Three years on, I can't argue the point: JavaScript now works. Just look around you on the web.

Well, to a point. We can no longer luxuriate in the -- and to be clear, I mean this ironically -- golden age of Internet Explorer 6. We live in a brave new era of increasing browser competition, and that's a good thing. Yes, JavaScript is now mature enough and ubiquitous enough and fast enough to be a viable client programming runtime. But this vibrant browser competition also means there are hundreds of aggravating differences in JavaScript implementations between Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Firefox. And that's just the big four. It is excruciatingly painful to write and test your complex JavaScript code across (n) browsers and (n) operating systems. It'll make you pine for the good old days of HTML 4.0 and CGI.

But now something else is happening, something arguably even more significant than "JavaScript now works". The rise of commonly available JavaScript frameworks means you can write to higher level JavaScript APIs that are guaranteed to work across multiple browsers. These frameworks spackle over the JavaScript implementation differences between browsers, and they've (mostly) done all the ugly grunt work of testing their APIs and validating them against a host of popular browsers and plaforms.

The JavaScript Ninjas have delivered their secret and ultimate weapon: common APIs. They transform working with JavaScript from an unpleasant, write-once-debug-everywhere chore into something that's actually -- dare I say it -- fun.

Secrets of the JavaScript Ninjas

Charles Kettering, writing in 1929:

What then, has happened to the car?

"People's minds will have been changed; improvements will come in other cars; new styles will have come. What you have here today, a car that you call 'the best that can be made,' will then be useless. So it isn't the best that can be made. It may be the best you can have made and, if that is what you meant, I have no quarrel with what you said. ..."

Change, to a research engineer, is improvement. People, though don't seem to think of it in that manner. When a change is suggested they hold back and say, "What we have is all right—it does the work." Doing the work is important but doing it better is more important. The human family in industry is always looking for a park bench where it can sit down and rest. But the only park benches I know of are right in front of an undertaker's establishment.

There are no places where anyone can sit and rest in an industrial situation. It is a question of change, change, change, all the time—and it is always going to be that way. It must always be that way for the world only goes along one road, the road to progress. Nations and industries that have become satisfied with themselves and their ways of doing things, don't last. While they are sitting back and admiring themselves other nations and other concerns have forgotten the looking-glasses and have been moving ahead . ...

The younger generation—and by that I mean the generation that is always coming—knows what it wants and it will get what it wants. This is what makes for change. It brings about improvements in old things and developments in new things.

If everyone were satisfied, no one would buy the new thing because no one would want it. The ore wouldn't be mined; timber wouldn't be cut. Almost immediately hard times would be upon us.

You must accept this reasonable dissatisfaction with what you have and buy the new thing, or accept hard times. You can have your choice.

From the archive:

I've come to the conclusion that you actually want shifty, dishonest politicians elected by an apathetic populace. This means that things are working.

I'm confident that technology has improved the resources available to people if/when they choose to act. So far they don't need to, largely. Don't wish for times when they do.

Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied

The purpose of this document is to help developers (and their managers) work with the development community with a minimum of frustration. It is an attempt to document how this community works in a way which is accessible to those who are not intimately familiar with Linux kernel development (or, indeed, free software development in general). While there is some technical material here, this is very much a process-oriented discussion which does not require a deep knowledge of kernel programming to understand.

How to Participate in the Linux Community

The Testing mafia goes to college.

Imagine this proposal:

First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."

Cruel, not to say insane. But that's the system we have in place.

The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees.

Consider these items from the archive:

In a digitally connected, rapidly evolving world, we must transcend the traditional Cartesian models of learning that prescribe “pouring knowledge into somebody’s head." We learn through our interactions with others and the world ...

Perhaps the formal curriculum of schools will encompass both a minimal core “that gets at the essence of critical thinking,” paired with “passion-based learning,” where kids connect to niche communities on the web, deeply exploring certain subjects.

As opportunities for innovation and growth migrate to the peripheries of companies, industries, and the global economy, efficiency will no longer be enough to sustain competitive advantage. The only sustainable advantage in the future will come from an institutional capacity to work closely with other highly specialized firms to get better faster.

It's not just what you know, but how you think.

For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time

As networks become ever more complex, securing them becomes more and more difficult. The solution is visualization. Using today’s state-of-the-art data visualization techniques, you can gain a far deeper understanding of what’s happening on your network right now. You can uncover hidden patterns of data, identify emerging vulnerabilities and attacks, and respond decisively with countermeasures that are far more likely to succeed than conventional methods.

In Applied Security Visualization, leading network security visualization expert Raffael Marty introduces all the concepts, techniques, and tools you need to use visualization on your network. You’ll learn how to identify and utilize the right data sources, then transform your data into visuals that reveal what you really need to know. Next, Marty shows how to use visualization to perform broad network security analyses, assess specific threats, and even improve business compliance.

He concludes with an introduction to a broad set of visualization tools. The book’s CD also includes DAVIX, a compilation of freely available tools for security visualization.

Applied Security Visualization

"Home prices in the U.S. are likely to start to stabilize or touch bottom sometime in the first half of 2009," he said in an interview. Tracing a jagged curve with his finger on a tabletop to underscore the difficulty in pinpointing the precise trough, he cautioned that even at a bottom, "prices could continue to drift lower through 2009 and beyond."

