Ajax Girl

JuicyCampus, the controversial site that lets students post totally anonymous (and often malicious) comments about their college classmates, has launched a new version of its site and opened support to over 185 new campuses, with 500 expected by the end of the month. JuicyCampus is essentially a public, anonymous bulletin board that encourages users to gossip about eachother, often referring to their targets by their full names.

The site’s founder, Matt Ivester, continues to portray JuicyCampus in a positive light, explaining that he’s intent on “Making juicy campus a place where students can discus the topics that matter to them most in a manner they deem appropriate”.

In the past, Ivester has also written blog posts asking users to play nice:

“Some of the things that have been posted have been mean-spirited, and we have received emails from people claiming to have been defamed on the site,” and adds “We want you to make JuicyCampus Juicy, not hateful.”

Unfortunately, most students choose to degrade their peers, oftentimes with disparaging remarks that are impossible to counter against because of the site’s anonymity. Ivester likes to act like hurtful gossip isn’t the sole purpose for the site’s existence, but with today’s press release listing such topics as “Cheaters”, “Biggest Stoner”, and “In The Closet”, it’s clear that the site is by no means benevolent - Ivester isn’t fooling anyone. The site may not be breaking any laws, but it shouldn’t be misrepresenting itself, either.

JuicyCampus seems like a prime target for lawsuits from upset students and parents, but Ivester says the company has yet to be sued for the site’s negative content. However, he does acknowledge that it is currently under investigation by Attorneys General in New Jersey and Connecticut (he refused to comment on the cases, but said that the site’s expansion was indicative of his view on their eventual outcomes).

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/6fdfuYGiD30/

Ustream is broadcasting the Republican National Convention live (as I type) and Google has embedded its coverage into the Elections section of Google News.

Why is this news? Because apparently this is the first time Google has embedded a non-Google service into one of its core pages. At least, that’s what Ustream is telling us and we have no evidence with which to disagree.

You can watch the full live coverage below:

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/yr004Mw6WpY/

Web analytics startup GetClicky says that almost 2% of all internet traffic to the 45,000 websites they monitor is coming from Google Chrome today. That’s sure to dip down as a lot of people go back to their normal browsers, and their client base is certainly not statistically relevant to the Internet as a whole. But if the experience these people are having with Chrome is anything like what I see on our Windows test machine, a lot of them will be making Chrome their new default browser.

Google Analytics, which is what we use at TechCrunch, doesn’t track Chrome usage yet (we’ll see tomorrow after the delay period ends). But our users have never been very representative of the Internet as a whole anyway. 56% of TechCrunch readers from the last 30 days use Firefox, compared to 31% for Internet Explorer and 10% for Safari. Full TechCrunch stats below:

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Hnf57wbDnzQ/

We’ve seen a few sites attempt to help turn the web green, but most of them have been little more than gimmicks. Blackle purports to conserve energy by offering a “black” version of Google, which it says uses less energy than the engine’s standard white. But Google has gone on to say that black may actually increase the amount of energy consumed by visitors (of course, this didn’t stop Google Israel from turning its site black in honor of Earth Hour).

Today, Y Combinator startup CO2Stats has launched a search engine that aspires to be truly green. Greenseng (sounds like Ginseng) is a standard search engine, pulling results from Google’s Custom Search to produce results. But instead of relying on a dubious method of energy conservation, CO2Stats measures the amount of energy used by its servers and the computers of its users and purchases renewable energy certificates (similar to carbon credits) to offset the environmental toll.

CO2Stats CTO Alex Wissner-Gross says that Greenseng isn’t meant to generate revenue though advertising. Instead, the site is using proceeds from its certification business that allows websites to purchase renewable energy certificates in return for a badge that labels them as “Green Certified”.

But while Greenseng may not directly be earning any money, it may help CO2Stats pull in a slew of new customers. In its next iteration, the site will be using Yahoo’s powerful BOSS search API to incorporate some of its own data. Users will be able to see the environmental footprint of each site in their search results with data pulled from CO2Stats, which may give companies more of an incentive to get Green Certified.

