Internet O'Clock

Safari 5: Yes, please.

Three epic things to note from the Safari 5 press release:

Safari Reader makes it easy to read single and multipage articles on the web by presenting them in a new, scrollable view without any additional content or clutter. When Safari 5 detects an article, users can click on the Reader icon in the Smart Address Field to display the entire article for clear, uninterrupted reading with options to enlarge, print or send via email.

Safari 5 adds more than a dozen powerful HTML5 features that allow web developers to create media-rich experiences, including full screen playback and closed captions for HTML5 video. Other new HTML5 features in Safari 5 include HTML5 Geolocation, HTML5 sectioning elements, HTML5 draggable attribute, HTML5 forms validation, HTML5 Ruby, HTML5 AJAX History, EventSource and WebSocket.

And:

Powered by the Nitro JavaScript engine, Safari 5 on the Mac runs JavaScript 30 percent faster than Safari 4, three percent faster than Chrome 5.0, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3.6.* Safari 5 loads new webpages faster using Domain Name System (DNS) prefetching, and improves the caching of previously viewed pages to return to them more quickly.

Yes, please.

First Time User Experience: Basecamp

via 37signals.com

I've never used Basecamp before.

After staring at this image, however, I feel like I understand what Basecamp does, it's major features, and how to get started. No videos, no guess and check, no FAQ. This is an amazingly simple and elegant first time user experience.

Tabnabbing: A New Type of Phishing Attack

Most phishing attacks depend on an original deception. If you detect that you are at the wrong URL, or that something is amiss on a page, the chase is up. You’ve escaped the attackers. In fact, the time that wary people are most wary is exactly when they first navigate to a site.

What we don’t expect is that a page we’ve been looking at will change behind our backs, when we aren’t looking. That’ll catch us by surprise.

via www.azarask.in

A devious new vector for executing JavaScript based phishing attempts on unsuspecting users.

Attack Summary:

• User visits site X
• User switches tabs away from site X
• While site X is inactive, it morphs to look exactly like a GMail login screen
• Later, when staring at your tabs, you see the (authentic looking, but fake) GMail tab, click and login
• Your info is logged, your account is compromised, etc.

Even more interesting / scary:

Match this with a history miner to figure out what sites a user has visited (say GMail, their bank, etc) and you can customize the fake login screen to match that of a service that specific user uses.

Fig leaf macro shots

Taken in Brisbane, CA this funny sunny morning. 

Javascript Web Workers: Chrome 5 Now Supports Complex Messages

After updating to Chrome 5 (specifically 5.0.375.55) last night I immediately ran some tests to see if the Web Worker API had been updated to support postMessage() arguments of types other than string.

Turns out, it had.

via weblog.bocoup.com

postMessage is an HTML5 spec to help various windows (of different origins) to communicate with each other.

Details about the spec are here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/window.postMessage

This is good news for sending machine readable messages between frames :)

Cross-domain Ajax with Cross-Origin Resource Sharing | NCZOnline

A couple of years ago, web developers were banging their head against the first wall in Ajax: the same-origin policy. While we marveled at the giant step forward enabled by cross-browser support for the XMLHttpRequest object, we quickly bemoaned the fact that there was no way to make a request to a different domain from JavaScript. Everyone setup proxies on their web sites, which was the onset of a new host of open redirect problems, as a way to get around the restriction. Although developers were working around this limitation using server-side proxies as well as other techniques, the community outcry was around allowing native cross-domain Ajax requests. A lot of people are unaware that almost all browsers (Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox 3.5+, Safari 4+, and Chrome) presently support cross-domain Ajax via a protocol called Cross-Origin Resource Sharing.

via www.nczonline.net

This is a really solid introduction to CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) which is currently implemented in FF 3.5+, Safari 4+, Chrome 4+, and IE8+.

Test

http://www.whatever.com

A JavaScript Module Pattern » Yahoo! User Interface Blog (YUIBlog)

This example is a simple one, and it’s deliberately verbose — if this was all we were doing, we could doubtless write it in a more compact way. However, this pattern scales well as the project becomes more complex and as its API grows. It stays out of the global namespace, provides publicly addressable API methods, and supports protected or “private” data and methods along the way.

via yuiblog.com

A brief introduction to the module pattern for JavaScript (defined by Douglas Crockford) by Eric Miraglia, an engineer on the YUI project at Yahoo.

Edit: If you're interested in a more in depth overview of the Module pattern, check out JavaScript Module Pattern: In-Depth by Ben Cherry.

Farmer's Market Photos!

Rather than post one a day I'll just dump 'em all together.

