Gmail gets a JavaScript facelift

Gmail gets a JavaScript facelift: As one small example, one team member reverse-engineered jscript.dll to figure out how its GC algorithm worked, and was horrified to find that it had hard-coded, arbitrary limits on how many objects could be allocated before a GC would occur. This led to an insane amount of effort optimizing the code to reduce the number of allocations in core code paths. [More good info in the article and links.]
Source: Ajaxian

We accidentally marketed ourselves into a corner

We accidentally marketed ourselves into a corner: First, I’d figure out how to teach parents to understand what really matters and what doesn’t about time spent in high school and the choice of a college. Second, I’d push for every selective college to share one application and do a draft similar to the one they do for medical residencies. Every applicant ranks the schools they’d like to attend, in order. Every school considers all the applications, grabs the students they’d love to have in priority order, puts the rest into the “good enough” pile and lets a computer sort em all out as pareto optimally as possible. At least kids will go into their twenties correctly blaming a computer instead of mistakenly blaming themselves. [I thinking about a lot of these isues as we search for Noah’s second school (that’s right, second school and he’s 2.5 years old. Don’t get me started… sigh.]
Source: Seth’s Blog

Jackass of the Week: NBC Universal’s Jeff Zucker

Jackass of the Week: NBC Universal’s Jeff Zucker: NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker claims Apple “destroyed the music business in terms of pricing”. As John Paczkowski points out, the going rate for digital downloads pre-iTunes was zero. Zero.

So while they sit around until hell freezes over waiting for Apple to voluntarily just start sharing iPod hardware profits with entertainment companies for no good reason whatsoever, that’s what they’re going to get for video now, too: zero.

[There’s a lot of entrenched thinking around “content”. More here. Disclosure: Oxygen, the company I work for was bought by NBC Universal.]
Source: Daring Fireball

Javascript battles

Brendan’s Roadmap Updates: Open letter to Chris Wilson: Everything that has been done to advance JavaScript to the proposed ECMAScript 4th Edition (ES4) in Ecma TC39-TG1 has been in the open for well over a year, first via the es4-discuss mailing list (complete archive) and exports of our group’s wiki, along with public talks I’ve given. Then by ecmascript.org hosting the reference implementation for ES4 as proposed, along with our public trac database. And finally by the whole wiki being fully opened up and hosted live — including Microsoft’s “ES3.1” proposals. [Hmmm.]
Source:

Eye-Fi Releases Wireless SD Memory Card

Eye-Fi Releases Digital Camera Wireless SD Memory Card | Laughing Squid: Eye-Fi has just announced the release of their new wireless SD memory card for digital cameras. The card, which they have been beta testing over the last year and a half, connects your local wi-fi network and automatically uploads photos stored on the card to your computer or to one of 17 online photo sharing services and social networks. The 2GB SD card is now available and is priced at $99.99.[Nice. I’ve been waiting over a year for this product to be released… now to see if they got the details right…]
Source:

The joy of refactoring

Sooo you might remember that I happily refactored a site to use Seth’s custom javascript events. (I believe they have since been wound into prototype core, if you’re going to implement them now.) Anyway, recently we had a number of changes that needed to tie into various user actions, and since they were already custom events from back in February, creating the new classes and having them listen to the events, or in one case adding a new event to a pre-existing class and it’s subclasses took almost no time. I love when that happens. Thanks Seth!