Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. The Web 2.0 Summit 2008 concludes today. Winners: web apps that save the world. Losers: Yahoo's Jerry Wang.


2. Firefox for your cell phone?


3. Have you heard of the Year 2038 Problem?


4. Flash or Java for game development?


5. Whether you're happy about Obama being elected or not, we've just experienced something monumental in American history. And it is refreshing to know that race is significantly less of an issue today.
   
   Someone with a lot of time on his hands also compared the web presence of McCain and Obama in Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.; Obama won hands-down.

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Google Chrome. It's fast. It's (mostly) secure. It's open source. It's all people are talking about.
   
   Personally, I really like it. Especially the Internets easter egg.
   
   The only thing I'm not fond of is how the Omnibar is used for entering URLs and search terms. While this creates a spartan interface, it also erases my search term after I enter it. Sometimes it's helpful to have it remain visible so I can quickly perform the same search in another tab.
   
   Also it mixes my search terms with my URLs while I'm typing... that is going to take some getting used to.
   
   
2. When you write a paper, you want others to cite it, especially if you trying to get tenured. And it turns out there are some not-so-obvious things you can do to increase your chances, at least in the field of astro-physics. My guess is this is true of other fields too. 1) If your paper appears in a mailing list, make sure it's near the top. 2) Write longer papers.
   
   
3. Trivia: Which web browser was the first to display an image?
   
   
4. Interesting article on cyber warfare.
   
   
5. This week I updated my Introduction to PHP for C++ Programmers. It now includes regular expressions, exception handling, and OOP. Let me know if you see something I should change and/or add.
   

Google comic: Where are all the women?

Like every other techie out there, I was excited when I found out this week that Google was releasing their own browser, Google Chrome. And I was dazzled by the array of technical enhancements they outlined in their comic book, illustrated by Scott McCloud.

But as I thumbed through the comic, I couldn't help but notice the dearth of female characters. Almost every comic character resembled your typical twenty-something computer dude, like the Mac guy from those (in)famous commercials.


I only found three women in the entire 38 page comic, and only one of them was a main character, pictured below twice. (Racial diversity is also an issue, but I won't go there.)


Now I understand that the characters featured in the comic were members of the Google Chrome team, and so the comic just reflected the gender makeup of the team. Google wasn't trying to be sexist. However, it does underscore an important point:

Technical fields like computer science are badly hurting for women.

As I look at my roster of 60 CS students this semester, I count only three females. There's only 10 females out of 75 students currently enrolled in an our introduction to programming classes this fall (13%), so that certainly doesn't bode well for the future.

And if Google, the tech company everyone wants to work for, can't find more than one woman to put on their team, we're all in trouble.

Something else about the comic that got me wondering: How is a comic book of young guys talking tech going to convert Internet Explorer users to Chrome users? The comic will only be interesting to guys that like comics and/or tech, and those guys are all using Firefox.

Perhaps that wasn't the point of the comic, but you have to believe Google wants the IE crowd to trade-up. The only browser marketshare I see Google capturing is from the Firefox crowd which is at roughly 18%. IE users, people like my parents who don't even really know what a browser is, are going to remain with IE. (That is unless Google figures out a sneaky way to put Chrome on their desktop through a "software update".)

Fav5

We just completed our first week of 16 for the fall semester. Only 15 more to go! ;-) And with that, my pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Microsoft has recently released Photosynth to the public. This technology was developed jointly by Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington a few years ago. It takes photos from various view points and synthesizes them into a 3D object when can be rotated. Warning: leaving your browser pointing to a Photosynth page will use up 50% of your processor (at least it did for me), slowing everything down.
   
   
   
   
2. The Internet Archive, Library of Congress, and a few other partners are going to archive many of the government's websites at the end of the Bush administration. In the past this has been done by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), but they decided it wasn't worth the effort this time around. I'm glad someone else thinks it is.
   
   
3. After less than one year, Yahoo Mash is no more. Wonder how many people are losing a year's worth of social interaction? Someday the same thing is going to happen to MySpace or Facebook, and there are going to be revolts in the streets.
   
   
4. Some interesting research done by facesaerch reveals that individuals usually google Windows and Linux on weekdays and Apple on weekends. Does this mean we "work and suffer with MS and Linux" during the week and "relax with Apple on the weekends"? Or are people just more interested in vegetation on weekends? ;-)
   
   
5. Internet Explorer 8 Beta is available. Like many others, I've made the switch to Firefox, mainly because I liked the add-on features. Apple's sly Safari install didn't convince me to switch. But I'm very tempted to give IE 8 a try. Has anyone tried it out yet?
   

Fav5

It's Spring Sing weekend at Harding, and the sun is shining. Here's my pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Technology Review has just released its top 10 emerging technologies of 2008, those technologies that are most likely to make a huge impact on the way we live. I personally find offline Web applications to be most interesting. This is an area Adobe and Google are vigorously pursuing.


2. Joan Smith (my former office-mate in graduate school) and Michael Nelson (my former Ph.D. adviser and pioneer of digital preservation ) just published an article in D-Lib Magazine showing a year's worth of crawling activity on some specially designed websites. Make sure you check out the animated images in Tables 3 and 6- they show the crawling behavior of an aggressive Google and timid Yahoo and MSN.


3. Ethics 101: You're a popular search engine that allows users to see emergent news from a number of sources. But you're housed in a country where the authorities often seek to squelch information that doesn't hold to the party line. If you show news stories that make the authorities look bad, your search engine will be shut down or blocked. What do you do?


4. Joel Spolsky writes an excellent article about IE 8 and the many difficulties of creating software that supports "standards". This is required reading for all you software engineers and CS students. (The article is a little long, but it's worth it.)


5. While we're on the topic of web browsers, almost a year ago Steve Jobs announced that the next version of Safari (Apple's web browser) would run on Windows. Now Apple is using iTunes to push it out to the Microsoft world. My guess is that many unsuspecting users are going to think they need Safari to run iTunes since it appears in the same dialog box they always see when needing to install an iTunes update. Many users are going to downloaded it and puzzle over the new icon on their desktop. This should be interesting...

Proposal: HTML 5

Mozilla, Opera, and Apple are pushing the W3C to recognize their proposal for HTML 5, the first large upgrade to HTML since 1999. You can read more about it here.

The HTML 5 specification includes some really cool stuff: Web Apps 1.0 and Web Forms 2.0. Web Applications 1.0 adds new elements to HTML and DOM to provide a richer environment in which to build on-line applications. For example, Web Apps 1.0 will allow you to present a context menu when the user right-clicks on an element, and you can draw a line connecting two points on the browser screen. Web Forms 2.0 (not to be confused with XForms) adds some powerful features to make controlling and processing user input from web forms a little easier. For example, you can more easily specify what types of characters are acceptable in a textbox or indicate that the form values are to be submitted as an XML document.

HTML 5 is designed to be backwards compatible, so the billions of pages which have been written with previous versions of HTML will still display correctly in newer browsers supporting HTML 5. This is a very important and positive development from a preservation standpoint, and it will likely help HTML 5 be adopted more readily by the development community.

Of course the most important player to get onboard is Microsoft who still controls around 75% of the browser market. Microsoft is busy right now promoting XAML, so it may not be in there best interest to devote many resources to HTML 5.