WordPress version 3.0 was released at the end of last week. It’s a little later than the intended May 1 release date, but WordPress is one of the most popular blogging and content management systems on the planet, so it was better to be late than cause issues for thousands of websites.

The update is the result of six months’ work by 218 dedicated contributors, culminating in 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements. So what can you expect from WordPress 3.0?

New Installer

WordPress has always been easy to install but it’s become even simpler. Few administrators will have to fiddle with the wp-config.php configuration file: all the MySQL settings can be specified within the installer panels now.

The new installer also allows you to specify the administrator ID and password. I suspect few people ever bothered to change it from the default “admin” in previous versions, so the facility to create your own ID will aid security.

New Interface

The WordPress 3.0 administration panels have received a polish. It’s hardly a radical change from version 2, but it’s lighter and feels slicker.

There are few obvious changes to the interface until you reach the Appearance section.

New Default Theme

RIP Kubrick: you’ve served us well and many websites use you to this day. Kubrick has been replaced by “Twenty Ten,” a new theme that has built-in support for child themes, background alterations, header customization, and drop-down menus.

The theme’s look and widgets can be customized within the administration panel, so I expect many people will never venture beyond the Twenty Ten theme. For those that do, there’s a new “Install Themes” tab that allows you to search for templates by color, type, and features.

Not impressed but then again, if they made a nice one, I’d be out of extra work!

WordPress Multi-user

WordPress MU was a fork that allowed hundreds of blogs to run from a single installation; it has now been merged with the main version 3.0 application. It’s disabled by default, but can be switched on by adding the following line to your wp-config.php file:

This could be the most important feature for web developers: you can create a number of websites using just one installation of WordPress. Updates are easier and hosting space is drastically reduced.

Custom Post Types

Pages and Posts were available in previous versions of WordPress:

• Pages were normally used for static content such as About Us or Contact Us pages.
• Posts would commonly be used for date-stamped news, articles, or blog posts.

WordPress 3.0 supports custom post types. For example, you could have a Product type that’s specifically used for items sold on your website. Product pages can then be treated separately; for example, have their own menu or search box.

Custom post types are configured using PHP rather than within the administration panels. Watch out for a full tutorial on SitePoint shortly.

Other Features

Where do I start? I suggest you visit the WordPress 3.0 Codex page for a comprehensive list.

Should you upgrade now?

I have no hesitation in recommending WordPress 3.0 for a new installation. But what if you’re upgrading from WordPress 2.x?

I’ve rarely experienced problems with the WordPress automated upgrade; it’s a quick one-click process that just works. However, my first attempt failed abysmally and I was left with a broken site. You should note that this was a test installation of 2.8.6 with lots of dodgy code and plugins, but you need to be wary: some themes and plugins are certain to break.

I would recommend updating a local test version of your site before attempting to upgrade the live server. Remember to back up your files and MySQL database, and you can’t go wrong.

If past experience is anything to go by, the WordPress team will almost certainly release 3.0.1 within a few weeks. If you’re especially nervous, you might be advised to wait a little longer …

From ZDNet

The discussion comes amidst an ongoing war of words between Apple and Adobe over over Apple’s refusal to support Flash Player on its iPad and iPhone devices. In April, for instance, Steve Jobs outlined his criticisms of the Flash development platform in a blog post.

In addition, this is not the first time Adobe has sent out a warning to users over an Apple update. In September, the company said that an Mac OS X update issued in August was shipping with a superceded version of Flash Player. It also noted that the Apple’s update was downgrading people with more recent versions of the player to the earlier edition.

That does not appear to be the case with this week’s Apple update, according to Adobe security response programme manager Wendy Poland.

I still can’t say that I am a Maconvert though Jen has me spinning the apples all over the house.  As a developer, I can’t say I’m in love with Flash either.  What I can say is that there are very specific rules that good web developers and designers abide by, one of which is that cross-domain requests are a very real and very scary threat.  Having taught a semester’s worth of web security and really digging into the issue of XSS, HTTP vulnerabilities and phishing schemes, and all the while developing Flash apps that have these apparent holes, it is easy to think that a malicious developer could easily design around this problem.  So kudos to Apple if in fact they really did fall back to plug up the problem.

I probably shouldn’t take sides.  Adobe has been well aware of the problem but it’s difficult at best to plug up every vulnerability across every platform out there.  Apple is doing what it can to protect its users.

So what’s the point?  The point is – be aware that there is a problem and that it is your responsibility (assuming you’re a developer) to cover it – not just the product makers.

Though quite honestly I don’t use ExtJS in favor of pure handcoding and maybe a smattering of minimal jQuery, it’s still a real formidable framework, though Ext’s (sorry, Sencha’s) exploration into HTML5 and CSS3 is probably the best collaborative work on the web so far.  The best part of it is the basic open source system and Ext Designer, which I only recently tried out for the first time.  jQTouch and Raphaël will still both remain MIT licensed.

According to the post on its site:

We’re choosing Sencha as our name because it evokes next-generation software development and it’s easy to remember, spell and pronounce. Sencha — the name of a popular Japanese green tea — is in the tradition of Java, and represents a new level of development. It feels memorable to us.

I’m real intrigued with Raphaël after my recent batch of Advanced Scripting students churned out some really fantastic HTML5 vector graphics.  Will have to try and carve out a few minutes to play around with it.

In any case, best of luck to the new venture – sounds like a real winner in the making!

Amongst them include an upgraded enclosure to unibody aluminum – much beefier than the plastic job my old one has. And the body has a new panel on the base giving it access to the memory slots. Plus they’ve added HDMI which makes it soooo much easier to connect it up with my HDTV (rather than having to put the MBP flipped open right next to it).

But of course the killer one that caught my attention – not because I am so into the 3D idea but simply because of iStream’s involvement with it – is the addition of Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics, one of the foundations for Nvidia’s 3D Vision. Killer.

Posted on TUAW
Buy the base model for $699 or the SL Server version for $999 at Apple Store

by Christopher Mims via Technology Review
How the Internet Porn Business Works>: Researchers set up adult Web sites to study how the industry makes its money and spreads malware.

A first-of-its-kind analysis of the online porn industry reveals the economics, and the vulnerabilities, of the shady world of online adult media.

If you want to know how the online adult industry works, you must become a part of that industry. That’s what five security researchers from The Technical University of Vienna, Sophia Antipolis and UC Santa Barbara did in an attempt to get a handle on how the adult industry makes money online. And they found that it’s exposing everyone who consumes its wares to previously unsuspected levels of malware.

