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A List Apart

JavaScript Minification Part II
Variable naming can be a source of coding angst for humans trying to understand code. Once you?re sure that a human doesn?t need to interpret your JavaScript code, variables simply become generic placeholders for values. Nicholas C. Zakas shows us how to further minify JavaScript by replacing local variable names with the YUI Compressor.

SVG with a little help from Raphaël
Want to make fancy, interactive, scalable vector graphics (SVGs) that look beautiful at any resolution and degrade with grace? Brian Suda urges you to consider Raphaël for your SVG heavy lifting.

Prefix or Posthack
Vendor prefixes: Threat or menace? As browser support (including in IE9) encourages more of us to dive into CSS3, vendor prefixes such as -moz-border-radius and -webkit-animation may challenge our consciences, along with our patience. But while nobody particularly enjoys writing the same thing four or five times in a row, prefixes may actually accelerate the advancement and refinement of CSS. King of CSS Eric Meyer explains why.

Supersize that Background, Please!
Background images that fill the screen thrill marketers but waste bandwidth in devices with small viewports, and suffer from cropping and alignment problems in high-res and widescreen monitors. Instead of using a single fixed background size, a better solution would be to scale the image to make it fit different window sizes. And with CSS3 backgrounds and CSS3 media queries, we can do just that. Bobby van der Sluis shows how.

Stop Forking with CSS3
You may remember when JavaScript was a dark art. It earned that reputation because, in order to do anything with even the teensiest bit of cross-browser consistency, you had to fork your code for various versions of Netscape and IE. Today, thanks to web standards advocacy and diligent JavaScript library authors, our code is relatively fork-free. Alas, in our rush to use some of the features available in CSS3, we?ve fallen off the wagon. Enter Aaron Gustafson?s eCSStender, a JavaScript library that lets you use CSS3 properties and selectors while keeping your code fork- and hack-free.

Digital Web Recent Articles Feed

Time To Change
It's the end of the year; a time for nostalgia and looking back on the past year. Nick Finck, Digital Web Magazine's founder and publisher, recalls where we've been, what we've achieved, and discusses the potential for dramatic change in where we are going as a publication. This is your chance to influence the future structure and focus of Digital Web.

Is The Web Really Helping Us Find New Music?
With exactly one month to go until Christmas, Digital Web Magazine is changing pace for our last article of 2008. Tempers have flared in recent weeks over our coverage of idiosyncratic CSS techniques, so we thought we?d look at something completely different?finding new music online. For many developers, their passion for great music runs nearly as high as their passion for semantic code; Chris Wright takes a look at how the current crop of online music tools might be failing us. This article also marks something of an experiment for Digital Web: opinion-driven editorial content, rather than our normal expert advice-led columns. Let us know what you think of our first, an editorial on the value of editorial?

RESTful CSS
With every web developer or agency worth their salt releasing a web application these days, it was inevitable that attention would eventually turn to how best to manage CSS within a modern MVC framework. Steve Heffernan pairs stylesheets with REST principles to present a new approach to CSS architecture.

Are Accessibility Statements Useful?
Leona Tomlinson is back for a second article, detailing where accessibility statements fit into Web sites today.

Review: Website Optimization
Is your website firing on all cylinders? We take a look at a book that has a little something for everyone, from marketers to developers, to help you polish your pages. Andrew Stevens returns to Digital Web to review Website Optimization.

The Globe and Mail - Technology RSS feed

The latest buzz: a RIM tablet
Foray into iPad market would come as device’s appeal spreads to corporate world

Pocono Raceway powers up with the sun
Pennsylvania 500 will be the curtain raiser for world’s largest solar-powered sports facility

iPhone 4 pandemonium
Hundreds lined up Friday morning to be the first to buy the Apple iPhone 4 in Canada. Consumer tech reporter Michael Oliveira says it's the first iPhone available without a contract in Canada.

Stylish iPad sleeves to keep your baby safe
The year's most coveted gadget has proven a hit, so make sure you protect your new investment

Canadian mobile wars heat up
Anthony Lacavera, chairman of wireless upstart Globalive, talks to BNN about Rogers Communications' launch of its no-frills Chatr brand

kuro5hin.org

Games People Play: A Book Review
Welcome to the K5 Book Club! Discussions on K5 have brought up this book. In an unrelated situation, real life people have recommended the same book to me. Mildly cultish following and also a nice short read. Dated but charming, and provides plenty of ammo for accusing your fellows of pathological behavior, which is probably the best reason to read psych books! Definitely up there with Freud and LRH. A true classic.

To Save The Gulf, Send The Enterprise
The real Planet Earth has an ongoing situation that could use a ship of superheros like those in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek soap opera. 60+ days have passed since the Deepwater Horizon's explosion and sinking. BP company engineers have been working continuously to stop the oil, but all efforts to plug the gusher in the gulf have failed. Efforts to contain the oil are ongoing, but the best case scenario calls for the well to run until the relief wells are completed in August. In short, people are becoming aware that BP's Big Problem in the Gulf of Mexico is probably the most epic environmental catastrophe of the past 1000 years. If only the Enterprise was available to help.

Salaryman's Bank Performance Report
Salaryman arrived to the car-park just as Boss's chauffeur was stamping on his cigarette. “Boss will be down in a second,” the chauffeur said. “You don't happen to have a laptop running OS/2, do you?” “No, I don't,” Salaryman said, tuning his cufflinks. “Darn,” the chauffeur said, staring at the doorway he expected Boss to walk through any minute. “I wanted to check my email.” Just then the door opened. Boss walked through, followed by whoever had held the door for him. Salaryman kept a keen eye on the new fellow. He was dark, thin, and tall and wore a meticulously-brushed three-piece suit.

Booting Up with Salaryman
Salaryman set his coffee mug on his desk. On a coaster, of course. Salaryman respected his banking firm too much to stain their solid oak desks with his fresh-ground Brazilian coffee. Smacking his lips, Salaryman hit the space bar on his black keyboard with his index finger and sat back. There was a quick electronic beep and some fans under his gargantuan desk whirled to life. The LCD lit up and Salaryman typed his BIOS username and password. Username: salarymanPassword: •••••••••

Why I Almost Gave OpenBSD $100,000--But Didn't
It is never a happy occasion to realize that a not-for-profit group, no matter how destitute or successful, is undeserving of charitable donations. And just last week I had such an unhappy realization. I wanted to donate a sizable sum of money to the OpenBSD Foundation for development of the OpeBSD operating system and other related projects. My uncle, an old Unix graybeard from the Seventies, devoted his retirement and considerable savings to teaching inner-city youth about computers and programming. He recently passed away and left instructions in his will that I donate money, in the amount of US $100,000, to "the most meritorious Free, Unix-like operating system" as according to my own research into the matter. [From http://www.trollaxor.com/2010/06/why-i-almost-gave-openbsd-100000-didnt.html.]

SANS NewsBites

SANS Network Security 2010
SANS will bring you the best in network security training, certification, and up-to-the-minute research on the most important topics in the industry today.

Google Android Apps Reportedly Stealing Data (July 30, 2010)
Dozens of wallpaper apps being sold for Google Android devices have been found to be gathering personal information and sending it back to the apps' developers.......

White House Seeks to Add Internet Activity to List of Information That Can be Demanded With National Security Letters (July 29, 2010)
The White House is seeking to add language to a list of items the FBI can demand without a judge's approval.......

Second Pennsylvania High School Student Files Suit Over Webcam (July 27, 2010)
A second Lower Merion (Pennsylvania) High School student has filed a lawsuit against the school district, its board of directors, the superintendent and two school employees alleging a civil rights violation for the misuse of a laptop computer theft tracking program.......

UK ICO Says Google Did Not Collect "Meaningful Personal Details" (July 29, 2010)
The UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has examined some of the data Google collected while gathering information from unsecured Wi-Fi networks for its Street View feature and concluded that Google did not collect "meaningful personal details.......

