyond ES3.1, which will include
syntactic extensions but which will be more modest than ES4 in both
semantic and syntactic innovation.
3. Some ES4 proposals have been deemed unsound for the Web, and are
off the table for good: packages, namespaces and early binding. This
conclusion is key to Harmony.
4. Other goals and ideas from ES4 are being rephrased to keep
consensus in the committee; these include a notion of classes based
on existing ES3 concepts combined with proposed ES3.1 extensions.

Detailed Statement

A split committee is good for no one and nothing, least of all any
language specs that might come out of it. Harmony was my proposal
based on this premise, but it also required (at least on the part of
key ES4 folks) intentionally dropping namespaces.

This is good news for everyone, both those who favor smaller changes
to the language and those who advocate ongoing evolution that
requires new syntax if not new semantics. It does mean that some of
the ideas going back to the first ES4 proposals in 1999, implemented
variously in JScript.NET and ActionScript, won’t make it into any ES
standard. But the benefit is collaboration on unified successor
specifications to follow ES3, starting with ES3.1 and continuing
after it with larger changes and improved specification techniques.

One of the use-cases for namespaces in ES4 was early binding (use
namespace intrinsic), both for performance and for programmer
comprehension — no chance of runtime name binding disagreeing with
any earlier binding. But early binding in any dynamic code loading
scenario like the web requires a prioritization or reservation
mechanism to avoid early versus late binding conflicts.

Plus, as some JS implementors have noted with concern, multiple open
namespaces impose runtime cost unless an implementation works
significantly harder.

For these reasons, namespaces and early binding (like packages before
them, this past April) must go. This is final, they are not even a
future possibility. To achieve harmony, we have to focus not only on
nearer term improvements — on “what’s in” or what could be in — we
must also strive to agree on what’s out.

Once namespaces and early binding are out, classes can desugar to
lambda-coding + Object.freeze and friends from ES3.1. There’s no need
for new runtime semantics to model what we talked about in Oslo as a
harmonized class proposal (I will publish wiki pages shortly to show
what was discussed).

We talked about desugaring classes in some detail in Oslo. During
these exchanges, we discussed several separable issues, including
classes, inheritance, like patterns, and type annotations. I’ll avoid
writing more here, except to note that there were clear axes of
disagreement and agreement, grounds for hope that the committee could
reach consensus on some of these ideas, and general preference for
starting with the simplest proposals and keeping consensus as we go.

We may add runtime helpers if lambda-coding is too obscure for the
main audience of the spec, namely implementors who aim to achieve
interoperation, but who may not be lambda-coding gurus. But we will
try to avoid extending the runtime semantic model of the 3.1 spec, as
a discipline to guard against complexity.

One possible semantic addition to fill a notorious gap in the
language, which I sketched with able help from Mark Miller: a way to
generate new Name objects that do not equate as property identifiers
to any string. I also showed some sugar, but that is secondary at
this point. Many were in favor of this new Name object idea.

There remain challenges, in particular getting off of the untestable
and increasingly unwieldy ES1-3.x spec formalism. I heard some
generally agree, and no one demur, about the ES4 approach of using an
SML + self-hosted built-ins reference implementation (RI).

We are going to look into stripping the RI of namespaces and early
binding (which it uses to ensure normative self-hosted behavior, not
susceptible to “user code” modifying the meaning of built-ins),
simplifying it to implement ES3.1plus or minus (self-hosted built-ins
may require a bit more magic). More on that effort soon.

ES3.1 standardizes getters and setters that were first implemented at
Mozilla and copied by Apple and Opera. More such de-facto
standardization is on the table for a successor edition in the
harmonized committee.

I heard good agreement on low-hanging “de-facto standard” fruit,
particularly let as the new var, to match block-scoped const as still
proposed (IIRC) in 3.1. Also some favorable comments about simple
desugarings such as expression closures and destructuring assignment,
and other changes in JS1.7 and 1.8 that do not require new runtime
semantic models.

Obviously, these require new syntax, which is appropriate for a major
post-3.1 “ES-harmony” edition. Syntax is user interface, there’s no
reason to avoid improving it. What’s more, the intersection semantics
of extended ES3 implementations conflict and choke off backward-
compatible *semantics* for syntax that may even parse in all top four
browsers (e.g., functions in blocks).

Both the appropriateness of new syntax, and the need to make
incompatible (with ES3 extensions) semantic changes, motivate opt-in
versioning of harmonized successor edition. I believe that past
concerns about opt-in versioning requiring server file suffix to MIME
type mapping maintenance were assuaged (browsers in practice, and
HTML5 + RFC 4329, do not consider server-sent Content-Type — the web
page author can write version parameters directly in script tag type
attributes).