Peddling Porn in the Name of Science

By setting up their own adult websites, the researchers, who will present their paper on June 7, 2010 at The Ninth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security at Harvard University, discovered that 43% of the clicks that arrived at their own adult website belonged to users whose browsers were vulnerable to a known exploit in either Adobe Flash or handling of the Microsoft Office or Adobe PDF document types.

Lead researcher Glibert Wondracek and his colleagues spent a total of $160 to acquire 47,000 clicks from sellers of adult traffic, known in the industry as traffic brokers, of which 20,000 could have been exploited to build a botnet, according to the researchers. The researchers discovered that they easily could have leveraged their investment for a hefty profit by serving as the vector for a Pay-Per Install affiliate program, which in one instance offered $130 per 1,000 installs to drop malicious code (malware, adware etc.) onto exploited machines.

To assess how much malicious code is being injected into users’ browsers by adult websites, Wondracek et al. custom-built an automated web crawler to download the content of almost a half million URLs spread across thousands of adult websites. Incredibly, 3.23% of those pages “were found to trigger malicious behavior such as code execution, registry changes, or executable downloads,” five times the prevalence of malware discovered by previous research on the subject.

In a back of the envelope calculation, multiplying 3.23% by the percentage of internet users who view porn (42.7%) or even just the percentage of men who view porn while at work (20%), by the frequency with which porn is accessed, suggests that internet porn is a major vector for infection of vulnerable machines.

The Peculiar Economics of Online Porn

A likely explanation for the high rates of malware on adult websites is the almost total lack of policing or enforcement by the brokers who move traffic between adult websites. According to Wondracek et al.’s analysis of the economy of online porn sites, 9 out of 10 are “free” sites that host image or video galleries and make money by directing traffic to pay sites or even to one another. This traffic is monetized through traffic brokers – the majority of which do not even visit the sites in their affiliate networks, according to experiments conducted by the researchers.

Unlike online ad placements by Google and affiliate marketing schemes by Amazon, adult sites do not rely on code that resides on the sites sending them traffic that could help verify that traffic is generated by humans and not click bots. As a result, the researchers found that it would potentially be quite easy to defraud not only users, but the traffic brokers and for-pay porn sites that enable the vast ecosystem of free adult media sites. (No users or brokers were actually harmed in the course of this research, which was vetted by the legal department of the Technical University of Vienna.)

The intricacies of the elaborate system of traffic arbitrage that have grown up around the world of porn traffic direction on the web are way beyond the scope of this blog post, but it’s possible that the rest of the media world could learn a thing or two from the way that for-pay adult sites have created a seething ecosystem of traffic affiliates constantly skimming clicks and pennies off of one another.

On the other hand, it’s just as likely that these techniques wouldn’t work for traditional media, because users don’t appear to be as motivated to read news as to find porn. How else can we explain the fact that in the course of the experiment, users clicked many times on single links that were randomly directing them to anything but the media they were apparently after – a practice widespread among free porn sites?

For years, the only other options were to use images (which then lose the semantics and made it difficult to update over time) or sIFR (which still rocks and can provide much more extended support for very unusual fonts).  Now you can add Font API support with:

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

body { font-family: 'Tangerine', serif; }

Produces (though this is an image):

According to Google, the back end system converts the font into a format acceptable to the browser (including MSIE6), serving up only the weights and styles you specify, and can be cache headered in order to optimize/improve performance over the span of the site.  They also work with HTML5 and CSS3, so transformations like rotation and drop shadows still works.  Currently support exists only for Western European languages (Latin-1) but I’m pretty sure that will expand quickly once it takes hold.

Nice job!

Read the Google announcement here.
See the fonts available in the Google Font Directory.

I’d love for fifteen or twenty minutes to go by without my Google Reader barfing out yet another piece of software patent or “HTML5 video codec war” news, but that’s how it is. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if the video tag didn’t become standardized until HTML6 or 7.

One serious downside to the lack of consensus is the fact that your browser may very well not have built-in support for some video files embedded with the tag. Firefox, for example, is running with Ogg Theora and won’t be bolting on H.264 support. Apart from patent issues, there’s a $5 million price tag to be paid to MPEG-LA if Mozilla did want to support the codec, and they still wouldn’t be able to include that code in their open source.

But developers love to spin remixes of the Fox, and it only makes sense that someone would take matters into his or her own hands. Enter Maya Posch, who has launched the Wild Fox project on SourceForge. The plan: add H.264 support to Firefox’s stable branch using libavcodec or GStreamer.
Posch feels “that decisions have been made due to patents which do not apply in most parts of the world.” He continues, “The Wild Fox project aims to rectify this by releasing builds with these features included, builds which will of course only be available to those not in software patent-encumbered countries.”

That sounds useful, right? A nice, pre-packaged Firefox build with H.264 support? Sure it does, but there’s a potential pitfall.

While you would probably be able to download and install Wild Fox even in the U.S. and Korea (two of the patent-encumbered countries), Thomas Holwerda of OSNews warns that you’d be doing so at your own risk, saying “MPEG-LA has clearly stated that it will sue unlicensed users (and is clearly not afraid to do so).” Their director of Global Licensing, Allen Harkness, has said “where a royalty has not been paid, such a product remains unlicensed and any downstream users/distributors would have liability.”

Yes, that means MPEG-LA could come after you if you choose to browse with Wild Fox. However, it’s infinitely more likely that they’d target Posch and Wild Fox.

With the Pwn2Own hacking contest coming up at Vancouver’s CanSecWest security conference later this month, Italian computer security blog OneITSecurity took some time to interview Charlie Miller. Miller, in case you’re not familiar, is a security expert who has won Pwn2Own two years running by hacking Apple’s Safari browser with incredible speed. Safari isn’t the only target — this year, all major browsers and a selection of mobile operating systems will serve as Pwn2Own challenges – but it’s fair to say that Miller knows a thing or two about keeping your browser secure.

Here are the highlights from Miller’s interview:

He thinks Windows 7 will prove more secure than OS X Snow Leopard this year, in part because it doesn’t have Java and Flash enabled by default. Windows’ full ASLR (address space layout randomization) also gives it a security advantage.

When asked what he thought would make the safest OS and browser combo, he opted for Chrome or IE8 on Windows 7, with no Flash installed, although “there probably isn’t enough difference between the browsers to get worked up about.”

For my money, the juiciest quote from the interview was “The main thing is not to install Flash!”

On the mobile side, Miller guessed that the iPhone 3GS would be more easily exploitable than the Motorola Droid, mainly because the iPhone’s been around longer, and has been subjected to more extensive security research.

