Read a lot of news articles or blog postings online? Have trouble keeping your place in long articles, or switching between articles and forgetting how much you've read? Get annoyed at having to slam repeatedly on the down arrow, or click on the scroll bar every few seconds?

Introducing Paragrasp, an extension for Mozilla Firefox, to alleviate your problems. It adds a highlight to the current paragraph you're reading, and allows you to use simple keyboard shortcuts to navigate forward or backward, moving the highlight and automatically scrolling the window to focus your reading attention to the center of the screen. Each window and tab has their own highlighter, which allows you to switch between them while still keeping your place. Try it now!

Paragrasp

All right: a rant. If you're like me, you dine out with friends quite a bit. And just as often, you find your meal sullied by the complex task of splitting the bill.

Sounds like somebody needs tabjab.

Splitting the check [this is broken]

The JIT is an advanced JavaScript infovis toolkit based on 5 papers about different information visualization techniques.

The JIT implements advanced features of information visualization like Treemaps (with the slice and dice and squarified methods), an adapted visualization of trees based on the Spacetree, a focus+context technique to plot Hyperbolic Trees, and a radial layout of trees with advanced animations (RGraph).

JavaScript Information Visualization Toolkit (JIT)

As the Web continues to evolve and more of our lives move online, we believe that Web browsers like Firefox can and should do more to broker rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information.

One important area for exploration is the blending of the desktop and the Web through deeper integration of the browser with online services.

We’re now launching a new project within Mozilla Labs to formally explore this integration. This project will be known as Weave and it will focus on finding ways to enhance the Firefox user experience, increase user control over personal information, and provide new opportunities for developers to build innovative online experiences.

Just like Mozilla enables massive innovation by making Firefox open on many levels, we will aim to do the same with Weave by developing an open extensible framework for services integration.

Mozilla Labs: Introducing Weave

I'm a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). My research background is in online games and immersive virtual reality. I am interested in social interaction and self-representation in virtual environments. You can find out more about my work and what I do for fun with the links on the right.

Nick Yee's HomePage

I finally got to see Topo's presentation this week-end at PH-Neutral and discuss it with him and FX.

Given that the slides aren't online yet [1], that Core hasn't published Topo's technical paper on their website [2] yet either, and that I'm done replying to direct inquiries about it [3], here's a summary of the IOS rootkit saga and its impact on the Service Provider community (from my point of view :)

Topo spent a lot of time (and if you ever loaded an IOS image in IDA you know what I'm talking about) analyzing strings and functions in IOS. In his proof of concept he located the code doing the password check and adds a trampoline to his backdoor code (by saving paramaters, glueing the two codes together, doing the "new" password check and returning properly to the main code path). Nice lesson on 101 hooking on IOS.

IOS Rookit: the sky isn't falling (yet)

Wednesday Yahoo announced they have a built a petascale, distributed relational database. In Yahoo Claims Record With Petabyte Database, the details are thin but they built on the PostgreSQL relational database system. In Size matters: Yahoo claims 2-petabyte database is world's biggest, busiest, the system is described as an over 2 petabyte repository of user click stream and context data with an update rate for 24 billion events per day. Waqar Hasan, VP of Engineering at Yahoo! Data group, describes the system as updated in real time and live – essentially a real time data warehouse where changes go in as they are made and queries always run against the most current data. I strongly suspect they are bulk parsing logs and the data is being pushed into the system in large bulk units but, even near real time at this update rate, is impressive.

The original work was done at a Seattle startup called Mahat Technologies acquired by Yahoo! in November 2005.

Petascale SQL DB at Yahoo!

Fast Interview: Earthmine co-founder John Ristevski talks about competing with Google and the first consumer applications for this space-age technology.

Just Around The Corner: The First 3D Map | Fast Company

The AJAX Libraries API is a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popular open source JavaScript libraries. By using the Google AJAX API Loader's google.load() method, your application has high speed, globaly available access to a growing list of the most popular JavaScript open source libraries including:

* jQuery
* prototype
* script.aculo.us
* MooTools
* dojo

Google works directly with the key stake holders for each library effort and accept the latest stable versions as they are released. Once we host a release of a given library, we are committed to hosting that release indefinitely.

The AJAX Libraries API takes the pain out of developing mashups in JavaScript while using a collection of libraries. We take the pain out of hosting the libraries, correctly setting cache headers, staying up to date with the most recent bug fixes, etc.

AJAX Libraries API

Most 2D-maps are used to represent topographic metrics: distances and areas measured on the map (multiplied by the map scale) give traveling distances and land surfaces. In some cases, this information is irrelevant or even misleading [see an example]. As a cartographer, you may wish to use map metrics to represent other data, such as human populations or amounts of produced resources. This is what ScapeToad is for.

ScapeToad - cartogram software by the Choros laboratory