Some expressed interest in an in-language pragma to select version;
this would require immediate version change during parsing. It’s a
topic for future discussions.

The main point, as important as cutting namespaces in my view, is
that the committee has a vision for extending the language
syntactically, not trying to fit new semantics entirely within some
combination of existing “three of four top browsers” syntax and
standard library extensions.

As Waldemar Horwat (Google) said on the final day, the meeting was
seminal, and one of the most productive in a long while. Much work
remains on 3.1 and Harmony, but we are now on a good footing to make
progress as a single committee.

There is still a lot to do, and I look forward to hearing Doug’s side of things too (going to blog about it Doug?).

What are your thoughts?

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/364285699/ecmascript-harmony-coming-together-after-oslo

Early stage venture firm Y Combinator, which has funded over 102 young startups, has “open sourced” the legal documents that they provide to their startups to use as they seek additional funding beyond what they’ve gotten from Y Combinator. The documents were created with their law firm, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and are available here.

The goal, says Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham, is to help young startups avoid at least some of the legal costs associated with that first round of financing. The lawyering fees don’t vary much based on the size of the round, and so a significant portion of small rounds can go directly to the lawyers on the deal. Companies are routinely forced to pay the legal bills of the investors, too, making the situation worse.

Jeff Clavier, the founder of early stage fund SoftTechVC, told me yesterday that the average legal bills on a deal are $20-$30k. Other angel investors gave estimates in the same range.

The Y Combinator documents are designed to have “terms close to neutral, in the sense that
they favor neither the investor nor the startup,” said Graham in an email.

We’re hoping that this will cause there to be a lot more startups. I know (because for many years I was one) that there are a lot of rich technology people who would do angel investing but don’t because it seems like a schlep. And obviously there are lots of startups desperate for funding. We’re hoping this document will bring a lot more of them together.

Is Y Combinator helping their competitors by making the legal process easier? Absolutely. And Graham doesn’t seem to mind.

On a related note, earlier this year TheFunded started allowing entrepreneurs to publish the various term sheet clauses that venture capitalists were asking for.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/To-x_EnxnjQ/

Up until last night, the person with the most followers on the micro-messaging service was Digg founder and Web celeb Kevin Rose, with 56,482 other people following his every public mind burp. It took none other than Barack Obama (or, rather, Obama’s campaign machine) to take the Twitter crown away from Rose. Obama can now finally stand tall knowing that 56,791 people subscribe to his campaign Tweets.

How do the two top dogs on Twitter differ? While Obama auto-follows everyone who follows him and more:59,474 people in total. I’m sure he reads every Tweet (no 2000-person limit for Presidential candidates). Rose is more stingy with whom he follows. Only 97 people—but one of them is BarackObama!.

While Rose likes to tell everyone what he’s drinking (nice unicorn background image, Kevin), Obama invites his followers to sign up so they can be the first to find out who his VP pick is going to be. How about Rose? He knows how to get the vote out and seems ready for a new gig.

Note to the Obama campaign: you might want to change the background image from your nondescript campaign button to a picture of Obama.

And John McCain? He’s not in the top 100. In fact, he’s nowhere in sight on the Twittersphere (it’s not exactly his constituency). Or at least, I can’t find him. There’s this unofficial account, JohnMcCain2008, which has attracted 1485 followers. But then, McCain doesn’t even use a computer, so you cannot very well expect him Twitter.

Not that it matters. This may be the Internet election, but Twitter still won’t be a factor until at least 2012. Or will it prove to be a more powerful influencer in the elections than its early-adopter pedigree would suggest?

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/khloRehMKv0/

Remember when you wanted a growable area with rounded-goodness and you had to cut up the image into a million pieces to have the top corners and the sides? Since then we have gotten nice effects to help us, and John Resig just posted on how Firefox 3.1 will implement what WebKit already has in the border-image CSS 3 magic:

Now you can create the iPhone search button that iUI contains, using the simple CSS:

Here you see the reusable button on the left, that will stretch and become the button on the right:

Next up, rounding the borders themselves in all browsers (border-radius!)

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/364021448/border-image-no-more-cutting-up-hell

Online map mashups are about to get a whole lot more sophisticated. A startup in Arlington, Virginia called FortiusOne (based on technology out of George Mason University) is developing a service called Maker! that will let anyone easily find geo-tagged data available on the Web and map it. One piece of the service is already available: a search engine for geo-data called Finder! It lets you find sets of geographical data already on the Web, store it, and organize it, or upload your own. Both are being built around its GeoCommons brand.

