Misc

Tuesday, September 2. 2008

Google to launch new open source browser: Chrome

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available -- you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

Saturday, August 23. 2008

Firefox to get massive JavaScript performance boost

Mozilla is leveraging an impressive new optimization technique to bring a big performance boost to the Firefox JavaScript engine. The code was merged today (but is not yet ready to be enabled by default in the nightly builds) and is planned for inclusion in Firefox 3.1, the next incremental update of the open-source web browser.

They are "getting ready to take JavaScript performance into the next tier" with a radically innovative optimization tactic called tracing that has already produced performance improvements ranging between 20 and 40 times faster in some cases. They believe that this is just the beginning of what can be accomplished with tracing, and they expect to be able to achieve even better speed as the work continues.

via Slashdot, ars technica

Practical Uses for the PHP Tokenizer

When PHP has to process a request, the engine goes through several passes of parsing until the code is expressed as a set of instructions that the interpreter can execute. The first such step is “lexical scanning”, which splits the code into smaller strings called “tokens”. The token is the smallest meaningful unit of your source code, and it can represent a reserved word (for, while, class, if, etc.), operator (+, -, *, /, && etc.), value literals (integers, floats, strings etc.) and other special symbols.

The same lexical scanner which PHP uses, is also available to userspace PHP developers via the function token_get_all().

Saturday, August 16. 2008

The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Premature Standardization

The web is made of open standards. This was a significant factor in the web’s displacement of proprietary application platforms. Openness is hugely attractive, so much so that the web dominates over competitors with better technologies. The difficult tradeoff that comes with a standards-based approach is that it is difficult to innovate. As a result, the basic technologies of the browser have been stalled for a decade. What innovation we’ve enjoyed, such as the Ajax revolution, has come by mining all of the latent, accidental potential of the existing standards. That potential has been used up.

Sunday, August 10. 2008

Back to normal

Though it took much longer than I had originally anticipated, I'm almost "finished" with some of my bigger projects. Finally.

Starting tomorrow, everything will be back to normal. It feels great to be almost caught up.

Thursday, July 10. 2008

Projects abound

I apologize for the lack of updates recently. Between work, meetings, and fun little side projects, I've practically been coding in my sleep. I'll be back to a full time posting schedule soon, I promise. In the mean time, here's a little bit of a description of the projects I've been working on.

Magus - An old school web based RPG / Collectible card game. Collect, buy, sell and trade cards to build powerful decks to duel your opponents. Nearly feature complete, in final testing before our first invite-only release.

Semantic IO - A flexible semantic input/output engine. Enter a file, text, or a URL and pull out an array of useful information. Quickly find phone numbers, addresses, names, or custom searches. Summarize long articles. Find keywords. Automatically tag bodies of text. Full i18n support.

And lastly, I'll be slowly updating and adding (literally) hundreds of research scripts, snippets, and documents to my resources. So - If there's anything specifically that you'd like to improve at or have an idea you want to share or explore - leave a comment. I'd love to hear from some of you lurkers.

Tuesday, June 17. 2008

Wine 1.0 Released

After 15 years of development, Wine version 1.0 has been released. Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix. While perfect windows compatibility has not yet been achieved, full support for Photoshop CS2, Excel Viewer 2003, Word Viewer 2003 and PowerPoint Viewer 2003 have been among the goals prior to the release. For further information about supported applications, head over to the appdb. Get it (source) while it's hot.

via Slashdot

Firefox 3 Download Day / Release

If you haven't already heard, Firefox 3 has been released, and they're having a Download Day today to go for the world record number of software downloads. Download it, see how many downloads they've had so far, or check out all of the features that are in Firefox 3.

Tuesday, May 20. 2008

How to install Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) in Ubuntu 8.04

Just like our Ubuntu 7.10 LAMP how to, this guide will cover the installation of Apache, MySQL and PHP on Ubuntu 8.04. I assume you're already running Ubuntu 8.04 for this guide. If you're still running 7.10, you can use this guide.
Continue reading "How to install Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) in Ubuntu 8.04"

Thursday, February 28. 2008

Practical (and impractical) PHP Optimizations

I've been seeing a lot of articles popping up lately about PHP Optimizations, particularly within the code (rather than the configuration, server, caching, etc) that I have some nitpicks with.

My position remains the same: Unless your code is running incredibly slow, you've found every single bug you can possibly find without having nightmares about unit tests, or an optimization that makes more than a 10% improvement in speed (factoring in your margin of error,) don't bother. That said, let's down to brass tacks.
Continue reading "Practical (and impractical) PHP Optimizations"