Ajax Blog

Looking for a job? We’re here to help.

Over 40 positions in technology have been posted to CrunchBoard since we wrote about it last week. Your dream job could be in there somewhere.

Here’s a sample of those posted:

• Business Development Manager
  MySpace, Beverly Hills CA
• Software Engineer
  Sugar Inc., San Francisco CA
• Director of Business Development
  Howcast Media, New York City
• Web Developer for Social Platforms
  RockYou, San Mateo CA
• Java Engineers
  CBS Interactive, Berkeley CA
• Front End UI Designer
  TripAdvisor, Needham MA
• Code Ninja/Pirate
  Reble.FM, San Francisco CA
• Senior Software Engineer
  Stealth Startup, San Francisco CA
• Interactive Product Manager
  nFusion Group, Austin TX
• Flash Developer
  UVLayer, New York City and San Francisco

Also, we’re still soliciting candidates for two positions here at TechCrunch:

• Events Expert
• CrunchBase Analyst

Employers: we’re extending discounts for bulk listing purchases another month. Please email jobboard@techcrunch.com for additional details.

In other news, I had the distinct opportunity to check out Box.net’s TechCrunch reading room in person, and it is indeed glorious.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/243581948/

Ask is rumored to be considering switching to Google for search and subsequently downsizing its engineering team.

According to Silicon Alley Insider, Ask may abandon or selling its Teoma search engine in favor of using Google for its search results. Teoma has powered Ask since it was acquired in September 2001. The decision will result in “bad news for Ask Engineers.”

Paid Content puts the downsizing figure at 100 in April, although they note that the final decision on the switch to Google hasn’t been signed off on yet.

The decision to abandon Ask’s in-house search engine comes following a $100 million advertising campaign in 2007 that succeeded in growing Ask’s market share, but not to a significant level in the overall market. Google already provides Ask with its search ads through a recently renegotiated, five-year, $3.5 billion deal.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/243567122/

Moving on from the “let me use that API” conversation and only some real stuff, urandom (thanks for the comment) let us know about the Cybernet News article on Firefox 3 performance.

They are reporting that Firefox 3 is now faster than Safari 3, and is close to WebKit nightly in certain benchmarks. I can just picture Steve coming down on people saying “we market this as the fastest browser on the planet!” which is tough, as noone stays the fastest for ever. It is a race, and I am sure that WebKit and Firefox will be switching spots a lot in recently years.

Again, this is great news for developers. I am running WebKit and Firefox 3b3 and I am really happy with both. For some tasks I choose one over another (e.g. Firebug, Greasemonkey vs. lean and mean).

I’m sure what most of you care the most about are the facts, and so I’ve compiled the results of the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark test for each of the different browsers. All of the tests below were performed on the same Windows machine, and the Firefox 3 nightly builds definitely came out on top. Here are the results sorted from best to worst (each one is hyperlinked to the full stats):

1. Firefox 3 Nightly (PGO Optimized): 7263.8ms
2. Firefox 3 Nightly (02/25/2008 build): 8219.4ms
3. Opera 9.5.9807 Beta: 10824.0ms
4. Firefox 3 Beta 3: 16080.6ms
5. Safari 3.0.4 Beta: 18012.6ms
6. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 29376.4ms
7. Internet Explorer 7: 72375.0ms

It’s important to know that every time you run the SunSpider Benchmark it conducts each test five times, and the result is the average of the five tests. So it is a rather thorough test, and definitely shows off the speed improvements that Firefox 3 is going to be bringing to the table.

Brendan has said that they are not finished with their performance work for Firefox 3, and I am sure the WebKit team isn’t sitting on their hands…. oh and what about IE 8? It will be fun when that is in the wild to be tested.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/243549270/firefox-3-performance-numbers

Microsoft has been in acquisition discussions with email startup Xobni, we’ve confirmed through multiple sources. The company, which launched at the TechCrunch40 conference last year, currently offers an outlook plugin for Windows users that significantly improves the desktop email experience (particularly search).

Microsoft may have first approached the company months ago and floated an offer of sub $20 million, which was apparently rejected. But the company, which recently hired notable Yahoo’er Jeff Bonforte as CEO, is now back at the table with Microsoft corporate development.

Xobni currently only works with Outlook, although the company has said they will extend to integrate with other email clients, instant messaging applications, and social networks in the future. The current product creates an information profile for each person you interact with, and surfaces historical information that is relevant to what you are working on. Xobni displays contact information, threaded conversations, attachments, related people, email usage statistics, and information from the web. See our post from January with a more detailed overview of the service.

The company was founded in 2006 by Adam Smith and Matt Brezina, with early funding from Y Combinator. Other investors include Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Ron Conway and Baseline Ventures, Atomico Investments, Paul Buchheit, Ariel Poler, Saar Gur, and Tom Pinckney.

Xobni has not yet responded to our request for comment.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/243526371/

Programmer happiness is the most important factor in making quality software

“Code is meant to be read by humans first and computers only secondarily — in order to write software that addresses real human needs we need to approach the problem of software development from a more human perspective…Performance is cheap. On the other hand, creating, customizing, and maintaining huge (and hugely complex) bases of inscrutable software code is very expensive. There is increasing sentiment in the software world that we should be happy to take performance hits if it means the process of software development can me made more sustainable, pleasant, and simple.”

