Blink

apiGrove is an API management tool by Alcatel-Lucent. It proxies APIs (presumably those you built and host, though the example is for Twitter) , supports authenticated access, throttles to help manage demand, usage logging and reporting. More info @apiGrove, hat tip.

• Schema.org NewsArticle
• hNews
• rNews (and the war between rNews and hNews)
• Google News Technical Requirements

Marathon and Marathon 2: Durandal are available as iOS apps. The classic Marathon Spoiler Guides might be good companions.

From the FAQ on the AirParrot site:

What does AirParrot do?

AirParrot lets you AirPlay your Mac’s screen to a second or third generation AppleTV. What you see on your Mac’s screen will appear on the AppleTV, wirelessly!

How do I use AirParrot?

Once you’ve opened AirParrot, click on the icon in your menu bar. Select the AirPlay device (such as your AppleTV) and then select which screen you want to mirror. To stop mirroring, simply click on the same AirPlay device in the menu!

Listen in with RadioReference.com’s index of live police, fire, EMS, and airport radio feeds in San Francisco.

Six years ago this month the Zend framework preview was released and Rasmus Lerdorf published a blog post titled “The no-framework PHP MVC framework” (italics added). R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah noted irony.

Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash minces no words in its conclusion:

Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform.[…]

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Via Mind Hacks: auctions with a low starting price may result in higher final sale prices than those with a high starting price. but negotiations with a high starting price often result in higher final sale prices.

The Kindle feels like an e-reading device, whereas an iPad feels like reading.

From latimes.com via Joseph Monninger.

Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast, by Russ Cox:

Perl [and PHP and others] could not now remove backreference support, of course, but they could employ much faster algorithms when presented with regular expressions that don’t have backreferences.

How much faster? About a million times (no, I do not exaggerate).

I use a lot of regular expressions, and relatively few of them use backreferences. It’d be worth optimizing.

I was wondering when somebody was going to do what html5media does:

HTML5 video tags make embedding videos into documents as easy as embedding an image. All it takes is a single

html5media is a JavaScript library that enables

One lesson here is that a simple but well-done web app […] can be vastly superior to a full-fledged but terrible iPhone application.

Usability Nightmare: The My.SXSW iPhone App.

The description to David McNicol’s URL Cache Plugin raises more questions than it answers:

Given a URL, the url_cache() function will attempt to download the file it represents and return a URL pointing to this locally cached version.

Where did he plan to use it? Does he envision the cache as an archive, or for performance? Why hasn’t it been updated since 2005?

It caught my interest because I’ve long been interested in a solution to link rot in my blog. A real “perma-permalink” would be very useful.

The Hanzo Archives WordPress plugin is something I’d be very excited to use. Ironically, it’s disappeared from the web (though the blog post hasn’t):

We’ve released a WordPress Plugin which automatically archives anything you link to in your blog posts; it also adds a ‘perma-permalink’ for the archived version adjacent to each original link.

An Amazon Web Services case study put me on to Hanzo a while ago, and in May 2008 I actually spoke with Mark Middleton (the markm who posted the entry above). Mark revealed that community take-up on the plugin and other general purpose web archiving services was below expectations. The company has since refocused on legal matters (even their blog tag-line has changed to “web archiving for compliance and e-discovery”).

I wonder if, now that the number of people and companies that have been blogging for years has grown, there might be more of a market for such a service.

Lorelle is a big fan of Scott Reilly’s Customizable Post Listings:

Display Recent Posts, Recently Commented Posts, Recently Modified Posts, Random Posts, and other post, page, or draft listings using the post information of your choosing in an easily customizable manner. You can narrow post searches by specifying categories and/or authors, among other things.

[I]n theory, I should be able to issue one command to VLC and have it receive the MPEG4-ES stream from the camera, transcode it to h.264, and stream it to the Wowza, which would handle the rest.

via John Beales.

In line with yesterday’s discovery of the Viddler WP plugin, Riffly Webcam Video Comments also supports video or audio comments within WordPress:

Riffly is a free service that easily plugs into your site allowing visitors to create video and audio comments.

The service is advertising supported. We cover all the costs for bandwidth, servers, and maintenance. Optionally, we also offer Premium Riffly accounts that provide you with additional benefits, such as advertising removal, control panel access, analytics, and much more.

The Viddler WordPress plugin promises to “Enrich your site’s commenting experience by enabling video comments….” Users can record direcly from a web cam or choose a video they’ve previously uploaded to Viddler.com.

Viddler evangelist Colin Devroe has it on his site, where I can see it requires would-be commenters have a Viddler account. That last bit is too bad. I like Viddler, but I can’t force my readers to like it and get accounts as a prerequisite to commenting.

When it comes to “shall” and “will,” Strunk and White gives the following example: “A swimmer in distress cries, ‘I shall drown; no one will save me!’ ” But a suicide says, “I will drown; no one shall save me!” And I say, “You two (pedantic) know-it-alls deserve to drown.” I mean, what about “Help!”

via Who Needs A Manual To Write Real Good?.