All of these were taken at the Alemany Farmer's Market last weekend.

Check out moar on Flickr.

Douglas Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts"

"JavaScript: The Good Parts" is a very short, dense book. The book itself weighs in at under 200 pages, but that's not for a lack of content covered. There is very little fluff in this book, which is a welcome relief from some of the more wordy programming books that spend more time explaining their example than the concept the example is trying to demonstrate.

The book starts off with some in depth railroad diagrams describing the grammar of JavaScript, to get the reader up to speed, and then immediately jumps into a well thought out discussion on some of JavaScript's finer points.

Topics covered include:

• Objects
• Functions (w/ coverage of closures, cascading, and currying)
• Inheritance
• Arrays (w/ coverage of their implementation and their built in methods)
• Regular Expressions
• An appendix detailing the 'Awful Parts' (and the 'Bad Parts')
• His JSLint program (think lint for JavaScript)
• An overview of the JSON format

This is the kind of book I expect to read two or three times to thoroughly understand everything he's covered. However, it's certainly opened my eyes to a much more elegant way of writing JavaScript. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who dabbles in JavaScript or wishes to learn more about the language.

Book Review: Steve Krug's "Dont Make Me Think!"

    I picked this book up because every design / usability expert I polled recommended it. And, after reading it, I can see why: It's a great book. It's a quick read, it's well designed, and each point is driven home clearly and concisely through good (and bad) examples.

    Some of the topics he covers include:

• How users actually look at a web page
• The importance of presenting users with easy choices
• Why usability testing is important and how to do it cheaply
• Designing web navigation that helps (not hinders) your users
• Writing good copy for the web

    I heartily recommend this book to anyone whose interested in a crash course in web usability.

Recommended Tech Reading for 2010

Earlier this month I surveyed some coworkers, bloggers, and friends to amass a recommended reading list for 2010. I made a point not to limit the suggestions to a specific topic, but instead encouraged recommendations across any tech related discipline.

After I started receiving responses I decided that sharing this list would be of benefit to everyone involved. So, here is the list of books I was recommended (broken down by arbitrary categories) for 2010:

Design / User Interaction:

• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
• Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
• Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition by Steve Krug
• Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems by Steve Krug
• The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web by Jesse James Garrett
• Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative by Edward R. Tufte
• Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition by Edward R. Tufte
• Beautiful Evidence by Edward R. Tufte
  

Front End Engineering:

• JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
• JavaScript: The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan
• jQuery in Action by Yehuda Katz, Bear Bibeault
• DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model by Jeremy Keith
  
• CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions, Second Edition by Simon Collison

Software Engineering:

• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites by Peter Morville, Louis Rosenfeld
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented​ Software by Erich Gamma, et al.
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler, Kent Beck
• Linux Kernel Development (2nd Edition) by Robert Love
• Perl Best Practices by Damian Conway
• Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook (Developers Notebook) by Ian Langworth
• Mastering Algorithms with Perl by Jon Orwant
• Ruby Pocket Reference by Michael Fitzgerald
• C Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan
• The Art of Unix Programming by Eric S. Raymond
• Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley
  

Human/Project Management:

• Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager by Michael Lopp
• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days (Recipes: a Problem-Solutio​n Ap) by Jessica Livingston
• The Art of Project Management (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly)) by Scott Berkun
• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition) by Frederick P. Brooks, Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

Special thanks to everyone I pinged for the recommendations!

Got a recommendation?

I'd love to add additional books to this list if you've got one. Let me know!

4/14 Edit: Added two more software engineering books. Thanks guys!

Water drop covered spider web

 Taken off the beaten trail around my home.

[ Flickr ]

A wall of walnuts

Taken at the Alemany Farmer's Market.

This one is fun to view huge, check out the larger version on Flickr.

Walnuts are weird, maaaaan.

[ Flickr ]

This beet has sprouted.

Taken at the Alemany Farmer's Market

[ Flickr ]

Carrots!

Taken at Alemany Farmer's Market

[ Flickr ]

Tala on a Pier

Tala hanging out on a pier while I was snapping photos.

Taken in Truckee, CA

[ Flickr Link ]

Donner Lake Sunset

Taken in Truckee last weekend while I was up in Tahoe.

HDR shot ( -2, 0, 2 )

[ Flickr Link ]

Russian Ridge Picnic

The beauty of this vista is lost in the photograph.

We were on a small ledge and the vista was completely surrounding us. Great place for a picnic!

Moss Mushroom!

Taken in Russian Ridge open space.

Growing on a moss coated Oak tree.