You can check out Miller’s full answers (in English or Italian!) at OneITSecurity.

So now Google is in the data storage, ISP, mobile device, hardware, software, and now the energy market.  For all the resources that Google provides that I use and inasmuch as I like how much they make my life easier, this may have been one step too far.  Any thoughts?

[more here on CNET]

To that end, however, I do wonder how I will deal with this little ditty about Outlook taking in social networks. With iStreamPlanet Boss Mio being such a fan of all things Redmond, of course we use Exchange and Outlook so there’s pretty much no doubt that as soon as Outlook 2010 drops, we’ll have it all at our fingertips.

On the one hand that could be great – not having to log into all the networks each time. But I can also see a real danger in it, both from a productivity as well as a privacy standpoint. In the article, Terrence O’Brien writes “The question is whether or not developers will be able to make the marriage seamless and unobtrusive. Let’s just hope we won’t have to train our spam filters to start blocking Facebook updates.” Touché. Guess I’ll have to download the Outlook Social Connect beta and find out for myself. Speaking of LinkedIn – if anyone knows of a GIS job opening in Honolulu, Denver or Des Moines, shoot me an email (no joke).

I’ll give it to the Quince company – they make nice interfaces. Really nice interfaces. Smooth, sleek and all that. But when it comes to devices, it’s sometimes a hit or miss. Google, on the other hand, well…they’re still playing a lot of catch-up. Google is a great big brother data collection/aggregation company but for all the work put into Android, especially into v2, it’s still just not the same.  Jennifer, a long time Mac-head, battled with me for the better part of 11 years.  If you walk into our home/MadeByGirl offices now, however, it’s nothing but one-bite fruit machines all over the place.  And though I hate some things (ok, code-writing is just an abomination and I STILL can’t get used to the command keys, something about Ctrl and Alt just fit my fingers well). And I suspect that the next few objets d’art that materialize will also be sleek and ringing “ta-da” when turned on.

Take the Kindle.  Now that’s a device with purpose.  Why is it so popular?  Because it has one purpose and one purpose only.  And it does it well.  Hey, if they added on a couple of other features, awesome, but it’s when it becomes overbuilt, that’s when it starts to become pointless.  Just like that, the iPod.  One purpose from inception, super design, awesome and intuitive interface, good UX, sells millions billions.

My G1, on the other hand, I am quickly learning that I wish it were just a freakin’ phone.  My very first Sprint mobile (circa 1993) was a somewhat bricky Samsung with a rocker switch and I loved it.  Hell, I wish I still had it – the roller switch was just so easy to use (compared to this pinhead sized trackball thing).  And for all the touchscreen love, I still miss that the phone was just to make calls.  Yes, I post from my phone, send text and all that other crap, but at some point I just started deleting apps because there really was no point to it.  Which is my point.

The iPad brings in a new level of “I really don’t know what I want to be.”  On the one hand, it’s very limited, but at the same time it’s pretty extreme.  I, like a lot of people, don’t seem to know where it will fit in.  Maybe I just need to use one for a while.  Or not use it as it sits idly on my coffee table, eventually becoming a very expensive coaster with a nice user interface.  Jobs had a lot of failures in the past but maybe we just don’t understand the impetus   crazy, drunken idea   motivation business model behind it quite yet (like Lisa).  Maybe the idea behind “just leave them all over like computerized notepads” really does have something behind it.

So back to Google – are we just plunking that idea on a browser?  As if every time Jennifer tells me to put the freakin laptop away while she’s trying to watch “Millionaire Matchmaker” and share a moment isn’t bad enough, but to have Google in my pocket, on the laptop screen, on my neighborhood gas pump (ok, that hasn’t materialized in my neck of the woods yet), and now on my coffee table too?  Right next to an iPad?  Does this mean that in 5 years, all the books in my custom-made bookshelf will be replaced with digital tablets (that I have to label with a Brother p-Touch – now there’s a device with purpose – one job, one UI, no complications)?

The age of computerization is nice.  It is.  But put the shit   screen   thing down and pick up a book.  A real book with paper and ink.  Enjoy it…it’s the original UI.

Great SOTU speech by the Man last night IMHO.  It was clear, detailed, lucid, and the GOP response was, well, pretty lackluster and inexplicit.  But whatever.  Exactly what O-man said about dropping the partisan issue and changing the way of political thinking…it’ll never happen.  Lobbyists will still continue to bust the hopes of the rest of middle America (amazing, aren’t they American’s too?  Don’t they leave their cushy jobs at night and go back home the same as the rest of us, just with better pay?).

But I digress, here’s the report…

It’s a nightmare that anyone with a Twitter account is vaguely afraid of, but no one before the year 2005 would have ever dreamed of having to worry about: Major Garrett, Fox News’ White House correspondent, accidentally tweeted the wrong link to his 13,059 followers. He intended to send out a shortened link to a transcript of last night’s State of the Union address. Instead, the link that went out was one to a Las Vegas call-girl website. Gawker managed to nab the series of tweets before he took them down:

“To overcome the numbing weight of our politics” and other Obama SOTU excerpts http://bit.ly/d6W Wed 27 Jan 18:22

Horrified, he deleted and explained:

I apologize. Bit.ly turned my original link to SOTU excerpts to a soft-porn link. NOT my intention. http://bit.ly/d6WZBu Wed 27 Jan 19:21

The link just posted works. Any frequent visitor here knows that is not my style. Sorry. Shld have caught it sooner. Wed 27 Jan 19:23

Enraged, he admonished and ordered:

For those suckling snide syrup. I publicly acknowledged an innocent mistake and corrected it. If that’s not good enuf, take a hike. Wed 27 Jan 20:18

As Gawker observes, it’s extremely unlikely that bit.ly would make that kind of error. But why would Washington-based Garrett be looking up a Vegas-based website like that?

If Garrett joins the press corps on Obama’s trip to Vegas later in February, we guess we’ll have an answer.

Maybe he should re-tweet it – might as well ride the wave, eh!

Last week, YouTube announced beta HTML 5 video support: once you’ve activated the beta, you’ll see videos using a native browser element rather than the Flash plugin. The new player only works with a recent version of either Safari or Chrome (or Chrome Frame in IE), as the video is encoded with the H.264 codec, which isn’t supported in Firefox. A day after YouTube’s announcement, Vimeo made a similar one. They also now provide preliminary support for the HTML video element with a new HTML player.

