Entries from January 2008 ↓

PCWMike writes "PCs may disappear from your desk by 2033. But with digital technology showing up everywhere else — including inside your body — computing will only get more personal, reports Dan Tynan for PC World's 25th Anniversary. While convenience will be increased by leaps and bounds, it will come at a profound loss in our sense of what privacy means. 'Technology will become firmly embedded in advanced devices that deliver information and entertainment to our homes and our hip pockets, in sensors that monitor our environment from within the walls and floors of our homes, and in chips that deliver medicine and augment reality inside our bodies. This shiny happy future world will come at a cost, though: Think security and privacy concerns. So let's hope that our jetpacks come with seat belts, because it's going to be a wild ride.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon’s EC2 service provides re-sizable compute capacity or a ‘pay as you use’ model for deploying web applications. This blog entry provides an overview for using such a platform with Java EE applications using a Groovy-based framework.

Steve O’Hear (who edits our digital lifestyle blog last100) has an interesting post on his ZDNet blog that questions whether Google’s OpenSocial initiative is at all about data portability, or if in fact it really just about widget standardization. O’Hear quotes heavily from a recent article by Marc Canter, who is a strong advocate for open standards and data portability, that ran on CNet.

“It seems that almost everybody got a little carried away about what OpenSocial really stands for, falling for Google’s attempt to outmaneuver Facebook and paint the latter as the big bad wolf of data lock-in,” writes O’Hear. “Except OpenSocial isn’t really designed to give users the ability to move their data from one social network to another.”

Instead, he says, OpenSocial’s goal is to standardize widget development. According to Canter, many of the social networks that have signed on to OpenSocial never intended to open their network and allows users to transport data, regardless of whether that was part of Google’s plans. Rather, networks wanted access to Google’s OpenSocial gadgets (their word for widgets) in an attempt to strike back against Facebook’s successful platform.

This is something Marshall Kirkpatrick picked up on shortly after Google announced OpenSocial. “As some people have told me tonight, it may have been more accurate to call this ‘OpenWidget’ - though the press wouldn’t have been as good. We’ve been waiting for data and identity portability - is this all we get?” he wondered in November.

And if Google is really just trying to standardize widget development, are they the ones we want at the helm? Snipperoo’s Ivan Pope argues that “we’d be better off working from the ground up rather than getting suckered by a Google et al inspired bit of marketing flammery.” I’m inclined to agree. Other than the seeming lack of data portability as part of the OpenSocial initiative, one of the other chief concerns that our own Marshall Kirkpatrick talked about was whether Google was exercising leadership or control.

“Still remaining is the question of Google’s control over the standards creation process. It’s not possible that one of the largest companies in the US and the largest in this consortium would act entirely out of concern for the world at large,” he wrote.

So if OpenSocial is really not about data portability and interoperability between networks (except as far as widget creation is concerned), we’ll have to look elsewhere for that. But that’s not to say that OpenSocial is a total wash — widget standardization isn’t such a bad idea. As we wrote in November, there are plenty of winners when OpenSocial is adopted. “The winners of OpenSocial are Google (who now has hooks into a large number of social networking sites that reach hundreds of millions of people — whom Google surely hopes will one day be viewing Google ads), users (who now have access to social apps on networks that previously didn’t have developer APIs), app developers,” we said.

The question is, do we want Google to be leading the way in widget standardization? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

The Yahoo! OpenID (beta) which was announced earlier this month has just been launched. You can try it out right away. This is expected to move the OpenID movement ahead considerably. All 250 million members of Yahoo are now able to log in to any website, not just Yahoo, that supports OpenID 2.0.

At this moment you can find very limited list at Yahoo which I hope will be expanded soon.

I have been testing OpenID login with Wordpress.com who also offers OpenID. Right now it seems Wordpress has a more attractive offer than Yahoo. At Yahoo my OpenID URL is:

https://me.yahoo.com/a/rEOH03k2oZKSWDlu_x22Z12oud0-

While at Wordpress.com it is:

http://bomega.wordpress.com

I think I prefer the Wordpress version…

UPDATE: It is possible to change your Yahoo identifier URL into something more easy to remember. I overlooked this possibility when I checked the service yesterday. This means that my Yahoo identifier is now https://me.yahoo.com/openidboris. I still think http://bomega.wordpress.com is easier to remember. Thank you Adam for pointing this out to me.

Jörn Zaefferer went absolutely feature crazy when he decided to update his jQuery Validation plugin. Update is putting it mildly with “overhaul” coming immediately to mind.

Here are some of the cool new features added in:

• AJAX-captcha validation example (based on http://psyrens.com/captcha/)
• Support for “remote” ajax-validation. In other words: Remote validation is now possible and very easy to use.
• Added highlight and unhighlight options, by default toggles errorClass on element, allows custom highlighting
• Added valid() plugin method for easy programmatic checking of forms and fields without the need to use the validator API
• Added rules() plguin method to read and write rules for an element (currently read only)
• Replaced regex for email method, thanks to the contribution by Scott Gonzalez, see http://projects.scottsplayground.com/email_address_validation/
• Restructured event architecture to rely solely on delegation, both improving performance, and ease-of-use for the developer (requires jquery.delegate.js)
• Added feature to merge min + max into and range and minlength + maxlength into rangelength
• Added support for dynamic rule parameters, allowing to specify a function as a parameter eg. for minlength, called when validating the element
• Allow to specify null or an empty string as a message to display nothing
• Rules overhaul: Now supports combination of rules-option, metadata, classes (new) and attributes (new), see rules() for details
• Added remember-the-milk-demo (thanks RTM team for the permission!)
• Added marketo-demo (thanks Glen Lipka!)

