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CSS Transformations in Safari/WebKit (and Chrome too?)

The cool browsers support radius corners, but Safari supports CSS transformations that allow developers to scale, skew, and rotate objects on the page like we’re used to doing in PostScript. And better than that, we can animate those transformations over time — all without any JavaScript.

Fire up Safari or Chrome and mouse over the examples here. The screencast at the top is from the menu on that page. There are, obviously, better uses for these transforms, but it’s easy to see it at work there. Also see this screencast. It shows a rendering error, but it’s a better use of the tech.

Now kick it up a notch with 3d transforms. They only work on the iPhone and iPod touch for now, but they’re quite nifty. See these examples: one, two. Paul Bakaus offers more detail, and Matthew Congrove offers this example of flick navigation.

Browser-Based JSON Editors

JSONLint, a JSON validator, was the tool I needed a while ago to be able to play with JSON as format for exchanging data in some APIs I was working on a while ago. And now I like JSON well enough that I’m thinking of using it as an internal data format in one of my applications, especially because it’s relatively easy to work with in JavaScript. Or, at least that’s the promise.

What I’ll need is an easy way to manipulate the contents of a simple array, and these JSON editors may give me a start.

The Braincast JSON editor was the first I found, but it doesn’t allow creation/expansion of the JSON. Katamari‘s JSON editor seems to work and has a lot of features and a post 2005-looking interface, but that doesn’t make it simple. Worse, I don’t think it’s available for me to re-use, modify, or extend in my projects. Thomas Frank‘s JSON editor, on the other hand, does have the features I need and a GPL license. That’s the place to start.

Extra: a JSON diff.

Michael Stephens Teaching on WordPress MU

Michael Stephens is now using WordPress MU to host his classes online, and that opening page is really sweet. It’s hardly the first time somebody’s used a blog to host course content, but I like where he’s going with it. We’re significantly expanding our use of WordPress at Plymouth, and using it to replace WebCT/Blackboard […] » about 300 words

Google’s Own Satellite

It’s not truly “Google’s own,” but the internet giant will get exclusive use of the images for mapping purposes, according to Reuters: GeoEye Inc said it successfully launched into space on Saturday its new GeoEye-1 satellite, which will provide the U.S. government, Google Earth users and others the highest-resolution commercial color satellite imagery on the […] » about 100 words

Installing memcached On CentOS/RHEL

Using info from CentOS forums, Sunny Walia and Ryan Boren, here’s how I got memcached running on my Dotster VPS:

Install libevent:

``` wget http://www.monkey.org/~provos/libevent-1.3e.tar.gz tar zxvf libevent-1.3e.tar.gz cd libevent-1.3e   ./configure make make install ```

Install memcached

``` wget http://danga.com:80/memcached/dist/memcached-1.2.5.tar.gz tar zxvf memcached-1.2.5.tar.gz cd memcached-1.2.5   ./configure make make install ```

We will start the server to use 30 megs of ram (-m 30), listen on ip 127.0.0.1 (-l 127.0.0.1) and run on port 11211 (-p 11211) as user ‘nobody’ (-u nobody):

``` memcached -u nobody -d -m 30 -l 127.0.0.1 -p 11211 ```

Get an error?

``` memcached: error while loading shared libraries: libevent-1.3e.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory ```