Superficially this seems like a victory for the “open” Web, right? A few major sites, representing a significant percentage of online video, begin to move away from a proprietary technology (Flash) and towards an open standard (HTML 5). But when you look a little deeper it turns out to not be so simple. Both YouTube and Vimeo have chosen to provide their HTML video encoded with the H.264 codec, which is patent-encumbered. Apple has a big stake in H.264, so Safari supports it, and Google has paid a licensing fee to include an H.264 decoder in Chrome.

Mozilla Firefox, on the other hand, doesn’t support H.264: it will only play HTML video encoded with the Ogg Theora codec. This is partly for ideological reasons, as the Theora codec is open source and therefore inline with Mozilla’s principles. But there’s more to it than just ideology. In reply to YouTube’s announcement, Mozilla’s VP of Engineering, Mike Shaver, published a blog post explaining why Mozilla is sticking to its guns with Theora. He points to H.264’s licensing fees not only as a justification for Mozilla’s decision not to support the format, but also as a more dire threat: “[...] if H.264 becomes an accepted part of the standardized web, those fees are a barrier to entry for developers of new browsers, those bringing the web to new devices or platforms, and those who would build tools to help content and application development.” Mozilla’s Open Source Evangelist, Christopher Blizzard, also had a lot to say on the topic, likening the situation to what happened years ago with the GIF format (and, to a lesser extent, with MP3).

It’s important to remember that the current level of browser support for web standards comes, in large part, from Firefox’s ability to compete on a level playing field with other browsers, and from the Mozilla team’s dedication to open standards. When big sites like YouTube begin positioning a proprietary format as the de facto standard for HTML video, they significantly impede the ability of free-as-in-speech browsers like Firefox to rival their competitors in functionality, which hurts interoperability and innovation on the Web as a whole. Meanwhile, though Chrome and Safari may be excellent browsers, and while their support for modern standards-based HTML and CSS should be applauded, in this respect their choice of a proprietary video format is more reminiscent of IE, circa the mid-90’s.

The fact that YouTube and Vimeo are trumpeting their new HTML 5 video support as an open standards victory is misleading to say the least. And it does lead to confusion: as pointed out by Christopher Blizzard, more than a few people on Twitter seem to think that Firefox’s lack of support for YouTube’s HTML 5 video should be taken to mean that Firefox doesn’t support HTML 5!

YouTube stated that it was launching the new feature in response to a user survey in which “Support HTML5 open web video with open formats” was the most requested feature. It seems that YouTube might only have been paying attention to the first half of the sentence: HTML 5 video, yes; open formats, eh, not so much.

So what do you think? Is it the job of YouTube and other sites like it to lead the way in providing video in an open format? Or should Chrome and Safari lead the way by supporting those formats first? Or are Mozilla being hopeless idealists?

If Oracle buys MySQL as part of Sun, database customers will pay the bill.

In April 2009, Oracle announced that it had agreed to acquire Sun. Since Sun had acquired MySQL the previous year, this would mean that Oracle, the market leader for closed source databases, would get to own MySQL, the most popular open source database.

If Oracle acquired MySQL on that basis, it would have as much control over MySQL as money can possibly buy over an open source project. In fact, for most open source projects (such as Linux or Apache) there isn’t any comparable way for a competitor to buy even one tenth as much influence. But MySQL’s success has always depended on the company behind it that develops, sells and promotes it. That company (initially MySQL AB, then Sun) has always owned the important intellectual property rights (IPRs), most notably the trademark, copyright and (so far only for defensive purposes) patents. It has used the IPRs to produce income and has reinvested a large part of those revenues in development, getting not only bigger but also better with time.

If those IPRs fall into the hands of MySQL’s primary competitor, then MySQL immediately ceases to be an alternative to Oracle’s own high-priced products. So far, customers had the choice to use MySQL in new projects instead of Oracle’s products. Some large companies even migrated (switched) from Oracle to MySQL for existing software solutions. And every one could credibly threaten Oracle’s salespeople with using MySQL unless a major discount was granted. If Oracle owns MySQL, it will only laugh when customers try this. Getting rid of this problem is easily worth one billion dollars a year to Oracle, if not more.

For my students and UNLV colleagues: if you had never heard of the DreamSpark program, you should jump on it.  A program launched in 2008 by MSFT (don’t groan) can get you free software.  Yes, free.  Yes, I’ve gotten some of it.  In a blatant (and conducive) attempt to move budding developers and IT staffers to the Redmond dark side, they’re offering Visual Studio (2005 & 2008), Windows Server 2008, Expression Studio and more for free.  So while the university’s alliance program is broken and paltry, you could have just headed straight to the source and gotten legit, keyed copies.

Now the new stuff: just released by MSFT – WebsiteSpark.  Like it’s older brother, the new program is aimed at small companies – no more than 10 employees – and offers:

• 3 Visual Studio licenses
• 1 Expression Studio 2 or 3 license
• 2 Expression Web licenses
• 3 users license for WinServer 2008 and SQLServer 2008
• 4 processor license for self-hosting WinServer 2008 and SQLServer 2008

That’s a buttload of very expensive stuff for nothing.  The caveat is that you must launch a new web app (that’s app boys and girls, not a paltry PHP site) and if you hit it big, you have to exit the program and pay a $100 fee.  That’s peanuts compared to the value.  Or you could go to a bunch of MSFT seminars and collect copies but that takes a lot of time and snoozing through 4 hours of demos.

[via Android and Me]

Everyone’s favorite Android hacker appears to have angered someone at Google. We just received word that Cyanogen has received a cease and desist letter from Google. Details are scarce, but it appears Google is not happy about Cyanogen distributing their closed source Android apps (Market, Talk, Gmail, YouTube, etc). CyanogenMod is easily the most popular custom Android rom with over 30,000 active users.

Relevant bits from the chat log we received:

Hopefully, the two parties will be able to work something out. I’ve been using CyanogenMod on both my Android phones for several months and they are awesome. If you want to show your support for Cyanogen, you can always visit his site and place a donation for all the countless hours he has put into improving the Android platform.

Several sites are reporting that a major attack on Wordpress blogs started yesterday. The latest version of Wordpress, 2.8.4, is not vulnerable to this particular worm, so upgrading now could save you a lot of headaches. The worm creates a new, hidden administrator account on your blog, allowing whoever’s behind this thing to access the guts of your blog, databases and all.

How do you know if your site has been affected? Lorelle on Wordpress offers two possible ways to find out:

There are strange additions to the pretty permalinks, such as
example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/.
The keywords are “eval” and “base64_decode.”

The second clue is that a “back door” was created by a “hidden” Administrator. Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognize.