One of the best features of this release is the remote validation via Ajax. This is extremely easy to implement with the code being as simple as this:

If you enter an email address, the validation plugin sends a request to the server with a parameter “email” and the value you entered. The server-side code can do it’s magic and send back the appropriate response based on the user input.

Adding client-side validation to a form can significantly improve the usability of that form, making it much easier for users to fill them out successfully. But pure client-side validation has severe limits where necessary information is available only on the server. Ajax helps to bridge the gap, but synchronizing validation on form submit isn’t exactly an easy task. The validation plugin makes it as simple as pure client-side validation. All you need to do is to specify a rule “remote” for a field and provide a parameter that points to a server-side resource that handles the validation.

To see the plugin in action, Jörn has created some demos using styling from Marketo.com and Remember the Milk. You can see some screenshots below.

John Resig has created a little script to give you pretty dates that Web 2.0 know and love (thanks Rails):

The library is short and sweet:

If you've got an already jailbroken 1.1.1 or 1.1.2 iPhone, you can now upgrade directly via Installer.app—no connecting to Mac or PC required. The only caveat is that the process takes 45 minutes as it downloads the entire upgrade via Wi-Fi, so hook your phone up to an AC adapter before you start. Again, find it in installer.app on your jailbroken 1.1.2 iPhone. [Crunchgear ]

Call it what you will – Jailbroked, Jailbreakened, Jailbricked – it’s been done to the latest revisions of both iPhone and iPod Touch. There are a few ways to do it, all of which seems to use a similar method and/or the same set of code. One is from developer Nate True, one from the iPhone Dev team, and one from Ben, co-13-year-old developer. There are methods to jailbreak the firmware on both OS X and Windows.

Over the weekend, I tried out the iPod touch hack from Ben, called iJailBreak. It got scary at times, but in the end it worked fine. I even have the $20 application bundle on there, including the new jiggly icons and the WiFi psuedo-GPS thingy for Google Maps (note: it works great, but you’ll need to actually be connected to a WiFi network for the maps to actually load).

IJailBreak is an application. Fire it up and plug in the iPod Touch, then follow the instructions. Mostly you’ll be clicking a few buttons in dialog boxes and waiting (the application downloads the 1.1.3 firmware from Apple’s servers, which can take a while).

The install hung for me, but following the instructions, I left it alone for 15 minutes and then forced a reboot. Everything works fine, although you’ll need to reinstall any third party applications you had before. Good luck!

Project page [iJailBreak]

Guide: How to use the 1.1.3 jailbreak on any iPhone (Mac/Windows) [iPhone Atlas]

iPhone Dev Team Release Instructions to JailBreak iPhone Firmware v1.1.3 [iPhone Hacks]

An announcement by Facebook late on Friday spotlights how they are attempting to stay ahead of the curve in exploiting the social graph, and in doing so, to make their version of your friend’s list the default one that is used across the web. The key is this new JavaScript library that makes it easier for developers to to make Facebook API calls directly from JavaScript from any web site, not just when running on the Facebook Platform:

This JavaScript client library allows you to make Facebook API calls from any web site and makes it easy to create Ajax Facebook applications. Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML…This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported.

Along with allowing individual developers conversant in Ajax to bring Facebook friends into their website’s user experience, as John Potter points out, it opens up a role for third-party developers to craft Facebook-friendly widgets that are easily dropped into blogs and sites that don’t have any Facebook programming experience. The release of this library caused a fair amount of buzz over the weekend from folks including Nick O’Neill, Dare Obasanjo, Jeremiah Owyang, Duncan Riley, and Search Engine Watch.

Recent moves in data portability and OpenSocial-style compatibility suggest that we are moving towards an environment that allows some form of opt-in sharing between elements of the social graph, and Facebook wants to make sure that it is easier to identify your groups of friends by starting with their version. The function of allowing you to organize your friends into groups (family, close friends, business acquaintances, etc.) that was added in December is also a step towards making your control over your social graph easier, and adding lock-in to the Facebook data.

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The excellent Trendsspotting blog has compiled a meta list of 2008 Web trends, by selecting “a group of 10 web/tech influencers suggesting their trends forecast for 2008.” ReadWriteWeb is one of the 10 influencers selected - using our 10 Future Web Trends post as our contribution. But see also 10 More Future Web Trends and our 2008 Web Predictions post for more RWW trends.

Below is Trendsspotting’s image from our post, which neatly displays our picks:

Note that all the RWW authors contributed to the 10 Future Web Trends post, so they weren’t just my ideas.

Trendsspotting came up with a tag cloud that combines the keywords from all of the 10 influencers:

It’s very high level, but you can see that mobile, open, video, green, social, and networks are among the most popular tags.

Here is the full report, well worth a browse: