Safari’s Date()

A coworker and I wrote a flurry of Javascript recently for Firefox and IE. Soon afterwards I switched my work machine to a G4 Powerbook and I wanted to make our code run in Safari. I came across this funny bug.

Normally, this code:
Date(“10/31/2005 09:30:00 AM”);

gives you a nice Date object initialized to the date you’d expect. For some reason Safari freaks out when it sees this and gives you the 1901 default date.

Pumpkin Stencils!!

In time for your weekend pumpkin carving, Zombie Pumpkins has a fantastic selection of geeky and traditional stencils. It makes me think that I should buy a couple of pumpkins so I can carve one Mario and one Luigi. Maybe some WoW characters too.

Flock Preview

Flock is out now and my impression is that they are on the right track. Some people feel that Flock is nothing more than a VC funded bag of buzz words. They’ve got tagging, social bookmarking, blogging and Firefox all mixed together and at a first glance it could look like a desperate attempt to be really on top of the hip tech du jour.

However, there is some substance to what they are doing. Look at the “Shelf” tool and the built-in blog tool, you’ll see some innovation taking shape. I’m authoring this post in Flock right now. The image above was dragged from a wikipedia page and dropped into my shelf. I then dragged it into this blog post. Same goes for the link to Flock above and this quote below (which it properly cites for me):

You can easily blog interesting web content with Flock, in just a few clicks.

Flock

All of this is done without touching any markup and without having to go out of context by logging into my weblog. I never leave the content that I’m writing about. It’s a sweet user experience and I wish I had something like this when I was blogging for joystiq.com.

They’ve also got this concept of a Topbar, which is basically another container for browsing and using data held at other services. Currently Flickr is the only topbar that seems to work well but it’s clear that you could go far with this concept. I would expect to see a nice amazon topbar from them soon. As an example, I’ll include a picture from my photostream by just dragging it into the post:

This is the direction personal publishing needs to go. The simplicity of it all is addictive. Do these features have to go into a customized version of Firefox to be effective? No, they’d work at least as well as Konfabulator widgets or some other net-enabled chunk of client code, but Flock deserves credit for putting the idea into action. I’m looking forward to see what else they add into the shelf and blogging tools. What they’ve shown drives home the point that all these open APIs can be used to weld together some really nice user experiences.

Edonkey’s future

In A Hard Ride for eDonkey they talk about the explosive dominance of eDonkey and it’s current situation after the grokster ruling:

eDonkey, which had roared past Grokster to become the most popular service in the world. In fact, while few people over 30 have heard of eDonkey, file-sharing on its network accounts for more than one-third of the volume of data sent over the Web, estimates researcher CacheLogic. On average, 3 million people are using its software at any one time to share music and movies

What a long way eDonkey has come. When Jed was first making the software that would become eDonkey, I remember discussing the ridiculous name eDonkey and how I liked it anyways. “Harness the power of 2000 electric donkeys” was his slogan. This was about 5 years ago when Jed and I both lived in San Francisco. What a ridiculous idea I thought, building another p2p file sharing program when there were already so many. After all, Napster was about to go down in flames, surely the rest would be doomed.

I can’t help but look at the eD2k network and just be amazed at the number of users and the amount of data. Originally, the first server was run out of my bedroom in Lower Haight. Jed’s server software had a nasty memory leak so it would periodically freak out my linux box and need to be restarted. Sometimes, I wanted the bandwith to play quake, so I’d shut the server down without telling him. After an hour or so my ping times would shoot up and I’d find that he’d logged in and started it back up again. It took months before the server would hit 1000 users, it was just abou there that the server would crash and need a restart.

Now the network has hundreds of servers reliably serving millions of users at a time. I’m glad they are working out a deal to make the network legitimate. It’s a win-win for everyone, no one has as many users and for large files (movies) it’s a great method of distrobution. It’d be a shame to see something built from scratch be shut down. The article does get “it” though. It doesn’t matter if you shut down the company. The users will keep the network alive as long as it’s useful.

It’s just so cool that so many people love what he built.

Gamer Language

This is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while. If you are a WoWzer or any MMO you should get a kick out of it. It’s a little subtitled slideshow done as an animated gif.

This is a really entertaining example of the language that’s evolved around online gaming. Some of what’s said is completely WoW-speak, words that only make sense in the context of the game itself. The frame where the orc appears with the text “Kek” is a good and funny example of this. (See the Azeroth project for more on Alliance Common and Horde Common)

Other words are commonly used online and are part of a lexicon used by youth. Some of the words have now undergone several mutations already. For example the term for new users unfamiliar with the mechanics of the environment has evolved from “newbie” to “noob” or “n00b” to it’s current state as “nub”. The changes are not only seen in the spelling of the words but in how they are pronounced. This is due to the increased use of voice chat programs like Teamspeak2(ts2) and Ventrilo(vent).

Here’s a quick run down of some of the words and phrases used in the little mashup above:

LFG – looking for group, used to annouced that you are looking for a group to join for accomplishing an in game task

wtf – what the fuck?

aggro – The attention of an in game monster.

nub – new player or someone who behaves like a new player

lfm – looking for more players to join my group

rez – ressurect

kek – In WoW, characters speaking in a language you don’t understand will be displayed to you as garbage. “Kek” is a common garbling of horde-speak in game.

carrot on a stick – item which makes your horse (or any mountable animal) run faster

“i think he’s a ninja” – a ninja is a player who steals items from other players