Brian LePore (POWRSURG)’s personal blog

Local Load

Published on 14 Feb 2010 at 9:20 pm. .
Filed under Life, Politics, Web stuff.

Just wanted to post here that I have created a new Web site dedicated to my new Firefox extension Local Load.

Phase one of Local Load is to allow developers to speed up the loading of their Web sites and to save on bandwidth by loading a copy of the most popular JavaScript frameworks on the net (currently I choose all the extensions hosted on the Google AJAX Library API) from the local disk, rather than loading the file from the Web.

Phase two of Local Load will be to allow users to install their own scripts that can be replaced by Local Load. The believe is that when this is coupled with the Mozilla Build Your Own Browser (BYOB) project (or something similar) will allow developers to deliver enterprise solutions using Web technologies with the near speed of a local application.

Tom Brady

Published on 30 Nov 2009 at 11:37 pm. .
Filed under Uncategorized.

At first he was like:

But then he was like:

RIP XHTML 2.0 We never knew thee

Published on 3 Jul 2009 at 9:47 pm. .
Filed under Web stuff.

Recently the W3C announced that it will no longer focus its time on the development of XHTML 2 in order focus its efforts on the widely heralded HTML 5 specification. This is something that I am very honestly surprised took this long to happen. XHTML started out as an XML serialization of HTML. XHTML2 barely had anything to do with XHTML 1.1 or XHTML 1.0 and was not even remotely backwards compatible with the current state of the Web.

HTML 5 does not have this problem. HTML 5 is an extension of what already exists on the Web. It is because of this that browser makers have jumped on this effort and have already begun working on the features for this. All modern browsers, even IE8, support at least SOME features of HTML 5. Unfortunately there are too many people out there today that are not using browsers that support these features, and every browser maker has picked various parts of HTML 5 to implement first, but we are seeing progress on this. XHTML 2 has been in the works for a number of years longer than HTML 5. And as far as I am aware no browser supports anything that was being planned for such. The only exception possibly being XForms (which Opera has the best support), and I’m not even sure if that was a part of XHTML 2.

I don’t know a single developer that has ever attemptd to write anything using said language. Maybe I’m just not listening to the right people, but I do spend a signficant portion of my life following the works of industry leaders such Peter-Paul Koch (ppk), Eric Meyer, and Molly Holzchlag, as well as the development blogs for the Internet Explorer team, the JScript team, Google Code, and the Yahoo Developer Network. I can’t believe that between all of that those groups that I would not once have ever heard about something interesting happening with XTHML 2.0 support if there was really something going on. For years I considered it an intellectual challenge rather than something that was ever going to be taken seriously. That intellectual challenge has met its unfortunate end. XHTML 2.0 we never knew thee.

Hey that was my idea…

Published on 2 Jul 2009 at 10:22 pm. .
Filed under Web stuff.

Google recently created a new site dedicated to making the Web faster. This site site contains a few articles and video tutorials that are a very helpful resource that gathers advice by experts in the field of Web development. It was the Life’s Too Short - Write Faster Code video that I found particularly interesting. At the 38 minute mark the speaker brings up a module that is used by the dojo library to load Google Analytics faster. The snippet that he shows is a dojo version of the same type of code I posted in the Google Analytics forum for non-blocking GA load and later reitterated on SlashDot.

Do I think they ripped off my idea without any credit? No, I doubt that is the case. In fact looking at the Dojo Google Analytic revision page it seems that they came up with the idea in on August 17, 2008. I don’t recall when we deployed our version at work, but it was months before I posted the version on the Google Analytics forum. Regardless, the ideas were conceived independently from one another which I find fascinating. I don’t think I am a bad programmer by any means, but I didn’t know that I was so good that the techniques I have come up were considered good enough to present to the masses.

Collectability

Published on 2 Jul 2009 at 9:49 pm. .
Filed under Comics.

In a recent Cup O’ Joe article on Comic Book Resources a reader named Kristen had a particularly sad story to ask Joe Quesada, the head of the publishing division of Marvel Comics. Her brother had recently passed away and she had discovered his comic book collection dating back 60 years. This collection had numerous comics of great shape, but was dumbfounded upon the discovery of the first 14 issues of Spider-Girl was vacuum sealed to preserve the comic in mint condition.