Wordpress has acknowledged the attacks and encouraged users to upgrade their sites. Wordpress.com users aren’t affected, as the whole system has already been updated to 2.8.4. If you’ve already been afflicted by the attack, start on the steps in Wordpress’ FAQ.

I’ve already done the upgrade and it is the same, painless upgrade as usual.  Just be sure (especially if you’re using FireFTP) that you set the transfer options to Automatic Mode (Tools > Options > Downloads/Uploads : top fieldset).

If you’ve ever read David Weinberger’s ”Everything is Miscellaneous” (ISBN10: 0805080430) as well as a host of other books and articles on Wikipedia, it’s almost as if Wikimedia is doing a 180 on its own founding principles.  Since the beginning, the founders strongly defended and imposed the concept that the community itself was the police and at no time should an editor be the final say…this to extent that a founder removed himself as an editor for changing an article without the consent of the community (consent being reached by culminating responses and critique any time an article change was made or requested).

“We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks,” said Michael Snow, a lawyer in Seattle who is the chairman of the Wikimedia board. “There was a time probably when the community was more forgiving of things that were inaccurate or fudged in some fashion — whether simply misunderstood or an author had some ax to grind. There is less tolerance for that sort of problem now.”

Not that I am necessarily opposed to having these types of sanctions, but at the same time, it gets to the core of defeating the point of the community based system.  The community, as I’ve often maintained, can rarely govern itself over a long period of time.  If it could, governments wouldn’t exist.  But by the same token, where does the power and authority end?  Should the Wikimedia board not consider that instead of a single editor, at the very least, possibly three or more editors should have to consent to the alteration first?

Advocates of the system point out that [it] provides an extra layer of insurance to prevent false posts and improve the overall accuracy.  But once again, at whose expense?  Is historical information not fact riddled by the opinion of the observer?  Who is to determine what is accurate?  While editors are, for sure, carefully chosen, aren’t VH1 game show contestants screened as well (ok, bad analogy but you get the idea – substitute radical terrorists in place of game show contestants and it’s a bit more frightening).  There is much at stake in this issue – freedom of speech, importance of historical record, observation and opinion – more than just the fact that Wikipedia could potentially end up more like Encyclopedia Brittanica (a system it sought to avoid) than the incarnation we’ve all grown to love over the last eight years.

Starting June 27, it will also feature live feeds including up to five simultaneous live feeds (of course the UK being 8 hours ahead of me means some extremely early morning admin).  The live feeds (and subsequent VOD archives) will feature at least one Smooth Stream, Microsoft’s new adaptive streaming technology that will bring you hi-definition video at 2950k (it looks really sweet).

The 2009 Wimbledon runs through July 5th.

I first encountered Silverlight 2 years ago when it was first released at NAB as version 1 (the Javascript version).  Quickly iStream assimilated into the Silverlight army and helped push several products into the forefront with Silverlight 2 over the last year+ including several prominent public jobs and some to be released shortly.  Now, just 23 short months later, SL3 promises some great stuff.

For all those that say Flash still kicks SL in the ass, maybe true, but with a 10 year head-start I would’ve thought they’d still be leaps and bounds ahead.  The fact that SL is quickly catching up and becoming a prominent player especially in the business forefront says something about its acceptance and viability.  Don’t take me wrong, I too still develop plenty of Flash apps and here at iStream we take strides to develop interfaces concurrently on both platforms but the sheer speed at which SL has come to adolescence speaks volumes about what it may bring in the near future.

In the resulting manifesto, entitled “Information Management: A Proposal“, Berners-Lee suggests the we “should work toward a universal linked information system.”  Every student of web design should read it and understand the origins of the industry.  It is an amazing path that the Web has taken in its course to ubiquity and utility but it all started, like most great inventions, as just an idea in someone’s head.

A longer version can also be found here.

iStreamDirector is both a digital asset management (DAM) system and a content management system (CMS) that does such things as media ingestion, transcoding between multiple formats, metadata management, live event management, Silverlight and Flash player creation, playlist management, rights management and so on.

It’s been a long time coming, but Apple has finally secured the deals to sell the entire iTunes music catalogue without DRM and the entire music library is finally available in the 256kbps AAC format that has been known as iTunes Plus until now.

Starting in April, iTunes will also be introducing variable pricing for songs – 69¢, 99¢ and $1.29 depending on the prices set by the record labels. Despite the momentum that the likes of Amazon and other DRM-free vendors such as 7Digital have been gaining in the last few months, the iTunes store remains the largest (and most popular) online music store.

If you’re already sunk a fair amount of money in the iTunes store, Apple will allow you to upgrade your entire library to the DRM-free format – for 30¢ per song or 25% of the album price.

In what may be a little slip, Motorola CEO Sinjay Jha mentioned Windows Mobile 6.5.  Partly after the announcement that WM7 will now not be released until mid 2009, this may have a sliver of truth to it.  Frankly I’ve been using this WM phone (originally 5 and upgraded to 6) and now, I just hate it.  Again, I’m not overly partial to the iPhone.  I love, more than anything else, the interface – slick and usable and the iconics and screen flow is, bar none, the best.  But it’s still gimicky.  WM6 has a lot of usable features but the flow stinks and its impossible to do a lot of things.  I would love to see what’s going to be included (potentially and allegedly) with this release, but in the end, who cares.  So I decided I’m just going to go buy a G1 instead – how can you beat a $148 price tag (Walmart – believe it or not).  I was really determined to wait for the Touch Pro but I’m just bored from waiting now, and the draw of being able to program Android apps in Eclipse is figuratively making me drool.

Moblin.  Know what it is, you know why it’s in a news category of its own.  Don’t?  Go look it up.

Blow out the candles.  iPod turned 7 today.  Wow.  Throw party.

Sarah Palin is still an idiot.  I actually feel bad for McCain having to grimace through every journalist asking if he regrets nominating her onto the ticket and daydreaming of just blowing up at one of them and saying “Of course I am, the woman is a train wreck!”

Jen, your blog is looking really good and I am very proud of you and your numbers.

Finally, Martin Cooper, an engineer from Motorola and one of the key inventors of the cellphone, says that today’s phones are too complicated…

[From switched.com]

The inventor of the cellphone says the iPhone’s ubiquitous, do-everything, jack-of-all-trades approach to applications, music and – oh yeah – phone calls, makes the Apple Computer superstar mobile device less impressive, not more.