Buying credits to offset seach engine usage isn’t a new idea. In April we wrote about EcoCho, a search engine wrapper for Google and Yahoo that promises to plant “up to two trees” for every 1,000 searches on the site (we noted that zero could fall within that definition). Only a week after launching, Google pulled the site from its advertising partnership - not a good sign, though it didn’t specify the details.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/f6pEP7hirN8/

Pablo Corral wrote me an email after I posted this tweet about managing on-again-off-again side projects.

I’m very curious about how to use Backpack to have a better experience on braindumps for side projects.

I switch a lot, and my side project sometimes is off for many days, and some weeks. Can you explain more about this?

It’s hard to find steady uninterrupted time for software side projects. Maybe you only have time on weekends or the occasional free night for your project, and sometimes weeks or months go by where you are too busy to sit down and make some progress. When you finally do find time to work, you can waste half of it just catching up on where you left off.

This has been a big challenge for me because one of my projects is a Rails app that supports registration and administration for a biannual retreat course. Four or five months may go by before I return to the app for another course, and with each course there are new bugs to fix or feature requests to implement. A couple years in this situation have helped me develop a system to manage my side projects with a minimum of headaches and wasted time.

My system is a one-two punch: Hosted version control plus a single Backpack page. These two are all you need to keep the state of your project off your brain and at the ready.

First punch: Hosted version control

Sign up with a hosted version control service like GitHub for Git or Beanstalk for Subversion. I advise using version control even for static websites.

There are two key benefits to hosting your source with these services. First, your source is independent of your work machine. If your machine crashes, you replace it, or even if you space out and delete some things you shouldn’t (that would be me), your code will always be safe and secure in the online repository.

The second benefit is an easy-to-read commit log. With one click you can visit a bookmark and see a timeline of changes you’ve made to the code in chronological order and in your own words. Just glancing at the commit log can be enough to jog your brain after a long absence and bring you right back into the project.

Second punch: A single Backpack page

I make a single Backpack page for each project with two lists and some notes. The two lists are ‘To-Do’ and ‘Debt.’
The ‘To-Do’ list is for things I really, truly, honestly plan to do next. I keep it very short, always less than five items. If it gets any longer, I’m probably fantasizing instead of actually planning to do those things. Whenever I return to a project, the top item on the To-Do list tells me what I should work on.

The ‘Debt’ list is for things I should have done but didn’t bother to do. The Debt list is partly a psychological trick. It helps me cut corners without feeling too guilty. Should’ve added validations to that model? Add it to the Debt list. Wrote a condition without thinking too deeply about the edge cases? Just add it to the Debt list. But it’s also more than a band-aid for laziness. If something breaks or I run into some unexpected behavior, chances are a quick glance at the Debt list will point me to a corner that I cut or a step I skipped and lead to a direct solution instead of an hour of head-scratching.

Lastly my Backpack account is SSL protected, so I feel safe storing information about my production environment. I can never remember where a project is hosted, what the username and password are or if there are particularities with the configuration I should know about. I keep all this server info on a note at the top of the page, so each time I need to log in I don’t have to go digging for passwords or welcome emails from my host.

A powerful combo—when you hold up your end

All the lists and logs in the world won’t help if you don’t create some good habits. Commit frequently, and whenever possible write commit messages about your intention, not your implementation. Say “Fix the broken sidebar layout” instead of “Fix a typo in the class name.” The former will be a sharper hook to your memory later. For the Backpack lists, try to be brutally honest. A mile long To-Do list is proof of time wasted, not time saved. Focus your To-Do list on the next few things you need done, and limit your Debt list to Debt that actually matters.

This system has helped me organized my side projects and optimize the short slices of free time I can dedicate to them. I hope it works for you too. Let us know in the comments if you have any systems of your own for managing side projects over time.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1226-how-to-manage-long-breaks-in-your-software-side-projects

Google announced Chrome yesterday and the company has already offered Windows XP and Vista owners the opportunity to try it out. And although I’ve only been able to use it for just a little while, Google Chrome is not only one of the fastest browsers I’ve ever used, it’s easily one of the best.

