I use this really basic Firefox bookmarklet pretty much every day, so I thought I’d post it.
–> Dictionary.com <– drag to toolbar
Dictionary.com provide an ‘official’ bookmarklet, here:
http://dictionary.reference.com/tools/bookmarklets.html
I’ve improved it a bit Read more…
I’ve been having fun playing with node.js over the past year, but have had little, or no excuse to use it in any production work, so I thought I’d set myself a challenge and build a module. That challenge was firstly to create a simple AMF gateway for Flash remoting, and secondarily to see if an RTMP socket server was achievable in node.
If you don’t know about “node” – It’s a JavaScript runtime that allows you to write socket servers. I like it a lot – it brings asynchronous, event-driven programming to the server side and provides a truly global variable scope across all connections. I’ll blog about it in more detail later, perhaps.
At Public we do a lot of Flash work, and regularly implement Flash remoting using a PHP AMF gateway. I wasn’t necessarily looking to replace this stock approach with node, but node offers proper socket connections that PHP can’t, so I was imagining the possibilities of using node as a free, and more flexible alternative to Flash Media Server. Not for streaming media, but for real-time messaging, for example in multi-player games. If I’m honest though, I did this mostly for fun, an academic exercise and as an excuse to work with node.
The four NYU students pledging to build Diaspora captured my imagination today, and I’m not the only one.
There is so much to discuss around this and it’s not even out of the lab yet. In a rare display of focus, I’ll devote my first post on the topic to one of the more obvious questions – Can they (or do they need to) get 400 million people to migrate away from Facebook? Read more…
Off the back of all the recent Facebook changes I just read the OAuth 2.0 spec – it’s currently in a draft state, and according to this page, Facebook is currently the only implementation in the wild. This new spec attempts to pull together various authentication journeys rather than just the typical web app model. This is a great news – It seems to accommodate many different situations across differing devices with different capabilities, while maintaining a good level of consistency.
You didn’t expect me to have only nice things to say, did you? There are a couple of things I have to question. Read more…
I’ve been saying to people that I’m not too excited about the announcements from F8 last week. I suppose this is because I was expecting the announcement that many were – that Facebook would launch a geolocation service. I still expect they will (even if it’s by way of acquisition). With 400 times the user base of Foursquare, just imagine how much faster they could build their ‘places’ database than the numerous firms all racing to do so; and what a valuable chunk of data that would be too.
Well, we didn’t get that announcement, but it’s taken a few days to dawn on me that geolocation is only one part of a much bigger picture – and that announcement we did get. It’s the Open Graph.