Martin Cooper, who while working at Motorola made the first cell-phone call in 1973 with a device weighing two pounds and with only 20 minutes of battery life, says that cell phones today, especially the iPhone, are too complex. Speaking at a conference in Boston, Cooper said wireless companies and cell phone makers have the wrong ideas when it comes to making products people really need. Instead, he advocates cell phones with fewer features and functions, not more. He also says cell phone reception problems and dropped calls are a major problem for the industry and could be avoided with some better technology. (Cooper serves as chairman of a company called ArrayComm, which develops software to help antenna arrays more finely pinpoint cell phone location.)

Cooper’s main push is for simpler, specialized phones, such as the one his wife designed called Jitterbug, a cell phone with large buttons and extra large characters on the LCD screen for use by the elderly.

“A phone that’s an Internet appliance, an MP3 player, a camera and a whole bunch of other functions doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he said. “You try to build a universal device that does all things for all people, and guess what? It doesn’t do anything very well.”

…okay, true maybe. Then why are we using computers instead of typewriters and graph paper? Technology changes people and people change technology. It, like evolution and natural ecologies, changes with needs, wants, conditions and the environment. It will get more complex and no matter how much we attempt to make it simpler, our fiendish need for gathering information (much like women hoard shoes) and gaining knowledge is one (or two) step(s) ahead of the ability to streamline the process of acquiring it. Build a better mousetrap and the world will come knocking at your door … at least until evolution produces a better mouse (on that note, did you know that a rat has 700psi of jaw force in its bite – that’s more than an alligator).

An appropriate followup to last week’s findings that television has actually altered people’s dreams (from black-and-white to color), now it’s that the Internet is actually causing our brains to develop differently.

DUH.

I mean, c’mon – that’s partly why I am even going back to school – to study that very subject.  The research, led by a team at UCLA, “discovered” that searching and text messaging has improved the brain’s ability to filter information (uh, isn’t that pretty much what the computer does so isn’t that basically “learning by watching”), but warns that it has a price if one fails to maintain social skills.

Make up your own mind.

By Belinda Goldsmith

CANBERRA (Reuters) – The Internet is not just changing the way people live but altering the way our brains work with a neuroscientist arguing this is an evolutionary change which will put the tech-savvy at the top of the new social order.

Gary Small, a neuroscientist at UCLA in California who specializes in brain function, has found through studies that Internet searching and text messaging has made brains more adept at filtering information and making snap decisions.

But while technology can accelerate learning and boost creativity it can have drawbacks as it can create Internet addicts whose only friends are virtual and has sparked a dramatic rise in Attention Deficit Disorder diagnoses.

Small, however, argues that the people who will come out on top in the next generation will be those with a mixture of technological and social skills.

“We’re seeing an evolutionary change. The people in the next generation who are really going to have the edge are the ones who master the technological skills and also face-to-face skills,” Small told Reuters in a telephone interview.

“They will know when the best response to an email or Instant Message is to talk rather than sit and continue to email.”

In his newly released fourth book “iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind,” Small looks at how technology has altered the way young minds develop, function and interpret information.

Small, the director of the Memory & Aging Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior and the Center on Aging at UCLA, said the brain was very sensitive to the changes in the environment such as those brought by technology.

He said a study of 24 adults as they used the Web found that experienced Internet users showed double the activity in areas of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning as Internet beginners.

“The brain is very specialized in its circuitry and if you repeat mental tasks over and over it will strengthen certain neural circuits and ignore others,” said Small.

“We are changing the environment. The average young person now spends nine hours a day exposing their brain to technology. Evolution is an advancement from moment to moment and what we are seeing is technology affecting our evolution.”

Small said this multi-tasking could cause problems.

He said the tech-savvy generation, whom he calls “digital natives,” are always scanning for the next bit of new information which can create stress and even damage neural networks.

“There is also the big problem of neglecting human contact skills and losing the ability to read emotional expressions and body language,” he said.

“But you can take steps to address this. It means taking time to cut back on technology, like having a family dinner, to find a balance. It is important to understand how technology is affecting our lives and our brains and take control of it.”

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

• Vint Cerf
• Net Neutrality
• Barack Obama
• Google

In any case, it comes at a weird time since I’m (finally) taking a crack at more Java coding due to school – Dr. Jo got me really into it and I love the Eclipse IDE (which is weird because no one else in my class likes it, but especially since that Frenchy company came out with the Silverlight toolkit for Eclipse, I am rockin’). Part of me wants to get the G1 just for pure technogeeky reasons but this silly WM Dash (which now seems pretty ancient) that I tote is just plain boring.

So maybe I’ll get it and just put up with the spottiness for now. And maybe I’ll win the lottery too. Any comments? Would you get the phone knowing full well that a better one will probably be released in 18 months? Were you an iPhone 1 buyer who said “doh!” when they first announced iPhone 2? Should I buy it and just hope they do a firmware upgrade? Or should I save the pennies and get that sweet Dell E4200 after all?

[photos courtesy of EngadgetMobile - read the review]

Automattic, the company behind the popular WordPress blog publishing software has acquired blog commenting service Intense Debate. [We've]
covered Intense Debate in the past. The service provides web publishers a replacement for the default comments systems supplied by WordPress, Blogger, and Moveable Type and other blog platforms. By installing the plugin, you get threaded comments, reputations, and other advanced features. And readers can track their own comments and those left by others across any blogs or web sites that use Intense Debate. Intense Debate will continue to be available for use on blog platforms besides WordPress, but Automattic plans to add some features, like threaded comments to WordPress 2.7, which will be the company’s next major release.

This can’t come as good news for Disqus, another company that provides enhanced commenting features for bloggers. While Disqus has gotten a lot of good press over the last year, and has rolled out an impressive suite of blog comment management features, an awful lot of blogs are powered by WordPress. And pretty soon most of those blogs will have quick and easy access to Intense Debate’s features, giving bloggers and blog commentors one less reason to sign up for another blog commenting service.

[more...truncated cuz it wasn't that noteworthy]

According to google, the idea is to:

1. Enter more effective and specific search criteria quickly
2. Reduce the chance of spelling errors
3. Save keystrokes

I’ve taught how to build these in past Ajax (IMD322) classes.  It’s always a good way to introduce the idea of combining PHP database lookups with Ajax and incremental data pulls, but frequently at a cost to UCD.  And though some of the products iStream has put out have similar mechanisms, it can often be a bit of an annoyance, especially when the drop down ends up covering the button.  True, it can be helpful and true, there are some instances when it can be a godsend (such as when trying to piece together tags in delicious posts).

Read more about it here.