The Google Chrome install was quick and easy. In a matter of seconds (literally), I downloaded the application from the company’s site and installed it on my PC. Once up, Chrome asked to import the data from Firefox and I was off.

The first thing that will strike you about Chrome is its soft, yet elegant interface. Unlike other browsers, which sport clutter, Chrome doesn’t do anything of the sort. Instead, it makes tabs the primary element of the software, which can be dragged around and moved as needed on the fly. You can already do that in Safari, but in Chrome, it’s simply much easier.

Chrome also offers the “Omnibox”, which lets you input a web address or search the web in the address bar. You can do that now with Firefox, as well, but if you’re visiting a specific site like Amazon and you want to search that site, it features smart search engine detection to let you search Amazon instead of Google. I did just that on Amazon.com and it worked extremely well. In fact, it was much easier to search through sites and pages than any other browser I typically use.

My favorite feature so far in Chrome is the homepage. Unlike every other browser on the market, Chrome gives you a list of all the most-visited pages you’ve been to. I found this to be extremely useful. Instead of wasting time sifting through favorites or trying to find a specific page, I had all my most visited pages at my disposal when I opened Chrome up.

But perhaps more than anything, you’ll notice just how fast Chrome is immediately. After just ten minutes of jumping from site to site, I was amazed by how quickly I was able to get around. And unlike some browsers (I won’t mention any names), opening a slew of tabs doesn’t matter — it’s just as fast with or without tabs.

For those that want to shop for their girlfriend’s engagement ring without them knowing or just want to do, um, other things, Chrome also features an incognito mode, which will stop the browser from recording your activity. I tried it out and it works as advertised, and was delighted to see that I could turn it on and off in a flash.

One of my biggest problems with Firefox is that I have a tendency to lose my downloads when I get a little overzealous in my software tastes. Granted, you can go to the “Downloads” tab and find everything there, but Chrome makes it easier: it has a download box at the bottom of the screen that lets you access your downloaded files and put them where they need to go. I doubt I’ll lose anything again.

But not everything is perfect in Chrome. It’s still not available for Mac OS X and Linux users and it’s missing an easy method for organizing bookmarks. Worse, it currently doesn’t offer any way to email links. Google claims it’s just a beta release and these functions will be added in subsequent versions, but I still would have liked to see them in the first iteration.

All in all, Google Chrome, after just a little time using it, is superb. It’s not only fast, but it’s useful. It’s not only elegant, but it understands what you really want to do with a browser. And although it suffers from some setbacks that shouldn’t be overlooked, it’s still a highly-capable browser. Download Chrome. You won’t regret it.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Us7tZJZctkY/

The world was introduced yesterday to Google’s new browser, Chrome, via a comic book. Today, Google is holding a press conference at its headquarters in Mountain View to demo the new browser and discuss the reasons behind its development.

If you’re interested in reading the comic released yesterday that introduces Chrome, you can find it here.

Below are our notes from the conference, which started at 11:00 am PT.

You can now download Chrome (just under half a megabyte; Windows only) from here.

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Tabs are going to be the primary elements of Chrome. They are like title bars for webpages and applications. They can be dragged around to reorganize (as in Safari) and can even be dragged out of a window to create a new one.

Google Chrome has no search box - instead it has an “omnibox” where you both enter website addresses and conduct searches. It sounds very similar to what can be found in Firefox 3.

The omnibox also has smart search engine detection. If you visit Amazon, Google will detect that site’s search engine. Next time you visit Amazon from the browser, you can hit tab to search using Amazon’s search without having to fill in the field on the page itself.

Google is turning away from the typical homepage (which makes us wonder - what about iGoogle?). Your default homepage is a list of your most visited sites, each accompanied by a screenshot.

Chrome comes with an “incognito window” (i.e. porn mode). It has a little spy icon to remind you when you’re in that mode. When using the window, it won’t record any of your activity. One cool thing about incognito mode - you can have one window open using incognito and another in normal mode at the same time.

A download bar will create a bucket at the bottom of your browser window where all downloads go. You can drag each file from the bucket to where you want on your desktop. It’s meant to prevent the loss of files that you’ve downloaded because you don’t know where they went.

