turnings

Macworld: News: With Web 2.0, a new breed of malware evolves: Until recently botnets would always look for commands on a pre-allocated IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel but now distributed RSS-based command-and-control networks are coming into favor, Huang said. This makes it much harder for law enforcement to take down the computers that are actually sending the instructions to the botnet machines.
[Ooops.]

Tips for presenting your work: Even the best designers in the world need to know a couple of things about presenting their work and managing a client/designer relationship. [Concise.]
Source: Vitamin Interviews

iPhone Web Developer Sample Code: Mark Malone’s web site has some terrific demos of MobileSafari web design techniques. Things like creating iPhone-style buttons, changing the tap highlight color to something other than gray, fixing divs to the top and bottom of the viewport, and much more. A veritable gold mine.
[Gold mine indeed...]
Source: Daring Fireball

CSS 3: A Giant Serving Of FAIL:

In my “Standards Heresy” talk I noted pretty bluntly that CSS 3 is a joke. A sad, sick joke being perpetrated by people who clearly don’t build actual web apps. If the preponderance of the working group did, we’d already have useful things like behavioral CSS being turned into recommendations and not turds like CSS namespaces and CSS Print Profile. And I’m not even sure if the “Advanced” Layouts cluster-fsck should be mentioned for the fear that more people might actually look at it. You’d expect an “advanced layouts” module to give us hbox and vbox behaviors or a grid layout model or stretching…but no, the “answer” apparently is ascii art. No, I’m not making this up. It’s sad commentary that you can propose this kind of dreck at the W3C and get taken seriously.

Beyond what’s obviously wrong with the avenues being (inexplicably) pursued, there’s a lot to read into what’s not being worked on. Namely the serious and myriad problems with the basics of how CSS rules are written and applied.

[We were discussing this just yesterday... CSS is really a mess. I wonder if the browser folks could be talked in to supporting something more grounded in people's needs?]
Source: Continuing Intermittent Incoherency

Making the OpenSocial API feel more at home:

Chris Chabot has been doing a lot of experimentation with the new OpenSocial APIs. He has written up his experience and created two prototype wrappers.

The first short article has some general information and background.

The second article includes the first library you can tell to load (owner, viewer, ownerFriends and/or
viewerFriends) information, and presents this information in an uniform way (instead of having to do different type of calls for different information fields) and with proper consistent error handling. With it you can very easily create your first OpenSocial container application in a friendly prototype style environment. You can take a direct look at the library itself.

The third article contains a Ajax.Request implementation, since Prototype’s version won’t work well or even at all in the cross domain environment of open social containers, it allows you to re-use your current Prototype based programs by trying to mimic Prototype’s Ajax call as well as possible given the constraints of the situation. Under the hood, _IG_FetchContent is used to talk back to the server.

It is good to see people take the raw APIs and make them feel more like their library of choice.

[Hmmm.]
Source: Ajaxian