Stage 8H is best known as the place where Saturday Night Live is filmed. This week, though, it’s been turned into an ad-hoc data center as part of NBC’s efforts to stream thousands of hours of live Olympic coverage over the Internet.

Instead of the usual crop of comedians, NBC will have dozens of people watching every hour of the games, looking for highlights that it can chop up and make available on-demand. It’s just one piece of an elaborate arrangement that shuttles the events in Beijing back to the U.S.

From each of the dozens of Olympic venues, a high-definition video feed is delivered over fiber-optic cables to the International Broadcast Center that has been set up in Beijing. A bunch of encoders and Windows Media servers get the video into an Internet-ready format. From there, it travels via satellite to NBC’s headquarters in New York.

There, NBC actually adds a one-minute delay, allowing its cadre of live bloggers in Stamford, Conn., and elsewhere to write their text and have the video and commentary synchronized. Once ready, it goes from NBC to Limelight Networks, a content delivery network, which has 1,000 servers just for the live events sending the content to various Internet service providers, who then shuttle the content directly to their customers. (See chart below)

(Credit: Susan Dove/CNET News)

Making it play
Limelight Chief Strategy Officer Mike Gordon said his company is prepared for this to be the biggest live event the Internet has ever seen. “I would not be surprised at all to get 1 million viewers,” he said. “We’re certainly prepared for whatever the audience turns out to be.”

Mike Gordon, chief strategy officer, Limelight Networks

(Credit: Limelight Networks)

That said, there is clearly an element of risk in all this, considering NBC’s history of live Olympic streaming has been limited to broadcasting a single game, the gold medal ice hockey match in Torino, Italy, two years ago.

“NBC has always taken risks and is always trying to do more than it has in the past,” said Perkins Miller, the NBC senior vice president in charge of the Internet push. “It does keep me up at night when I think about streaming 2,200 hours (of live coverage).”

The massive effort has come together in a remarkably short amount of time. Microsoft’s deal to power NBCOlympics.com dates back only to January.

NBC had a pretty good idea what they wanted to do and had built some mock-ups of the player prior to deciding to partner with Microsoft.

Initially, they expected to use Adobe’s Flash, given that is the standard for video delivered over the Internet these days. But, as they began to hash things out with Microsoft during a series of all-day meetings at NBC’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza headquarters, Microsoft was able to show NBC some ways it could do more using its homegrown Silverlight technology.

Silverlight, Microsoft said, would be key to enabling NBC’s vision of a “control room” in which a viewer could watch multiple live streams at once.

Perkins Miller, senior vice president, NBC Universal

(Credit: NBC)

Even within Microsoft’s team, though, there was some apprehension of whether it was doable.

“Can we actually pull this off?” Senior Technical Evangelist Jason Suess recalled thinking. “Is the user’s machine going to be able to maintain four connections at one time?”

The key, Suess said in an interview at Microsoft headquarters last week, is using an approach known as adaptive streaming in which the player has the ability to customize the bit rate of the video stream based on a computer’s connection and processing power.

By Valentine’s Day, they were ready for a test. It was pretty important that the test work out, given that NBC was getting ready to crate up the gear to ship it off to Beijing.

“That was the first time the player came to life,” Suess said. “Obviously the player was extremely crude.”

Making it pay
One of the last pieces to fall into place was the advertising. Initially, NBC and Microsoft were hoping to be able to insert full video ads into the live streams, but doing so is tough work.

“You don’t have any way to pause a live stream,” Suess said. “Trying to deliver a video ad on top of that, you hit the limits of a user’s bandwidth.”

As of mid-April, they were still struggling with what to do and began considering that perhaps they would have to just rely on companion advertising around the video stream. Then they came up with an idea. Rather than insert full videos into the live streams, what if they stuck a display ad into the video, particularly during dead times in the action.

Jason Suess, senior technical evangelist, Microsoft

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News)

That, approach, which is ultimately what’s being done, solved several issues. It was less bandwidth-intensive than video ads, but still got the advertiser directly in front of the viewer, all without interrupting any of the coverage. The amount of advertising will vary, Suess said; “It depends what is happening in the sports. We just wait for a dead space.”

By early May, NBC made the basic player available on the Internet, using a variety of prerecorded Olympic video, and by early June the enhanced Silverlight player was made public as well. The Olympic Trials, at the end of June, offered the companies and the public a chance for a test drive.

At this point, it’s come down to a triage of the few remaining known bugs. Each day, the bar is being raised in terms of what is a big enough deal to warrant such a late change. Suess, meanwhile, sent his wife and kids to visit family in New York so he could work 18-hour days.

In an interview last week, Suess said he had been at work until 1 a.m. the night before and gets in every morning by 8 a.m., so he can chat with the folks in Beijing before they sign off for the night.

“If I am not online and pushing things along, then I am introducing delay,” Suess said.

An admitted type-A personality, Suess is a stickler for organization–the kind of guy whose desk is always clean. (His wife would probably use the word “compulsive,” Suess said.)

Suess said he hopes things will be enough under control that he can actually watch some of the games, particularly sailing, of which he is a big fan. “I sure hope so,” he said. “When I got involved in this project, that was one of the reasons.”

Computer industry heavyweights are hustling to fix a flaw in the foundation of the Internet that would let hackers control traffic on the World Wide Web.

Major software and hardware makers worked in secret for months to create a software “patch” released on Tuesday to repair the problem, which is in the way computers are routed to web page addresses.

“It’s a very fundamental issue with how the entire addressing scheme of the Internet works,” Securosis analyst Rich Mogul said in a media conference call.  “You’d have the Internet, but it wouldn’t be the Internet you expect. (Hackers) would control everything.”  (more…)

And a response via Doxpara.

Swurl is a lifecaster (life Friendfeed and Spokeo) – a social networking aggregator.  In short, it pulls all the data from all your various social network activities and aggregates it into one place.  More than that, it uses somewhat intelligent decisions about the content and context to attach related materials.  For example, if you rent a movie from Netflix, Swurl appends it with a YouTube link to the trailer.  Interesting.

This may sound a bit intrusive, and to me it is, but only because it’s being shared.  Nonetheless, it does bring up some interesting issues about where we are headed.  Many industry experts, including Web inventor Berners-Lee, foresee the Web becoming a tool where semantics yields to intelligent agents that link enough intelligently associated information together to basically make your life easier.  Is this not one step closer to that?

For more on Swurl, check out this article on TechCrunch or Swurl’s web site.  Any of my student’s who’ve started using this, let me know what you think.  And maybe I’ll slice out a couple of hours and set it up for myself.  Like you’d really care what the hell I’m doing (and if you do, that’s a bit scary and I still don’t get why one would want to).