Some applications, like Gmail, want to break free from the browser window. Gmail could use shortcuts on the desktop and in the start menu, for example, so it can be launched like a real app. A special app view window in Chrome doesn’t have typical browser controls, just the web app itself.

Google Chrome has reportedly been in development for two years and will release in more than 40 languages today in beta.

The rendering engine has been limited to that all a webpage can do is talk to the browser. Pages are basically placed in sandboxes and the only way a hacker could cause harm would be to find a bug in the rendering engine and escape those sandboxes.

A task manager for the browser itself will let you see how much CPU is being used for Flash and other plugins on the sites you visit. When a browser tab hangs, you can use the manager to kill that single tab. This preserves the page and the position of the browser when you reopen it.

Google has chosen Webkit because it’s fast, open source, and they don’t want to force developers to learn another rendering engine. A rendering test of static content resulted in 220.64 ms in IE and 77.28 in Webkit.

Chrome’s new JavaScript engine (V8) efficiently handles hundreds of kilobytes of code, as found in applications like Gmail. Google has found a way to introduce so-called “hidden classes” through a virtual machine. The classes are used within the native code that it compiles. They are supported by inline caching and dynamic parsing, so the access of data and execution of functions are really fast.

Even though Webkit already had a JavaScript rendering engine, Google wanted to set a new bar for virtual machine performance within the browser. The team behind V8 is Danish. In speed tests, IE performed at 15.5 round trips per hour (RPH) and Chrome performed at 584 RPH.

Other browsers can take V8 and include it in their systems, because it is being provided as open source.

Chrome has no tie-ins to other major Google services. If you had Live Search as your default search engine in Internet Explorer, Chrome will use that automatically.

Larry Page is here saying he’s been using Chrome for awhile now. He says Google wants a world where platforms are advancing and the open source model allows for this. Mozilla can choose to take some of the advancements Google has made and incorporate them into its own Firefox browser.

When asked how Chrome fits into Google’s mobile strategy, especially with Android, the company said Android has a separate browser (which is also Webkit based) but that both browsers share underlying technology. The two basically only differ in their user interfaces.

Sergey Brin: “I would not call Chrome the operating system of the web application - it’s basically a very fast engine for them”

As for plugins, Chrome will support plugins like Flash and PDF but it doesn’t have extensions like those found in Firefox. Google does, however, plan to provide an extension API in the future.

Chrome is very small, about 7 megabytes in size.

When asked about gaining marketshare, Google representatives say they don’t have a target number for what they hope to achieve. They say they want “a diverse ecosystem” of users.

When asked why consumers should use Chrome, they say it’s attractive if you want a “faster, more robust, safer web experience” (yawn)

Google reps are admitting that they have to compete with a product that’s given away by default on almost every computer. When asked whether they have been worried about IE7 or IE8, Google responded by saying they started two years ago and have always wanted to provide consumers with a choice.

Here’s a brief interview with Sergey Brin:

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Source: TechCrunch
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A few days ago YouTube announced the addition of Closed Captioning support to its videos. One small problem though… YouTube included neither the tools nor the services to help video owners create the actual captioning source files– SubViewer (*.SUB) and SubRip (*.SRT)—needed to activate this feature. This is where SubPLY, the new video captioning service by PLYmedia might be helpful. With the launch of the service the company is providing an exclusive offer for TechCrunch readers: Free professionally produced English and Spanish closed captioning for YouTube videos!

SubPLY will provide English & Spanish captioning to 5000 YouTube videos submitted by TechCrunch readers. The video source language must be English and video duration cannot exceed 5 minutes. The captioning will be available within 24-hours of video submission. Offer details and how-to, here.

Is captioning videos really worth the hassle? YouTube clearly believes as much and PLYmedia’s internal research supports this claim as well. SubPLY was piloted with a video publisher that tested ten different videos for a period of six weeks, in three different languages (English, Spanish and French). Here are the results for videos watched with captioning:

1. Foreign language usage and viewership increased over 700% in a 5 week period.
2. 19% more viewers watched videos to completion than those without subtitles.
3. The share function (sending the video to others) was used by viewers watching subtitles 171% more often (the viral effect was boosted).
4. A 37% increase in both users who watched the video in full screen mode and users who replayed video.