The advantages of closing a few doors

”’Predictably Irrational’ is an entertaining look at human foibles like the penchant for keeping too many options open…In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish, even though it was obviously a dumb strategy.”

Video: "How to Speak"

“In this skillful lecture, Professor Patrick Winston of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers tips on how to give an effective talk, cleverly illustrating his suggestions by using them himself. He emphasizes how to start a lecture, cycling in on the material, using verbal punctuation to indicate transitions, describing ‘near misses’ that strengthen the intended concept, and asking questions. He also talks about using the blackboard, overhead projections, props, and ‘how to stop.’”

The power of micro-specialization

“Become the expert in what you do. Which means micro-specialization. Who is the single-best agent for condos in your zip code? Or for single family homes for large families? Who is the one and the only best person to turn to if you’re looking for investment property in this part of town? As I wrote in The Dip, you’re either the best in the world (where ‘world’ can be a tiny slice of the environment) or you’re invisible. This means being Draconian in your choices. No, you can’t also do a little of this or a little of that. Best in your world means burning your other bridges and obsessing.”

Q&A with graphics director for The NY Times

Steve Duenes, graphics director for The Times, is answering reader questions.

“Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business”

“The word is externalities, a concept that holds that money is not the only scarcity in the world. Chief among the others are your time and respect, two factors that we’ve always known about but have only recently been able to measure properly…There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.”

Top 10 Mistakes in High Tech Marketing

“Why do so many high tech companies and products fail? We’ve had the opportunity to evaluate the management practices of hundreds of high tech companies and here are the primary reasons…”

Managing product development: “Are your defects like potholes?”

“Defects, especially big ones, slow down other development or fixes. So, what do you do? If you have a ton of defects, I would choose a one-week timebox, and work on fixing them. For me, fixing means developing a fix along with a unit test (or two or three), getting some peer review, and then checking it in so the developer can do some around-the-area testing before system test. I don’t care if the developers write the unit test first, I just care that they write some unit tests. Although, if you’ve got defects, you’ve got the makings of a bunch of great unit tests. I would not allow any development in this timebox, just fixing and checking the fixes in a variety of ways.”

How spiderwebs work

“An orb-spinning spider puts its elegant traps together pretty quickly, proceeding easily from step to step according to the instruction manual preprogrammed into its brain. The diagram below shows the major steps.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/889-sunspots-the-skillful-edition

After recently installing Snitter, I have to say I’ve become a bit of a fanboy of Jonathan Snook. The guy just produces some good stuff. So when I saw that he announced a new AIR application, I had to get it installed and checked out.

While Snoto (ya know, Snook, Snitter, Snoto) isn’t as polished as Snitter, it’s not meant to be. Jonathan has released this as a foundation for those that want to understand how to build AIR applications.

The goal of this is not to create a Flickr client that “does it all”. It was put together as a reference application for anybody interested in learning more about Adobe AIR. Snoto has been released under a Creative Commons license, so it’s available for you to take and extend how you wish. The link to the source code is included at the bottom of the Snoto page.

This is a great help to many developers as interest in Adobe AIR has skyrocketed since the release of AIR v1.0. MooTools developers should be especially pleased with the fact that Snoto was built using the MooTools JavaScript library, specifically because of the ease with which AIR applications can be developed without jumping through hoops. While other JS libs are now updated to work with AIR’s security model, MooTools was the first to be compatible even during the beta process.

Again, the biggest benefit is to those that want to learn about working with the AIR API:

From the AIR API, I haven’t gone hogwild but rather kept it simple. You can see use of nativeWindow, context menu and EncryptedLocalStore.

Having access to Webkit made styling the interface very straightforward. Like Snitter, it’s a combination of background images, PNG images, and some CSS3/border-radius to round things out.

The Snoto page has been setup with an AIR install badge which should make it easy to check it out.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/243433052/snoto-photo-snook-flickr-and-air

The Pownce team has been working hard to get their API up to speed and have gotten the API to a point where some cool applications can be built from it. Yesterday, they announced v2.0 of the Pownce API:

We’re sorry it took so long for us to release a complete API. We’ve taken great care to provide the best experience for developers and we hope the wait was worth it. Going forward, we’ll be working hard to keep Pownce the best social messaging application out there.

Well worth the wait, new features include:

• Ability to post notes
• Ability to post messages, links, files, events and replies
• Ability to fetch lists of private and friends-only notes.
• Integration of OAuth token-based web authentication.

This should open the doors for building new custom Pownce clients and applications similar to what’s been done with Twitter.

In addition, the Pownce team has created a new application directory to showcase applications built by developers.

Documentation for Pownce API v2.0 can be found here: http://pownce.pbwiki.com/API+Documentation2-0

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/243440880/pownce-api-v20-released

Courtesy of TechCrunch UK, starting from this week I’ll be giving you a run-down of what’s been happening in the UK, Ireland and - where possible - a little of what’s going on in the rest of European startup scene. Hopefully you’ll find this useful.