Finder! will be combined with Maker! so that all of that geo-data can be easily placed on a digital map. The company is still putting the finishing touches on Maker!, but we’ve obtained some screen shots of the types of maps it will be able to create. For instance, in the screen shot above, carbon emissions data from Chinese power plants (the orange circles) is laid over population density (the darker the shading, the more people per square mile). When you mouse over any bubble, the underlying data pops up.

The maps below show Facebook users in the U.S. by city and a comparison of Hispanic concentration versus population density in San Francisco.

FortiusOne raised $5.4 million last year from investors that included Chart Venture Partners and In-Q-Tel (the CIA’s investing arm). Earlier this month, the company acquired geo-feed aggregator Mapufacture, which will form the basis for Maker!

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/lSxFI_14XEw/

Years ago I read a book about guitar effects pedals. Something the author wrote in the intro stuck with me: “Tone is in your fingers.”

He went on to explain: You can buy the same guitar, effects pedals, and amplifier that Eddie Van Halen uses. But when you play that rig, it’s still going to sound like you.

Likewise, Eddie could plug into a crappy Strat/Pignose setup at a pawn shop and you’d still be able to recognize that it’s Eddie Van Halen playing.

Sure, fancy gear can help. But the truth is that your tone comes from you.

I often think of this story when people fixate on gear over content. You know the type: Wannabe designers who want an avalanche of fancy typefaces and Photoshop filters but don’t have anything to say. Amateur photographers who want to debate film vs. digital instead of what actually makes for a great photo. Startup folks that worry more about software and scaling issues then how to actually get customers and make money. They all miss the point.

Aspiring podcasters consantly ask Gary V about the tools he uses. He responds:

It’s not the camera that I use, it’s not the blogging software, it’s not the widgets, it’s not the SEO. It’s the two C’s: content and community…There are so many crap podcasts out there with billion dollar cameras and editing tools for days. It’s about giving from your heart with content you really understand and, more importantly, giving back to the community that supports your show.

Figure out what you have to say that’s interesting and then unleash it. Use whatever tools you’ve got already or what you can afford cheaply. Then go.

It’s not the gear that matters. It’s you and your ideas that matter. Tone is in your fingers.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1186-gearheads-dont-get-it

I was (digitally) leafing through the latest Lehman Brothers Internet Data Book for August this morning, and came across these forecasts for total U.S. Internet online ad spending and online video ad spending.
Video ads are the hottest area of growth. Analyst Doug Anmuth thinks that online video ad spending will reach $1.1 billion this year (up 63 percent), and more than double to $2.4 billion over the next two years.

He also thinks that total advertising spending in the U.S. will go from $26.1 billion this year to $45.5 billion in 2012 (consequently increasing from 8.8 percent of total advertising spending to 13.7 percent).

Here are some tables with his estimates:

Also, to give some perspective on where online advertising is compared to TV advertising, he offers this comparison chart of the first decade of broadcast TV advertising VS. cable TV advertising Vs. Internet Advertising. The 30 percent growth rate for Internet advertising is double the rate of where cable advertising was at the same point in its history, and triple the rate of broadcast TV advertising. There, don’t you feel better already?

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/1-H9S3-jb8Y/

We just talked about codecs, and in particular the world of Ogg.

Mozilla came out supporting the format, and saying that we should see it in Firefox 3.1. Niall Kennedy then reminded me of a post, way back in time, by David Singer of Apple discussing the research that Apple did into Ogg:

Preamble

The HTML5 specification contains new elements to allow the embedding
of audio and video, similar to the way that images have historically
been embedded in HTML. In contrast to today’s behavior, using
object, where the behavior can vary based on both the type of the
object and the browser, this allows for consistent attributes, DOM
behavior, accessibility management, and so on. It also can handle
the time-based nature of audio and video in a consistent way.

However, interoperability at the markup level does not ensure
interoperability for the user, unless there are commonly supported
formats for the video and audio encodings, and the file format
wrapper. For images there is no mandated format, but the widely
deployed solutions (PNG, JPEG/JFIF, GIF) mean that interoperability
is, in fact, achieved.

Licensing

The problem is complicated by the IPR situation around audio and
video coding, combined with the W3C patent policy
. “W3C seeks to
issue Recommendations that can be implemented on a Royalty-Free (RF)
basis.” Note that much of the rest of the policy may not apply (as
it concerns the specifications developed at the W3C, not those that
are normatively referenced). However, it’s clear that at least
RF-decode is needed.