Read the post “The Paper Version of the Web” and see the pics at deeplinking.net.

Dan Catt’s concept sketch for Flickr Places

I know many of you are into sci-fi and as a kid I read a lot of it so it is with a bit of sadness to read about the passing of the legendary Arthur C. Clarke.  For those of you too young to know who he is or the impact he had on both science fiction and the culture of technology, you should read up.  Probably most famous as co-writer of 2001: A Space Odyssey (and authoring the screenplay’s basis The Sentinel), he authored some 100 books, 1000 essays and innumerable ideas in innovation, including introducing the idea of geostationary orbiting satellites … in 1945!  He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 and was knighted in 1998.  In fact, his short story Dial F for Frankenstein was one of Berners-Lee’s inspirations for developing the World Wide Web.  Learn some history…there is amazing truth and knowledge in it.

[Via TorrentFreak]

As of Saturday, Feb 9 (according to the Wall Street Journal), the Yahoo! board is rejecting Microsoft’s unsolicited $44.6 billion acquisition offeron the premise that the $31 per share offer significantly undervalues the Yahoo! brand. Sources close to the board are not going to hold out for anything under $40 a share, which increases the price another $12 billion. The thinking is that Microsoft won’t be willing to pay that much, and the alternative, a hostile bid, would be too detrimental to the company’s overall value, as board members and key employees would quit (quote from DownloadSquad).

And yes, it’s Friday night, it’s 10pm, and I’m sitting here contemplating what a possible acquisition of Yahoo might mean for web developers.  As you can see, I lead an exciting life!

Google today is announcing Android, the mobile OS and the Open Handset Alliance. Google will be releasing the first version of the software development kit for Android on November 12.

Android is built on Linux and features a virtual machine designed for memory and resource optimization. Since the OS is built on an open source foundation, we could eventually see thousands of independent developers creating or porting third party applications to the mobile operating system. Think there are plenty of applications for your Windows Mobile, Palm, or Symbian phone? If Android catches on, we’d love to see developers port every single one of those apps, plus a few Linux goodies like OpenOffice.org or at least AbiWord.

In other words, Android is sort of the anti-iPhone. While Apple released an amazing new OS for a single handset, Android will be able to run on any number of phone models. And while Apple has yet to make an SDK available for third party iPhone development (although one is coming), Google will launch an Android SDK before a single phone even runs the OS.

So what’s your take?  For developers like me this is both a blessing and a curse.  Most developers who embrace open-source development (which I sometimes do and sometimes don’t) will definitely applaud this measure because it means deployment of handheld devices specifically tailored to need.  On the flip side, it could open up a lot of issues with compatibility and usage.  Not to mention a proliferation of crappy apps (which, I might add, I personally haven’t found a single downloadable app for my own Windows Mobile 6 phone that I would tout as one I can’t live without; but then again, I’m not exactly the power user simply because I find the phone to be little more than a brick with a few PC-like features – oh well, maybe something good WILL come out of it).

[article by Brad Linder of DownloadSquad]

Microformats have actually been around for over 2 years but are starting to become more and more prominent.  They are defined as “a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.”  In layman terms, they are extensions to tag markups that provide bits of information (based on the microformat used) in a comprehensive format that can be used to network with other bits of information.  Some of the better known ones are hCard, hCalendar and rel-tag.  You can read more about microformats here.  And if you happen to be in a bookstore that has a fairly good computer section, check out “Microformats” by John Allsopp.  I actually found a copy at B&N the other day and read half over a cup of (puke) Starbucks. For an example of microformat code I use, look at the source of the page.  Notice two meta tags:

<meta name="ICBM" content="36.02674, -115.08997">
<meta name="DC.title" content="Mobimeet:Art Institute of Las Vegas"> 

The first one defines my lat/long coordinates (more specifically, those of the Art Institute of Las Vegas), which associates me with other users near and around me – basically maps out social-to-web providers.  The second one is an unratified format that provides for better compatibility across meta tagging systems.

Gravatars are also not new but grew up pretty quickly, and word on the street today is that Gravatar just got bought (oh, sorry, acquired) by Automattic, the company headed by Matt Mullenweg that owns WordPress.  Gravatar stands for globally recognized avatar and conceptually its pretty simply but the implementation is much more defined.  You can create your own gravatar(s) and upload them on the main gravatar web site.  So long as you continue to use a primary email address in your blog (or other social network) registrations, the back-end system will automatically insert your gravatar in place of your avatar – basically it keeps you from having to upload a new one each time you register in a new site and keeps your identity consistent.  I’ve posted a comment under this article so you could see an example.

Goes to show you, some of the simplest ideas – as both microformats and gravatars are – can sometimes be the most powerful despite the impetus or platform.

For more information about this issue, go here.

However, Flash does have some drawbacks (which I won’t bother to enumerate here).  Enter Microsoft Silverlight.  For those of you who haven’t caught the buzz, Silverlight was officially released by Microsoft last month though it’s been under beta development and deployment for most of the year.  At iStreamPlanet, we’ve jumped on it quickly – largely because of its ability to integrate directly into .NET based applications, its support for Windows Media streaming, and because of the flexibility in creating full-fledged applications without requiring re-compilation.

In many ways, Silverlight is very similar to Flash.  One of the primary reasons we’ve elected to use it over Flash (as I mentioned) is the ability to create applications quickly without recompiling it and without (pricey) authoring tools – Silverlight “applications” can be written in Notepad or any other text-editor.  In the past where we’ve used embedded Windows Media Player, we are now deploying Silverlight media players because we can construct modular, branded interfaces, but still using the same CDN repositories for the media.  A recent example is the deployment of a player for the Phoenix Suns fan community Planet Orange (site was authored by one of your AILV classmates).  While Silverlight does require a download and installation, it does work cross-platform (Windows and Mac) and across major browsers (MSIE, Forefox, Safari).

It’s simplicity comes from the fact that the interface is written in plain text using an XML-based file system called XAML.  A XAML document looks pretty much like any XML with a definitive set of tags and attributes.  The XAML can also control the animations in the same manner that tweening or ActionScript would in Flash.  Events and methods can be scripted in Javascript, which makes debugging and modification very simple and very flexible.

Example of XAML Canvas:

Example of HTML Document (fragment):

Example of Javascript handlers:

Several early adopters have written applications.  I urge you to visit the official Silverlight web site (www.silverlight.net) and check out some of them.

Bug in Excel 2007 thread on Google Groups