A short backgrounder on PLYmedia: The Israeli company, which recently raised $6 million, provides video publishers the ability to add layers—”PLYs” as the company calls them—on top of their video players. These layers allow a variety of interactive applications to be offered along with the video with fairly minimal hassle for the publishers. The applications can range from BubblePLY (that lets users add text, images and graphics to videos) to information enrichment via infoPLY to ad overlays via adPLY.

SubPLY, the newest addition to PLYmedia’s range of “PLYd” applications is a dead-simple service that adds captioning to videos. All one has to do is provide a URL of a previously uploaded video and in return receive a new embed code from SubPLY that loads the original player along with the additional code necessary to overlay the captions. See the bottom of the post for an example.

SubPLY is being launched with captioning translation for 42 languages. The company will provide commercial customers a turnaround as quick as two hours from submitting the video to having the captioning active on it. Important to note is that the SubPLY embed code can be embedded immediately and the captioning functionality will appear once it’s available. Adding additional languages down the road will not require a code change, they will simply appear as soon as they are ready to go. Another aspect worthy of note is that the subtitles are encapsulated in an XML file that is made available with the SubPLY code. This means that videos are not only enriched with captioning, they are also enriched with additional SEO juice (XML files are parsed by search engines).

Pricing depends on the type of content, turnaround time, and scope of work per customer. There is also pricing “seasonality”. Current pricing is available here.

SubPly will open-up its translation tools in the coming months, allowing any user to create closed captions and subtitles. The tools were specifically created for online video, optimized for Flash and require no upload or transcoding.

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

It is really exciting to see the level of pace that browsers have been setting recently, especially with respect to performance.

I have been able to keep in sync with Google Chrome the new browser, and Chromium, the open source code-base it comes from. There are a couple of innovations that have been great to see such as the multiple process model for tabs and windows, the unified tab and search functionality, and at the core, V8.

V8 is the super-speedy JavaScript VM by Lars Bak of Sun HotSpot fame. When you run JavaScript benchmarks on this puppy, you see very speedy responses indeed. The V8 part of the comic says it well:

Some of the core technology is also exciting to geeks. For example, as this code is operating system neutral we use the Skia Graphic Library (SGL) used by the Android team.

What about the process manager? John Resig has interesting thoughts on that with the rub: “The blame of bad performance or memory consumption no longer lies with the browser but with the site.”

Alex Russell also has some good thoughts on the importance of Chrome, and Christopher Blizzard (Mozilla) also has some thoughts on how this shows the browser market is strong.

This is all great to see. Not only is this just the beginning for Google Chrome, Chromium, and V8 (I am dying for a Mac version!), but the other browsers are keeping pace too. The end result is a better Web for users, and a higher quality of product for developers to build against!

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/381521890/google-chrome-chromium-and-v8

It is really exciting to see the level of pace that browsers have been setting recently, especially with respect to performance.

I have been able to keep in sync with Google Chrome the new browser, and Chromium, the open source code-base it comes from. There are a couple of innovations that have been great to see such as the multiple process model for tabs and windows, the unified tab and search functionality, and at the core, V8.

V8 is the super-speedy JavaScript VM by Lars Bak of Sun HotSpot fame. When you run JavaScript benchmarks on this puppy, you see very speedy responses indeed. The V8 part of the comic says it well:

Some of the core technology is also exciting to geeks. For example, as this code is operating system neutral we use the Skia Graphic Library (SGL) used by the Android team.

What about the process manager? John Resig has interesting thoughts on that with the rub: “The blame of bad performance or memory consumption no longer lies with the browser but with the site.”

Alex Russell also has some good thoughts on the importance of Chrome, and Christopher Blizzard (Mozilla) also has some thoughts on how this shows the browser market is strong.

This is all great to see. Not only is this just the beginning for Google Chrome, Chromium, and V8 (I am dying for a Mac version!), but the other browsers are keeping pace too. The end result is a better Web for users, and a higher quality of product for developers to build against!

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/381521890/google-chrome-chromium-and-v8