ReadWriteHack

Wappwolf and ifttt are a bit like the chocolate and peanut butter in Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Separate, they're pretty good. Together, though, is when the magic happens.

For folks new to the services, Wappwolf is an application that performs actions when you drop a file into your Dropbox. ifttt, on the other hand, can interact with websites and services and then do things like send an email or save a file in Dropbox.

The next time representatives from Microsoft come knocking on your door, it may be to actually seize your servers. And it is all legit, thanks to the RICO laws. The interesting thing is it is part of its digital crime efforts to disrupt botnet operators. On Friday, Microsoft staffers entered two hosting providers, one in Illinois and one in Scranton, Penn., to seize the command and control computers of two Zeus botnets. Microsoft had sued the operators on the grounds that the botnets violated their copyrights and trademarks by taking control over a series of Windows PCs.

SendHub has put up a post on things its developers learned in rebuilding the front-end of its Web site as a single-page application with Backbone.js. This includes everything from template rendering to "avoiding a zombie apocalypse."

The company decided to give SendHub.com a facelift because "the site looked a bit dated, and it just didn't feel as snappy as we wanted it to. All pages were rendered almost entirely on the server, and only a couple of places used Ajax to pull in data asynchronously." The company also wanted to test out its developer API>.

NASA is inviting all citizens of planet Earth to take part in a two-day coding marathon next month. Called the International Space Apps Challenge, the idea is to develop software for various purposes to support NASA's mission. It is open to just about anyone interested, including "engineers, technologists, scientists, designers, artists, educators, students, and entrepreneurs." The challenge will take place in several cities on all continents around the globe, including San Francisco, Santo Domingo, Sao Paulo, Nairobi, Tokyo and even on Antarctica at McMurdo Station.

Imagine looking for a job at the same exact time that everyone else is doing it, and you have to adhere to rigid interviewing and application standards. Now imagine that to get the job you have to be matched with your prospective employer by a national computer system. The program is designed to take into account your preferences and your prospective employer's. That is precisely what is going on next week, when medical students from all over North America participate in what is called Match Day. For more than 50 years, Match Day has happened in March, on the third Thursday, which is next week.

Sometimes, you need to see what a technology can do before you can fully appreciate it. Take, for instance, CSS 3D and Three.js. It's one thing to hear about doing 3D elements for Web sites, and another to see them integrated into a well-designed site. Take, for example, Steven Wittens' Acko.net redesign.

Visit Acko.net using a current release of Firefox, and you'll see a nice clean site with a nice header image that demonstrates two-point perspective nicely. But hit the site using a WebKit browser, and you're in for a real treat.

We bring in the new year with a new Pokki developer contest. Like the one we mentioned in October, you have a chance to win 30 large. But this one has an extra bonus with an all-expenses paid trip to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next spring. All you have to do is build a new game in HTML5 and other Web technologies (but not using any Flash, thank you very much) and have it approved at the Pokki store before the end of the day February 20, 2012.

Games will be judged by a panel of game development managers on the basis of gameplay, appeal, polish and overall graphics and sound. Besides the first prize mentioned above, there is a second and third prizes (but no trip) of $13,000 and $7,000. Here is where you can learn more about the contest and enter. Good luck! (We aren't affiliated with Pokki, but happy to promote other contests if you hear of them.)

There's something very appealing about the design of the London Underground (PDF) Tube maps. The design has spawned plenty of spinoffs, and is in demand for all types of projects. If you're looking to include something similar in your own project, Nik Kalyani has produced a jQuery plugin that you can use to create your own.

A blog post from the coders at BrightTag this week is instructive in how they responded to a "shark week." No, it wasn't giving all the developers time off to watch the popular Discovery Channel series (that doesn't mean I can't borrow their icon), but an opportunity to improve the performance of their code. The results were impressive: they cut page load times at least in half, and built internal test tools to make it easier to do more performance tuning in the future. The post describes who did what and how.

In addition to the official Kinect Accelerator program we wrote about last month, data crowdsourcing contest site Kaggle today announced a new challenge around Kinect as well.

Kaggle hosts cash prize competitions for people to play with data and come up with various solutions. The contests are calls for hacks that jailbreak fundamental models professionals currently use to monitor finances, write code to analyze shopping behavior, improve space exploration, and a wide variety of other topics.

Their latest is the Gesture Recognition Challenge. It is organized by CHALEARN and is sponsored in part by Microsoft. The object of this contest is to produce an improved gesture algorithm that will analyze a series of Kinect video streams. Samples of actual Kinect video clips are supplied, similar to other Kaggle contests that are used to develop other algorithms.