Category Archives: Articles

Happy as a Free-Range Chicken

As Spring nears, we begin to plan yet another year of vegetable growing. But are chickens finally in our future? How happy can we make them and how does a happy chicken taste?

How to re-crawl with Nutch

Have you ever wondered how Apache Nutch decides how often to crawl your sites? Learn how Adaptive Fetch Schedule works.

Google Adopts Anti-Gun Policy

Internet giant Google has adopted a new and discriminatory policy with respect to the advertising of firearms, ammunition and related products. The change affects the firm’s “Google Shopping” function.

Liberty Threatened

Bill Gates is the world’s richest person, but what kind of power does he have over you? Can he force your kid to go to a school you do not want him to attend? Can he deny you the right to braid hair in your home for a living? It turns out that a local politician, who might deny us the right to earn a living and dictates which school our kid attends, has far greater power over our lives than any rich person.

Introduction to Ext.Direct

Evan Trimboli of the Ext-JS team just published an article describing Ext.Direct, a remoting API that is part of Ext 3.0.

Persistent Storage for Web Apps

Brad Neuberg talks about the latest ways to achieve browser-based client-side storage and how it can help you make better web apps.

Image Optimization, AlphaImageLoader

TweetThis article, part 5 of a series on image optimization, talks about the use of transparent PNGs with IE6 and why the AlphaImageLoader hack is bad and a very interesting solution This installment of the image optimization series is about the IE-proprietary AlphaImageLoader CSS filter, which developers often use as a workaround to solve transparency [...]

WPA Cracked, Sort Of

TweetArstechnica has a great explanation of the issue. Academic researchers have found an exploitable hole in a popular form of wireless networking encryption. The hole is in a part of 802.11i that forms the basis of WiFi Protected Access (WPA), so it could affect routers worldwide. German graduate student Erik Tews will present a paper [...]

Ext-JS 3.0 Showcases Visual Designer, Updates Roadmap

TweetJack Slocum has posted a screencast of the visual designer tool that will be part of upcoming release of Ext. The roadmap for version 3, due out in the first quarter of 2009, has also been updated. Here is what we can expect (I am really interested in the ones in bold): All new lightweight, [...]