Devolio

Hiatus Complete!

I've been incredibly busy lately, and I sincerely apologize for the lack of updates. I never even fathomed that I could be this busy when I started this site. With my hiatus complete, things are going to change around here, hopefully for the better. So without further ado, here's what I'm going to be changing over the next week, give or take a few days.

Pare down on the daily news

Quite obviously, I'm not the most timely source of news. You've got other sources I'm sure you get your news from, so I won't inundate you with more of the same.

Ramp up on the amount of quality articles

I've got quite a large backlog of articles to update, finish and post, so over the next few weeks I'll be chugging through and posting them. (Hallelujah!)

Move to a more powerful server

This has been in the works for awhile, I've just been too busy to make sure it goes down without a hitch. Business behind me, this will probably the first on my list to be completed.

Android Articles

Like (hopefully) some of you, I'm the proud owner of a new G1. Being a developer, I can't ignore how wonderful this is going to be for the developers like me that love hacking around with open source software, and handsets. So I'm going to be doing a series of articles on development for the Android platform.

Complete revamp of the aesthetics

The current layout of the site I do enjoy, however, it's a bit too busy for my tastes. I've been meaning to do this for awhile, again, I just haven't gotten around to it.

I'm sure there's something (or two) that I forgot, but I digress. Once again, I apologize for my lack of updates. I'll be much better about updating regularly going forward.

And last but not least, a sincere Thank You to those of you who still come back daily and check for updates; I wouldn't be here without you. Comments, as always, are greatly appreciated. Let me know exactly (or not so exactly, that's up to you) what you want to see more and less of. I'm always listening.

CodeWeavers brings Chromium to Linux and Mac (sort of)

So on Thursday, September 4th, I called a company Fire Drill. I said I wanted to ship ported versions of Chromium for Mac and Linux, and I wanted to do it as fast as possible. By Friday, we had a first working build. But it had a major problem - you couldn't do https sites, so logging in to Gmail, for example, was right out. Unfortunately, supporting that required that we finish the implementation of a nearly brand new DLL in Wine - the winhttp dll. Luckily for us, Hans Leiddeker had recently joined CodeWeavers, and in a bit of a hazing ritual, we asked him to scramble madly to implement what we needed. A little more than a week later, and he had done it. Of course, there were many other people who pitched in and tuned Wine to make Chromium just that much nicer.

via Slashdot

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.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Now Available

You’ll find versions for 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008. In addition to English, IE8 Beta 2 is available in Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and German. Additional languages will be available soon.

While Beta 1 was for developers, we think that anyone who browses or works on the web will enjoy IE8 Beta 2. Before the team blogs about our Beta 2 in detail, here’s an overview of what you’ll find in IE8. You can get it here.

Data Filtering Using PHP's Filter Functions - Part one

Filtering data. We all have to do it. Most, if not all of us, despise doing it. However, unbeknown to most are PHP's filter_* functions, that allow us to do all sorts of filtering and validation. Using PHP's filter_* functions, we can validate and sanitize data types, URLs, e-mail addresses, IP addresses, strip bad characters, and more, all with relative ease. This is part one of two, covering filter_var() and the different constants and flags that can be set.
Continue reading "Data Filtering Using PHP's Filter Functions - Part one"

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().

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.

Dynamically Creating Graphs and Charts with PHP and GDChart

If you've been working with PHP for a while, you already know that the language makes dynamic image generation very simple: the GD extension and a few lines of PHP code are all you need to create a JPEG, GIF or PNG image from scratch. However, while this works remarkably well for simple tasks, it can become tedious and complicated if you need to generate more complex images, such as graphs and charts, at run-time.

Court: violating copyleft = copyright infringement

A federal appeals court has overruled a lower court ruling that, if sustained, would have severely hampered the enforceability of free software licenses. The lower court had found that redistributing software in violation of the terms of a free software license could constitute a breach of contract, but was not copyright infringement. The difference matters because copyright law affords much stronger remedies against infringement than does contract law. If allowed to stand, the decision could have neutered popular copyleft licenses such as the GPL and Creative Commons licenses. The district court decision was overturned on Wednesday by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

via ars technica

Build Better Pages With Firebug

Ask web developers to name their desert island Firefox extensions (ignoring for now the improbability of having a laptop while stranded), and they're bound to put Firebug at or near the top of their lists.

Firebug is a web development tool for tweaking CSS, debugging JavaScript and more. In part, it's like juiced-up "view source" for seeing how sites are put together. But Firebug really shines when it's used to streamline your own development.

The extension's slogan is "web development evolved," which is apt, given how much it changes one's approach to web work. The tools available in the standard installation of Firebug are super. Coupled with additional functionality available via Firebug extensions (sort of meta extensions, which add on to Firebug itself), you may feel like you have evolved.

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.

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.

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.