The major concerns were:

• a number of large companies are concerned about the possible
  unintended entanglements of the open-source codecs; a ‘deep pockets’
  company deploying them may be subject to risk here;
• the current MPEG codecs are currently licensed on a royalty-bearing basis;
• this is also true of the older MPEG codecs; though their age suggests examining the lifetime of the patents;
• and also SMPTE VC-1
• H.263 and H.261 both have patent declarations at the ITU.
  However, it is probably worth examining the non-assert status of
  these, which parts of the specifications they apply to (e.g. H.263
  baseline or its enhancement annexes), and the age of the patents and
  their potential expiry.
• This probably doesn’t have significant IPR risk, as its wide
  deployment in systems should have exposed any risk by now; but it
  hardly represents competitive compression.
• Most proprietary codecs are licensed for payment, as that is the
  business of the companies who develop them.

So, there was worry. The BBC decided to try to solve this by creating Dirac, but they also just posted on Open Industry Standards For Audio & Video On The Web where they put their money behind H.264 and AAC:

I believe that the time has come for the BBC to start adopting open standards such as H.264 and AAC for our audio and video services on the web. These technologies have matured enough to make them viable alternatives to other solutions.

And then answer the obvious question on Dirac:

Some people may ask: why are you not using your own Dirac codec? I am fully committed to the development and success of Dirac, but for now those efforts are focused on high-end broadcast applications. This autumn, we intend to show the world what can be achieved with these technologies.

Something tells me that 2008 is going to be a fun one wrt the opening of codecs.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/363842972/more-codecs-from-apple-bbc

I am a fan of Ruby, and when I saw Red the framework that allows you to write Ruby and get JavaScript out the other end I was excited. It allows you to write this:

And you end up with:

You can also have fun with blocks:

You also get convention conversion, which can lead to some weird things such as:

On one hand I am excited about being able to think that I am hacking on Ruby, even though I am not. On the other hand, I worry about the abstraction leaking (ending with weird bugs) and how ruby is great because of all of the MOP, the libraries, and other things that you can’t really do with this system. This makes it a bit of a tease.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/363812875/prefer-ruby-syntax-see-red-and-your-ruby-will-convert-to-js

Most PR professionals I know are flat out busy right now and being really picky about new clients that they take on. But the way that they do business is under fire. Today’s volleys are just the most recent example, although one of PR’s own is leading the charge (Steve Rubel from Edelman, a master at his craft).

The issue Rubel brings up is whether PR really serves any purpose today given that more and more journalists, particularly tech journalists, are finding the interesting stuff on their own and ignoring the canned pitches that hit their inbox daily.

I can’t speak for big media journalists who’ve been in the game for years and years, but from my experience with blogging for a few years, I agree that PR as a profession is broken.

They’re trying to apply the same rules they used when the number of journalists covering their companies was a manageable, chummy lot. Today there’s a whole spectrum of people writing about startups in big media publications, large and small blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed and everything in between.

Most PR folks don’t read blogs and certainly don’t understand them. All they see is a Google alert with their clients name, and rush to put out a fire. Down the road they may try to bring those bloggers into the fold, largely relying on word of mouth as to the best way to approach them in lieu of actually reading the blog itself.

That leads to the occasional massive clusterfuck and some truly hilarious moments that I would like to write a book about some day. To sum it all up, the relationship between bloggers and PR firms is shaky at best. Or at least it should be. Some bloggers really cultivate PR relationships, but for me PR is the last refuge when I’m attacking a story. They keep trying to put out the fires I’m starting.

So back to practical advice: what do you do if you’re a startup looking for help in getting the word out about your company? First off, don’t hire PR help until the volume of inbound requests by press are simply too much to handle without help. That’s way down the line for most companies.

Until then, take the time to start reading blogs and other publications that cover what you’re doing. Go to an event or two. This should be fun for you, since they’re writing about stuff that you’re spending all your time on. You’ll start to see links to other relevant sites, and before long you’ll fully understand who’s who in the space, get a feel for people’s personalities and passions, etc. Leave a few thoughtful comments. Better yet, start your own blog and link appropriately. And in your leisure time participate in the fascinating conversations occurring on Twitter and FriendFeed.

Suddenly you are no longer just a spectator with an agenda. You are now part of a community. You are a person that gives and takes. Someone who makes the overall network stronger. And I guarantee that after a few weeks of actually participating in the community, you’ll have far better press connections than most of the PR people we deal with daily.

And best of all, you aren’t sucked into the web of politics and intrigue that guides the relationships between PR firms and the press. You can build your own relationships and bypass all the mess.

Of course there are exceptions to this advice. Some startup founders just aren’t comfortable talking directly to the press without guidance. And there are a lot of good PR people out there that really understand what’s going on with the profession today. The problem is, they’re not taking on new clients.

See our previous posts with PR tips by Brian Solis.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/I6jbtKDgz0o/