Last.fm, the UK startup CBS bought, said it was getting a lot of traffic from its widgets. On March 14 Ireland finally gets the iPhone about three months after the UK, courtesy of UK-based carrier O2, which has the exclusive contract. Meanwhile Ireland-based voice apps startup VoiceSage closed a €3m round. The UK’s Squa.re launched a so-so video portal, but at least it had great video of Keira Knightley. The etsy-like ShopWindoz launched a strike into the UK from its Berlin base. TwitPlus arrived as another file-sharing service for Twitter users. Hot startup Dopplr continued to add new features. Fav.or.it, the RSS reader with integrated commenting (a story TCUK broke), launched its beta to an invite-only crowd. Mobile outfit 3Bill acquired ProfileHeaven. Behavioural targeting company Phorm launched its service with a bunch of UK ISPs and publishers (this is quite a new field for the UK). The number of German start-ups tripled in 2007. UK startups tried to figure out if we had the equivalent of Bucks of Woodside, and fretted about the price of office space, their exit strategy and VCs leaving early stage. Ireland-based reviews aggregator LouderVoice prepped a new version. Badoo, the international social network, hit 13 million users. Kublax, which syncs bank accounts, utilities, and loyalty schemes, won funding, as did Bragster. Buzzspotr, which mashes Twitter users with Google maps, launched a beta. UK broadcasters leant on startups steaming video of their shows. We reviewed the Pixenate image editor, MyMapTracks, FreewireTV, Tipped and FreeAgentCentral.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/243372672/

Malte Ubl has put together a library called xssinterface (somewhat scary name) that uses postMessage when available, and tries work-arounds when not, to give you cross domain JavaScript access.

How it works

For Browsers that support it, we use the postMessage() interface.

For all other browsers, we use the following mechanism:

All sites that participate in the cross domain calls must provide an html file (cookie_setter.html) that is provided by this library that enables other domains to place certain cookie under the domain of the site.

The library uses this mechanism to place cookies on the target domain that are then read and evaluated by the target page.

Pages must explicitly grant access to their domain by setting a security token cookie under a domain that is allowed to access the callbacks.

As a caller you say:

As the listener:

It would be nice if the library used cross domain workers if Gears is installed.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/243312371/xssinterface-cross-domain-access-using-postmessage-and-more

Vladimir Vukićević has posted on the performance improvements of Firefox 3 on the Mac, and how one hack, albeit “dangerous” has helped ton. Vladamir says:

While figuring all this out, I noticed that Safari/WebKit didn’t seem to be affected by this framerate cap — the fps meter when Safari was running the same benchmark happily went up beyond 60fps.  After I found the plist entry, I checked Safari’s plist and was surprised to discover that they didn’t have this disabling in there.  Doing some more searching, I found this code in WebKit.  Apparently, there is a way to do this programatically, along with some other interesting things like enabling window update display throttling (though it’s unclear what that means!) — but only if you’re Apple.

All these WK* methods are undocumented, and they appear in binary blobs shipped along with the WebKit source (see the WebKitLibraries directory).  There are now over 100 private “OS-secrets-only-WebKit-knows” in the library, many of which are referred to in a mostly comment-free header file.  Reading the WebKit code is pretty interesting; there are all sorts of potentially useful Cocoa internals bits you can pick up, more easily on the Objective C side (e.g. search for “AppKitSecretsIKnow” in the code), but also in other areas as a pile of these WK* methods used in quite a few places.  Would any other apps like to take advantage of some of that functionality?  I’m pretty sure the answer there is yes, but they can’t.  It’s not even clear under what license libWebKitSystemInterface is provided, so that other apps can know if they can link to it.

David Hyatt, the guru lead of Webkit/Safari commented:

The programmatic disabling of coalesced updates should not be public API. It’s actually a very dangerous thing to do. We aren’t really happy with that code in WebKit, but we had to do it to avoid performance regressions in apps that embedded WebKit. Technically it’s wrong though, since we turn off the coalesced updates for any app that uses WebKit! This includes drawing they do that doesn’t even use WebKit.

As for the window display throttling, that was a pref designed for Safari (that we don’t even use any more). It’s not private or magic. It’s nothing more than a pref that we can examine from Safari-land, so linking to that is just silly. ;)

Many of the private methods that WebKit uses are private for a reason. Either they expose internal structures that can’t be depended on, or they are part of something inside a framework that may not be fully formed. WebKit subclasses several private NSView methods for example, and it cost us many many man hours to deal with the regressions caused by the internal changes that were made to NSViews in Leopard.

As you yourself blogged, there was a totally acceptable public way of doing what you needed to do.

For any private methods we use that we think should be public, we (the WebKit team) file bugs on the appropriate system components. Many of these methods have become public over time (CG stuff in Leopard for example). Be careful when you dig into WebKit code, since we may continue to use the WK method even though it’s not public API just because we need to work on Tiger.

WebKit flies on my Mac, and Firefox 3 has almost caught up. The end result is that I am pretty happy with how browsers are improving their performance, and I am sure there is a lot more to see.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/243300509/firefox-3-mac-performance-gains-due-to-undocumented-apis