The first issue of Spider-Girl has a cover date of October 1998, and despite a very vocal and loyal following (of which I am a part of said following and have every appearance of said character) the comic faced cancelation on numerous occasion only to be saved due to various campaigns across fandom or the use of publishing gimmicks to up sales on the book. It got to the point where Spider-Girl was finally officially cancelled and new stories of the character was moved to Marvel’s digital/online comic imprint where her stories are printed a few weeks later in the Amazing Spider-Man Family anthology comic. While there is some value to these 14 issues, everyone (including Quesada) agrees that this set of comics is an interesting choice of comics to preserve, presumably considering the value of other comics in there vastly exceeding these comics.

After speaking out on the negative stigma that collectability received due to the speculator boom in the mid-90’s Quesada had this to say:

For someone like Kristin’s brother who was an obvious fan of the medium, there is a whole other aspect to collectability. It sounds to me that he was like so many of us, who keep our comics or collect certain comics because we have an emotional attachment to them and or they remind us of a particular moment in time in our lives. I have a very small collection. It’s a collection that isn’t particularly worth much money. They’re mostly torn up books, not necessarily hallmark issues, but they mean something to me. I have the first three comics that my father bought me. They were three Spider-Man comics, and they’re all torn up and in terrible shape. I didn’t really keep them very well but I always kept them very close to my heart. They’re comics that I will give to my daughter, and hopefully she can give them to her kids if they last that long.

So, with respect to “Spider-Girl,” I don’t know what the market value is on those books, but it’s probably not a lot, but there are readers out there who do treasure May Day’s adventures. Perhaps Kristin’s brother may have taken extra care preserving them because perhaps those stories had a particular emotional connection with him or he saw something in those books that he wanted to preserve for a later date. Maybe he was saving them for a special moment – perhaps to hand them down to someone he thought might get a lot out of these comics.

While I have not gotten to the point where I have ever vacuum sealed any comics — in fact I do not yet have every one of my comics bagged and boarded, though every comic I have purchased for the last 6-7 years has been and I have worked my way up my collection to the “S”s bagged and boarded — I do indeed have numerous comics that I think back of fondly that do not have significant value. Interestingly enough, many of them coming from the Spider-Girl writer Tom DeFalco.  It was during his run on Fantastic Four that I began truly collecting and not just buying random issues I came across and thus why I am so lenient on that era of Fantastic Four, despite it being considered a poor run by many Fantastic Four fans. Which then explains why I was also a fan of DeFalco’s Spider-clone fiasco.  *

I must have read the story where Spider-Man’s gained the powers of Captain Universe about a dozen times when I was a child. It was such a novel concept for me as a child. Here we have Spider-Man, a down to Earth guy who is remarkably driven by guilt/responsibility (despite not being Catholic) who cracks jokes to make up for his own inadequacies and because a situation was so dire he was chosen as the random recipient of cosmic powers to battle a Tri-Sentinel. Honestly, it sounds corny as all heck, but I loved it back then. I didn’t get many comics at the time, but a comic shop did open up around me. At the time that time Marvel recent some trading cards. My Grandpa bought me a pack and it contained hologram card of cosmic powered Spider-Man! I went back and bought as many packs as I could because the holograms were so cool. I then read the stats and the background history on the characters and I was hooked. It got me back in and buying actual comics. I really wish I did not write on a few of those cards.

The Spider-Girl is a run of comics that means a great deal to me. These stories were told in a contemporary manner that harken back to many elements from the silver/bronze era. They are stories that work on numerous levels. They are stories that are appropriate for children that are intellectual enough that a young adult (or the adult collector) can consider them entertaining. I do feel that they would be great stories to read to a daughter to give her a great role model.

* This may seem like I am implying DeFalco was a bad writer, but this is not the truth. Unfortunately the speculator boom hit Marvel very hard and it was on the brink of or had to file bankruptcy during these eras and thus Marvel was forced to run wild with any concept that started to sell even relatively well. This meant that writers were being forced to keep coming up with ideas for something that may have legitimately only had a limited shelf-life. The Spider-clone storyline is considered the most infamous of such conundrums.

The new state of video on the Web

Published on 2 Jul 2009 at 8:34 pm. .
Filed under Web stuff.

The recent release of Mozilla Firefox 3.5 seems to have sparked a great deal of discussion about what codecs browsers should support with the newly added <video> element that was introduced in HTML5.

The believe behind the video element is that video has become so fundamental to the Web that it no longer makes sense to require users to install plug-ins such as Flash or Silverlight in order to watch files. The video element allows for sub elements such as a link to a file that the browser will play if it knows how to play it. It allows you to place other content inside of the tag as a fall back in case nothing can play it, or the browser does not support the video tag to begin with. This means that you could embed Flash (or Silverlight) to play the video if the video tag as a fallback, and barring that you can reference just the little bit more.

