While most developers are proficient in several languages, today's economic climate coupled with advances in technology has meant that oftentimes developers need to pick up a new language quickly. And although most developers are typically fluent in the security issues surrounding their specific languages and do their best to ensure that the code they produce is secure, security vulnerabilities in new language environments may not be as well understood.
Enter Fortify, a software security company that has organized security issues by both vulnerability category and by language so developers can easily ascertain the types of errors that have an impact on security.
Dave Winer yesterday announced EC2 for Poets, a step-by-step guide to help you create a server on Amazon's EC2. His how-to is so easy to understand that we had our own server up and running within the hour. Sure, it may not seem like much that this fairly uninteresting page is sitting out there somewhere, but for this writer, it was an amazing coup.
"It's time to stop thinking about these servers as being things for geeks and start thinking about them as things for people with ideas," Winer said in a podcast roadmap he created for this work. The technology available today is enabling anyone with even the slightest technical bent to get out there and create amazing new things; often taking the technology in directions than the company which created it could have ever imagined.
Your browser doesn't have to be the boss of you - if you're a Firefox user there are a wold of different ways you can change how it displays your favorite websites. One of the most powerful is Greasemonkey, a plug-in that lets you install other little plug-ins ("scripts") that change the functionality or appearance of a wide variety of sites.
Greasemonkey is easy to use, fast and powerful. Most scripts are hosted and discussed at Userscripts.org, but that site can be a little overwhelming. In the past week, 375 scripts were added or updated. We looked through them all and picked out the best 5. Below we've also posted a screencast that will get you started harmlessly hacking your browser with Greasemonkey in under 5 minutes.
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we cover the iPhone OS 3.0 announcement, review the highlights from Microsoft's MIX event, look at Facebook's new privacy controls, check out some cutting edge web-based books, analyze the latest social media and Twitter stats, and more. Also we look at a featured story from Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb's new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.
Hotshots, rock stars, geek heroes - many of us follow a lot of the same people online. But who do they pay the most attention to themselves? The influencers of influencers are of interest for a lot of different reasons, most appropriately because finding them is a good way to dive deeper into niche topics.
Twitter exposes conversations that can show us who's in anyone's inner circle because conversations there are public and programatically accessible. In the following post we look at the data and find out who has the most reciprocal conversations on Twitter with 10 geek heroes - from the founders of big sites like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon to nonprofit geeks working to challenge injustices.
Yesterday on the O'Reilly Radar blog, House Representative Mike Honda (D-San Jose), called out for suggestions and guidance for ways to better utilize technology to get the public involved with U.S. government.
His post, entitled Request for ideas: Crowdsourcing the Evolution of Congressional Websites opened with this plea:
Yesterday, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 finally came out of beta, but according to the latest data from StatCounter's GlobalStats, users are not exactly in a rush to update their browsers to IE8 just yet. Even though IE8 had been in public beta testing for a year, its market share only rose from 1.39% on its launch day to 1.56% today.
Looking at a regular graph of traffic data from Digg and Facebook, it would be easy to assume that Digg is lagging far behind Facebook's staggering growth. However, Compete just produced a very different graph that compares traffic at Digg and Facebook since their respective launches, and according to this data, Digg is actually doing better than Facebook. Facebook is obviously older than Digg, so while it has more traffic now, Digg's growth since its inception has actually been faster than Facebook's.
So you've joined Twitter and have finally started to get the hang of things. You know to put an "@" sign in front of usernames for public replies and you know how to send private messages with a "d." You filled out your profile and have mastered the art of TinyURLs. You even found some interesting people to follow and have started conversations with them. There's just one thing holding you back from complete Twittervana: those odd-looking abbreviations in people's tweets preceded by the pound sign (#). Congratulations, you've stumbled upon the Twitter hashtag, a tracking tool for Twitter topics. But what do they mean?
If there was any doubt that the upcoming Palm Pre is being poised as an iPhone competitor, some recently discovered documents about Palm's financial plans can put those thoughts to rest. According to Palm's Subscription Accounting plan for the Palm Pre (PDF link), all revenue and expenses for the device will be distributed across 24 months - the required 2-year contract period for new Pre owners. What this means is that Palm will account for device sales immediately, but plans to use the subscription fees to fund ongoing R&D efforts. For Pre owners, the documents promise "new software features free of charge." Sound familiar? It should - it's the same accounting model used by Apple for their iPhone.