Show it the path to the library:

``` LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib export LD_LIBRARY_PATH ```

Dragonflyer X6 UAV Remote Control Helicopter Is Sneaky, Awesome

I so want one of these sweet Draganflyer X6 helicopters. The two pound powerhouse can carry up to one pound of camera equipment, carrying it smooth enough to get decent video and stills. More videos are at the Dragonfly website, including one which supposedly demonstrates that it’s quiet enough for wildlife photo work (scroll down […] » about 100 words

WordPress CAS Integration Plugin

CAS — Central Authentication Service — has no logo, but it’s still cool. Heterogeneous environments like mine offer hundreds of different online services or applications that each need to authenticate the user. Instead of throwing our passwords around like confetti, CAS allows those applications to identify their users based on session information managed by the […] » about 300 words

2.6 Million Self-Hosted WordPress Sites And Counting

The huge problem with open source software is that there are no sales numbers to show how many people are using it. We know that WordPress.com hosts over three million blogs. We know EduBlogs powers nearly 200,000. But how many sites are hosted using the original, downloadable, self-installed and managed version of WordPress? Now, the […] » about 100 words

More Web Performance Tips From Steve Souders

Hearing Steve Souders at WordCamp last week got me thinking about website performance, so I went looking for more. The slides from his WordCamp talk are online, but he gave a similar talk at Google I/O which got videotaped and posted richer detail than his slides alone will ever reveal.

Also on his blog: Use the Google AJAX Libraries API when you don’t have a CDN, and a post that asks why make users wait to download all your javascript before they see the page if you’re only going to use 25% of it at first?

Global Voices On WordPress

I hadn’t heard of Global Voices Online, a community generated global group news blog, until Jeremy Clarke spoke of it at WordCamp. And I didn’t think the site, with it’s do-good premise, worked until I actually explored it for a while. But, well, it’s a bit fascinating. Global Voices grew out of a one-day conference […] » about 300 words

Quercus PHP To Java Compiler vs. WordPress

Emil Ong is the Chief Evangelist and a lead developer for Caucho Technology, the developers of the Quercus PHP to Java compiler. The idea, I guess, is to write in PHP, deploy in Java, which some people say is better supported by the “enterprise.”

Ong claims 26% performance improvement over Apache + mod_php + APC. That sounds great, I suppose, but it’s less than what Chris Lea suggests is possible if you simply replace Apache with Nginx.

Chris Lea On Nginx And WordPress

“Apache is like Microsoft Word, it has a million options but you only need six. Nginx does those six things, and it does five of them 50 times faster than Apache.” —Chris Lea.

Why? No forking. No loading of unnecessary components. Fast CGI. And to prove it’s not as complex as you might think, he’s installing it live. The session has eight minutes left, can he do it?

Yes, he did. The big concern is in managing permalinks without .htaccess, and it turns out it’s not so difficult. Does he have a cookbook for this? Darn, no time left for questions, I’ll have to ask later.

Mark Jaquith On WordPress Security For Plugin Developers

I’ve been pretty aware of the risks of SQL injection and am militant about keeping my database interactions clean. Mark Jaquith today reminded me about the need to make sure my browser output is filtered through clean_url(), sanitize_url(), and attribute_escape(). Furthermore, we all need to remember current_user_can(), check_admin_referer(), and nonces. » about 100 words

Steve Souders On Website Performance

Steve Souders: 10% of the problem is server performance, 90% of problem is browser activity after the main html is downloaded. He wrote the book and developed YSlow, so he should know.

JavaScripts are downloaded serially and block other activity. Most JavaScript functions aren’t used at OnLoad. We could split the JS and only load essential functions up front, and load all the rest later. How much might that help? He says 25% to 50%. This quickly gets complex, but he’s got a simple plan that considers three questions:

  • Is the script URL on the same host as the main HTML?
  • Should the browser indicate it’s busy, or not?
  • Does script execution order mater?

And at that point things started to get too interesting to take publishable notes. I clearly need to pay more attention to this guy.

Stats he mentioned without being specific about the source:

  • Google: 200ms longer download time cut revenue by 20%
  • Yahoo: 100ms of latency costs … big.

Will Norris on OAuth and DiSo

Will Norris talking about things OAuth, OpenID, and Diso at WordCamp. Demonstrates/fakes an OAuth authentication and authorization process with WordPress for iPhone app. Does this matter? OAuth support is slated for WP 2.7, and people are finally getting smart about linking all this stuff without throwing passwords around “like confetti.” » about 100 words