Slashdot

How Should a Non-Techie Learn Programming?
CurtMonash writes "Nontechnical people — for example marketers or small business owners — increasingly get the feeling they should know more about technology. And they're right. If you can throw up a small website or do some real number-crunching, chances are those skills will help you feed your family. But how should they get started? I started a thread with the question on DBMS2, and some consistent themes emerged, including: Learn HTML + CSS early on; Learn a bit of SQL, but you needn't make that your focus; Have your first real programming language be one of the modern ones, such as PHP or Python; MySQL is a good vehicle to learn SQL; It's a great idea to start with a project you actually want to accomplish, and that can be done by modifying a starter set of sample code (e.g., a WordPress blog); Microsoft's technology stack is an interesting alternative to some of the other technology ideas. A variety of books and websites were suggested, most notably MIT's Scratch. But, frankly, it would really help to get more suggestions for sites and books that help one get started with HTML/CSS, or with MySQL, or with PHP. And so, techie studs and studdettes, I ask you — how should a non-techie go about learning some basic technological skills?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Justice Department Joins Fraud Lawsuit Against Oracle
suraj.sun writes with news that the US Department of Justice has joined a lawsuit alleging Oracle of overcharging the federal government for its software products. Quoting: "In a nutshell, the lawsuit argues that Oracle's government customers — a wide array of agencies, including the State Department, the Energy Department, and the Justice Department itself — got deals 'far inferior' to those the enterprise software giant gave to its commercial clients. The allegations stem from a software deal between Oracle and the federal General Services Administration that the Justice Department says involved 'hundreds of millions of dollars in sales' and that ran from 1998 to 2006. Under the contract, Oracle was required to inform the GSA when commercial discounts improved and to offer those same discounts to government buyers. Oracle misrepresented its true commercial sales practices and thus defrauded the US, the lawsuit contends. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ISC Offers Response Policy Zones For DNS
penciling_in writes "ISC has made the announcement that they have developed a technology that will allow 'cooperating good guys' to provide and consume reputation information about domains names. The release of the technology, called Response Policy Zones (DNS RPZ), was announced at DEFCON. Paul Vixie explains: 'Every day lots of new names are added to the global DNS, and most of them belong to scammers, spammers, e-criminals, and speculators. The DNS industry has a lot of highly capable and competitive registrars and registries who have made it possible to reserve or create a new name in just seconds, and to create millions of them per day. ... If your recursive DNS server has a policy rule which forbids certain domain names from being resolvable, then they will not resolve. And, it's possible to either create and maintain these rules locally, or, import them from a reputation provider. ISC is not in the business of identifying good domains or bad domains. We will not be publishing any reputation data. But, we do publish technical information about protocols and formats, and we do publish source code. So our role in DNS RPZ will be to define 'the spec' whereby cooperating producers and consumers can exchange reputation data, and to publish a version of BIND that can subscribe to such reputation data feeds. This means we will create a market for DNS reputation but we will not participate directly in that market.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Adds Licensing Server DRM To Android Market
eldavojohn writes "According to AfterDawn, Google has given app makers the option to use a license server as DRM to ensure the user has paid for an app before they can download it. Reportedly, the Market app will communicate with a Google license server using RSA encryption. It is important to note this is only available for non-free apps (built with SDK 1.5 and later), and it was instituted to provide a better solution to the old and widely criticized copy protection scheme that was susceptible to Android app piracy (like sideloading). For better or for worse, Android's Marketplace appears to now have an optional, phone-home form of DRM." Following news of the new licensing service, Hexage Ltd, makers of a popular Android game called Radiant, released the data they had collected on piracy of Radiant over a 10-month period beginning last October. A series of charts shows total users, paid users and the piracy rate, by region. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tribalism Is the Enemy Within, Says Shuttleworth
climenole points out a post from Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth about internal strife in the free software community. He wrote, "Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are 'wrong by default.' It's the great-granddaddy of racism and sexism. And the most dangerous kind of tribalism is completely invisible: it has nothing to do with someone's 'birth tribe' and everything to do with their affiliations: where they work, which sports team they support, which Linux distribution they love. ... Right now, for a number of reasons, there is a fever pitch of tribalism in plain sight in the free software world. It's sad. It's not constructive. It's ultimately going to be embarrassing for the people involved, because the Internet doesn't forget. It's certainly not helping us lift free software to the forefront of public expectations of what software can be." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Channel Register

Futurologist defends 'malevolent dust' warning
Dust up over supposed evil particles A futurologist has defended his controversial warning that "smart dust" is liable to become a future information stealing threat.?

Unisys floats mainframe cloud
A ClearPath to the development skies A mainframe cloud may seem oxymoronic like a lead Zeppelin ("a" included on purpose), or intuitively obvious (given the virtualization and metering capabilities that have been in mainframes for decades). But Unisys has nonetheless fluffed up a mainframe cloud for its ClearPath mainframe customers.?

BlueArc gets extra greenbacks
$20 million BlueArc, the hardware-accelerated NAS array supplier startup, has pocketed another $20m in a seventh funding round, taking total funding to around $225m.?

Microsoft should starve on radical penguin diet
Capitalism and open source Open...and Shut When the mouthpiece of American capitalism calls a company a dog, it's time to re-evaluate that company's chances.?

Mozy insists: It's not a bug...
...it's a... yes, one of those! Mozy says that the bugs reported by users concerning repeated full backups were not bugs at all, instead reflecting a feature of the product.?

News from Adaptive Path

Christian Palino on Brand Redesigns
Adaptive Path Design Strategist, Christian Palino, shares his thoughts on Roosevelt University's new identity in his latest post on Brand New. He also recently shared his thoughts on the Golden State Warrior's new brand.

Want Magazine Interviews Peter Merholz
Adaptive Path Co-President, Peter Merholz, shared his thoughts on crafting 'want' in an interview with Want Magazine.

The Elements of User Experience & Service Design
Adaptive Path Co-President, Jesse James Garrett, shared his latest thoughts on The Elements of User Experience and how service design relates to UX in Johnny Holland Magazine.

Adaptive Path Sketchboards Are Smashing
Adaptive Path Leads, Brandon Schauer, and Leah Buley had their popular technique of generating sketchboards during the design process written up as a key tool for generating content in Smashing Magazine.

Peter Merholz in Harvard Business Review
Adaptive Path President, Peter Merholz, regularly writes for the Harvard Business Review blogs. He shares insight and opinions on topics ranging from design thinking to the customer experience of Google's Nexus One, Starbucks, Tropicana Orange Juice, and much more. His piece on design thinking was recently published in the January-February, 2010 print issue.