The OGG Theora codec is a royalty-free codec, while H.264 (as seen in mp4) is a proprietary codec that offers a higher quality video at a lower bitrate than OGG. Opera and Mozilla are hesitant about supporting H.264 due to licensing and distribution issues, while Apple does not seem to be interested in implementing OGG claiming they are worried concerned about patents. Google (who owns YouTube, which serves out files using H.264, but no OGG) actually supports both file formats in Google Chrome.  Microsoft’s recently released IE8 has no support for the video element.

To help keep things clear, here is a Venn diagram.

And yet print media is dying?

Published on 2 Jun 2009 at 8:48 pm. .
Filed under Politics, Rants.

From a recent CNN article.

Obama lost to Republican presidential candidate John McCain by 11 percentage points and close to 1 million votes. Still, that margin is less than more than half of what it was when the state’s favored son George W. Bush was on the presidential ballot.

Let me emphasize that again less than more than half. Really? This is what passes for journalism today in the online world? This is what is killing print media? What is that even trying to say? Wouldn’t less than more than half just be less than half? The Hell?

What’s in a browser?

Published on 24 May 2009 at 10:58 pm. .
Filed under Web stuff.

As the Internet becomes more and more engraved into our everyday lives, if you are going to do business over the Web, you should educate yourself on what goes into a browser and how those features can effect your overall business decisions. For the purpose of this article I shall cover the two features that are most influential to the development cycle for a Web site — the layout engine and the JavaScript engine.

The Layout Engine

The term layout engine (sometimes referred to as the rendering engine) is the part of the browser that formats what is placed on a Web page. In technical terms, it is the part of the browser that takes content that has been written in (X)HTML/XML and uses CSS to apply style (e.g. make header green or separate content into two or three columns) to said content. The purpose of separating content from presentation is that to reduce the size of Web pages (which will decrease the loading time of a page) and to decrease development/maintenance time.

Layout engines are not exclusive to Web browsers. Layout engines are commonly used by Internet-capable applications such as E-mail clients, Instant Messengers, and other applications that need to display Web content. While there are numerous Layout engines, the following are the most prevalent layout engines in use and a list of many key applications that use these engines.

The JavaScript Engine

The JavaScript engine portion of the Web browser is the portion that applies the behavior to a Web page.  A behavior would be some action that occurs on a Web page as a result of an action by the user. For example, replacing the main image in a photo gallery when the user clicks on or moves their mouse over a thumb nail image, or when a WYSIWYG editor is applied to a form input box.

Because of the push of Web applications inside the browser, the JavaScript engine is primarily maintained by the core developers behind the Web browser. For example, you’ll notice that both Safari and Google Chrome use WebKit as their layout engine, but Safari uses the SquirelFish JavaScript engine, while Google Chrome uses the V8 JavaScript engine. For completeness, here is a list of JavaScript engines and their primary Web browsers.

Market Share

As you can see from the above, there are a lot of different possibilities that can affect development. Because of this developers tend to create a support graph indicating what browsers are actively tested. This support graph is typically based off of market share — the percentage of use a product has in the market. Some developers go the extra mile to forcibly block browsers that do not meet said criteria. This is typically a short sighted process because you are artificially reducing your potential client base. For example, developers that allowed Safari were actively blocking Google Chrome for a time being, despite both browsers using the same layout engine.

When developing your personal support chart you need to take in to account what market you want to push your product currently, and where you want to be in the future. For example, Opera has less than 1% market share in North America, but makes up 36.14% market share in Russia.

Sports Columnist Doesn’t Know Difference Between Ovation and Lull

Published on 20 May 2009 at 8:55 pm. .
Filed under Wrestling.

During a recent article on WWE being kicked out of the Pepsi Center the columnist ended the article with this little tidbit:

Little more than a month ago, the WWE took in $52 million staging WrestleMania 25 in Houston, making it the highest-grossing one-day entertainment event so far this year. Judging by the applause, the crowd’s favorite moment came when actor Mickey Rourke, who received an Oscar nomination for portraying a washed-up wrestler struggling to hang on, knocked WWE star Chris Jericho with a single punch.

Apparently said writer was never taught the definition of applause. See for most people when they judge something by applause they are usually talking about what got the most applause, not the least. The whole Mickey Rourke thing was just to get free publicity, it wasn’t about building the most electrifying moment of the night — the Shawn Michaels vs. Undertaker match.

Bush raises 100 mil for library

Published on 4 May 2009 at 9:42 pm. .
Filed under Politics.

Yeah, it may be a library dedicated to his presidency so it’s not totally selfless, but it is still a worthwhile endevor. Something that any President should have. Good job.