obfuscated.org

I spent Thursday and Friday at work essentially without fingers. Well, I had fingers, but only one useful hand of them. Interestingly enough, I learned that I’m at least in the short term incapable of hunt-and-peck typing. Finger muscle memory takes over when I try and everything goes all crazy-go-nuts. Not a good time.

My original plan for my convalescence was to go charge a book on JavaScript to the company account and see if I couldn’t learn a bit about a language that I’m likely going to use for an upcoming project. However I don’t know what the good JavaScript books are, and walking to the book store is a lot more work than surfing the internet, so I checked for good online resources.

It turns out that there are many. In particular, Yahoo!’s YUI team has put together large collection of videos about JavaScript. I watched videos of three of Douglas Crockford’s lectures: “The JavaScript Programming Language,” “An Inconvenient API: The Theory of the DOM” and “Advanced JavaScript.” All three were good lectures. They were, for shots of a lecture about a programming language, well produced, and Crockford’s talks were well structured. I got a lot more out of the first talk than the other two, but that could arguably be couched more as a compliment for the introduction video than a knock on the other two, as I felt like I knew the language pretty well after it. (I’d never used the language seriously before.)

I didn’t get too far in to any of the other videos, but there are a ton of them there, so there’s got to be at least a few more good ones. If you’re looking to pick up JavaScript, I can recommend the YUI Theater as a good place to start.

Holy mail wars, Batman! The ‘Hoo is offering $10/head for new mail users. From Jay-Z’s blog:

Oh, I should also mention that if you build the next kill application and convince people to use it and upgrade to the premium version of Yahoo! Mail, we’ll pay you $10 per user. The sky’s the limit on how cool your mail front-end can be. We’ll handle the infrastructure.

So, first off: Damn. That’s a lot of cash. Says something about their belief that somebody out there can build the better mail trap. Although I’d hate to be on the Yahoo mail client team right about now.

I mean, I know the answer: so they can get you to click through to the page and look at some banner ads. But seriously. Does that really fit in with what they’re trying to do with things like Pipes?

In related news Fake Steve went back to full feeds, so there is some justice in the universe.

So Jill mentions a blog that from time to time posts weekend things to do with the family. This is braggable. I’m always looking out for that sort of thing.

However, the site doesn’t seem to have per-category RSS feeds. (That, or I’m just too lazy to find them.) I’d like to read about things to do, but the main content of the blog — wireless technology — is something that I have a real hard time getting in to. This struck me as a fine opportunity to give Y!Pipes a go.

Man was it easy. Enter the URL in to a box that sounds like it will pull the data down and up pops a debugger to tell me what it’s found. There’s a handily-named “filter” box that will do what you expect. Drag the little bits from one box to the next — the “what does the pipe produce now” debugging output always current — and you’re done.

I usually can’t say enough snarky things about my former employer, but I have to give them credit here. Pipes really is cool, very well implemented and stunningly easy to use. This is easily the most well-executed Web 2.0 “version one” that I’ve ever used. Kudos, Yahoo.

With three zillion trillion dollars burning a hole it its pocket, Google decided to purchase YouTube, the popular internet lawsuit magnet.

Oct. 9 (Bloomberg) — Google Inc., the most-used Internet search engine, agreed to buy YouTube Inc. for $1.65 billion, adding the largest video-sharing site on the Web and an audience that watches more than 100 million clips a day.

Expect Yahoo! to respond by flying Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch in for an emergency all-hands* concert and beer bash.

* Sunnyvale campus only

No, wait: it’s because I can. Big difference, I guess.

So, Valleywag. I don’t read it regularly, but whenever somebody cool posts a link to it I follow the link. Waxy posted one today to a piece called The Anatomy of a Google Product Cycle. Hi-Lar-I-Ous. First off, consider the use of the word “googletards.” That’s priceless comedy gold. The whole thing is funny, and smacks of absolute truth.

47 Days Later

Zawodny blogs; laments that Yahoo had this idea in 1999; considers quitting; instead posts excel spread sheets cataloging (a) his weight loss (b) his Cessna’s mileage.

YOU CAN’T HAVE A GOOGLE PRODUCT CYCLE WITHOUT ZAWODNY TALKING ABOUT IT. Why has nobody pointed this out before?

Anyway, it made me laugh. So there you go.

Two brief pieces of nerd news today. One is silly and the other is extrodinarily cool. Cool first: Tej and the rest of the Buzz Game crew at YRL got a nice shoutout on TechCrunch for their Y! “hack day” entry. Hey, it turns out that Yahoo has smart people in Burbank after all. Who knew? Second, amusingly, Business 2.0 lists Ruby on Rails creator DHH as #34 on their list of “People who matter”. Bezos, Ellison, Oprah and the EFF come in after 34.

Yahoo, my esteemed former employer, is training a monkey to fiddle with gadgets. This is the Best Thing Ever. Google, watch out. (The monkey even has a Flickr account, which is braggable.)

So Microsoft has a browser update and they’ve built a search box in to it. Woo, woo, toot toot, beep beep. I still won’t use it. Not surprisingly, the search box defaults to MSN search. Go figure. It’s their browser. Google is all different sorts of fussy about this, claiming that somehow Microsoft is limiting its users choice. (From everything I’ve read, it’s not exactly difficult to switch search engines in IE version whatever.)

Yahoo’s J-Z has an amusing writeup on how Google really does need to shave its ass about browser search engine “choice.”

First off, I agree that companies should compete based on quality. But Microsoft and McDonald’s are both shining examples of how that’s not necessarily the way it works when “the market” is involved in the decision making. Price and convenience tend to trump quality.

However, if that’s what Google or Marissa really believe, why did they enter into an agreement that’d result in paying $1 billion to Dell Computer in exchange for a Googlized web browser on the computers they ship?

Right! Because many users don’t choose. And Google decided to take advantage of that fact.

Now that Microsoft is doing the same, it’s suddenly a big deal.

Cry me a river…

OK, even I’m getting bored of these. It’s not quite outrage fatigue, but it’s similar.

Surprise surprise, Yahoo drops a dime on yet another Chinese dissadent.

News implicating Yahoo in the imprisonment of Jiang Lijun in 2003 surfaced on the eve of a summit between Chinese President Hu Jintao and President Bush in Washington.

It was the third such case involving the U.S. Internet giant.

So, yeah. Boo on you, Yahoo. Way to stand up for the little guy.

I not I’ve not stated it explicitly before, always assuming that it was just understood. In case this was a mistake, I’ll be clear here: while Yahoo — and Google, and whoever else — clearly isn’t the good guy in the whole China situation, they’re not the bad guy, either. China is very clearly the bad guy. They’re the ones who need to clean up their act and stop doing stuff like imprisoning its citizens for questioning the government.