He did offer one suggestion: "The most effective initiative, though politically difficult, would be a major expansion in quotas for skilled immigrants," he said. The only sustainable way to increase demand for vacant houses is to spur the formation of new households. Admitting more skilled immigrants, who tend to earn enough to buy homes, would accomplish that while paying other dividends to the U.S. economy.

Greenspan Sees Bottom In Housing

What is a perceptual hash?

A perceptual hash is a fingerprint of an audio, video or image file that is mathematically based on the audio or visual content contained within. Unlike usual hash functions that rely on the avalanche effect of small changes in input leading to drastic changes in the output, perceptual hashes are "close" to one another if the inputs are visually or auditorily similar. As a result, perceptual hashes must also be robust enough to take into account transformations that could have been performed on the input, such as rotation, skew, altering contrast, etc. All of these properties make perceptual hashes a very interesting computer science problem to study.

What is pHash?

pHash is an open source library released under the GPLv3 license that implements several perceptual hashing algorithms and provides a C++ API to use those functions in your own programs.

pHash, the perceptual hash extraction library

War Nerd:

There are three basic facts to keep in mind about the smokin’ little war in Ossetia:

1. The Georgians started it.
2. They lost.
3. What a beautiful little war!

For me, the most important is #3, the sheer beauty of the video clips that have already come out of this war. I’m in heaven right now.

South Ossetia, The War of My Dreams

"I need data for my blade server!"

In the curious way of technological evolution, we first had computers that occupied entire rooms, watched them shrink to desktop, laptop and palm-sized devices, and now find ourselves coming full circle, and then some, Alan Benner reports. He tells this MIT class about warehouse-sized data centers, linking processors, and ensembles of processors, in dizzyingly complex hierarchies. These gigantic operations, some with their own power and air conditioning plants, are central to the enterprise of Internet behemoths Google, Amazon and YouTube, but have not yet percolated out to more traditional companies like insurance firms -- a situation Benner and his IBM colleagues would like to remedy.

Benner describes in broad strokes how these data operations are organized into levels of “virtualization and consolidation,” where the hardware is hidden, yet the data is both fully accessible and secure, no matter where the user and the computers are located. These new enterprise data centers aim to maximize efficiency, both in utilization and power consumption. It’s better to have fewer, bigger and well-integrated machines, says Benner, working as much as possible. Since even idle servers use a lot of power, users should share processing time in a manner that keeps the processors occupied. Benner describes computer architecture and software that aims at “statistically multiplexing jobs,” matching peaks in one group’s workload to nonpeaks in another group’s. Ideally, users remain blissfully unaware of this traffic management, and need never worry whether their information is getting crunched next door, or on the other side of the planet.

Benner hopes that companies will see advantages in migrating their data and services to a bigger, shared infrastructure, especially now with the near-ubiquity of high bandwidth networks. Given the rapid rise of energy costs, and the burdens of supporting a growing IT administration, it may save money “to move work to where it can be done most efficiently,” he says.

See also:

I want to stress that last point because there is no denying it: the system failed. The active wrong-doing detailed in the two joint reports was not systemic in that only a few people were directly implicated in it. But the failure was systemic in that the system – the institution – failed to check the behavior of those who did wrong.

A Roadmap for the Edge of the Internet

Who doesn't love a tasty skewer of roasted author, now and then?

Despite its thrilling material, “Kingmakers” gets off to a slow start. Although Meyer and Brysac are strong on the texture and detail of historical events, they simply do not appear to be very interested in the early part of their story about British imperialism. The first few chapters are a patchwork of glamorous and entertaining anecdotes without much to hold them together. The authors stray into lengthy digressions, some of which — like a five-page diversion into the filming of “Lawrence of Arabia” — tend to have the same effect on the flow of their story as Lawrence’s bombs had on the Ottoman railways.

These weak chapters show up the worst of Meyer and Brysac’s writing style, which is sometimes pretentious to the point of incomprehensibility and becomes more so when they seem to lack interest in their subject matter. The thesaurus takes a battering: Meyer and Brysac will not have half of something if they can have a moiety; they will not give a gift if they can give a lagniappe; they will not quote a saying if they can quote an apothegm.

Sometimes it’s almost impossible to make out what they mean, as when Gladstone is said to have “habitually lofted oratorical rockets into the unassailable empyrean,” when all the poor man actually did was to answer a few questions. Or when the British agent St. John Philby is said “to glare at the world through his owlish shrubbery.” What is owlish shrubbery? A shrubbery full of owls? A shrubbery shaped like an owl? A prop from Monty Python? As to what glaring through such a thing might signify, this reviewer is at a loss to imagine.

See also:

The book is subtly subtitled “A Novel of December 8th” to signal its attention to the Japanese point of view. On the basis of that detail, you might expect a high level of fastidiousness from “Pearl Harbor.”

And you would be spectacularly wrong. Because you would find phrases like “to withdraw backward was impossible,” sounds like “wretching noises” to accompany vomiting, or constructions like “incredulous as it seemed, America had not reacted.” Although the book has two authors, it could have used a third assigned to cleanup patrol.

From the archive:

And yes, it's also true that whenever Gingrich utters the word "frankly," the words that follow almost always involve rank deception. And frankly, he says "frankly" a lot.

Meddle East