I just got this in my inbox from Google.

Before I quote the email I'd just like to add my own heart felt sentiments: Please die Internet Explorer 6. Please die now. You're very old, insecure, and stupid. Please die fast but painfully for putting the world through extended support and allowing yourself to exist for what? almost 10 years now?!

Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 ​as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

I kept reading on Giz about how HTML 5 takeover is imminent and each time lost a little respect for my favourite gadget blog. It's good to know that when it comes down to it some of them do actually know what they're talking about.

Gizmodo, who were some of the idiots I referred to in my post yesterday redeemed themselves by publishing a very comprehensive breakdown of why HTML 5 isn't saving anyone anytime soon 40 minutes ago, and (although they only briefly touched on it, being that the post is primarily about HTML 5) why Flash is better at doing the kind of things HTML 5 is supposed to usurp in imagination land.

HTML isn't platform ubiquitous and never will be because whoever has the monopoly is also directly motivated to keep web standards to shit. Companies are companies and the monopoly will always be a company.

Flash on the other hand is already platform ubiquitous. Write once, deploy everywhere. The only problem with flash is resource use, which 10.1 - already in 2nd beta will address.

Flash also now has the ability to run native c/c++ code, so decoding video with flash will be as fast as doing it natively in the browser. Well as doing it natively in the browser will eventually maybe possibly in 5-10 years if the web can come together in happy fairy land on HTML 5 implementation.

Goodbye Flash?? I say goodbye web browsers and hello Adobe AIR branded front ends to web services and content.

Here's a small excerpt from John Herrman of Gizmodo's comprehensive HTML 5 breakdown, although I strongly recommend you read the whole thing as it makes things clear for the tech - and not so tech, savvy:

...

The Basics

Before we get into what HTML5 means, we have to talk about what it is, and to talk about what it is, we need to talk about what it's built upon.

Hypertext markup language, or HTML, is the language underneath every web page you've ever been to. The language, along with its various complementary technologies (see: CSS, Javascript), has become immensely complex over the years, but the concept is simple. HTML is what turns this:

<u><em><strong><a href="http://gizmodo.com">Hello!</a></strong></em></u>

Into this:

Hello!

It's basically a set of instructions that a website hands to a browser, which the browser then reads and converts into a formatted page, full of text, images, links and whatever else.

Here, try this: Right-click anywhere on this webpage, and click "View Page Source," or "View Source," or something to that effect. Your eyes will be assaulted with a wall of inscrutable text. You'll see evidence of syntax, but your brain won't be able to parse it. Your eyes will glaze over, and you will close the window. This, my friends, is HTML. But you probably already knew that, because it's 2010, basic web languages are basically in our drinking water. So what's this "5" business?

Somewhere in the central command center basement of the internet, there's a group of guys who maintain the standard, or the rules, of HTML. In the case of HTML5, the buck stops with the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), and to a lesser extent, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It is through these independent standards organizations that new features are codified and presented to the public, and later—in theory—supported by various browsers, no matter what company is behind them.

In the early nineties, the W3C and a few influential torchbearers would collect various new web features thought up by different browser makers, publishing these standards with the hope that we didn't end up with different internets for different browsers. By the mid to late nineties, the standards had grown in both size and stature, then serving as the de facto guide for browser makers and developers alike. (If this sounds a bit rosy, the reality was far grimmer—just ask any seasoned web developer about Internet Explorer, version 6 or earlier.)

Despite an occasionally rocky road, HTML standards went beyond being just a record of changes in web technology; eventually they became the blueprint to push them forward. Still, standards are guides, not laws, and no browser maker has to adopt each and every revision.

The last major revision of the HTML standard, version 4.01, was published in 1999. HTML5 hasn't yet been formally codified, but it was born in 2004 and has been undergoing steady work and maintenance since. In the '90s, HTML discussion centered around topics like font coloration, or tables, or buttons, or something more esoteric. Today, a new HTML version means deep-down support for the modern web, namely web apps and video.

John Herrman - Read the rest on Gizmodo

The internet is a buzz with talk of the downfall of Flash. Flash, the only web platform with 99%+ penetration rate cross platform, and 90%+ penetration rate for their latest version only 3 months after release. The platform that powers the web's content, games, and more than 75% of all interactive online media. That's now able to power desktop and mobile applications, and with the imminent release of Flash 10.1 which will bring with it much more efficient and lower memory/ram usage, lighter on cpu so much that it's able to play HD Youtube videos on a mobile phone without a problem. Yes, Flash, the downfall of Flash.

There are two main arguments to these ridiculous claims. The first is the emergence of HTML 5. HTML 5 finally allows video and audio playback without any plugins, and canvas - a tag which allows for complex drawing, embedding fonts, etc. etc. Things Flash has been able to do for years, has a huge head start on, and does really well. The problem that nobody seems to get is that not only does Internet Explorer still have majority market share, by a lot depending on who you ask - and Microsoft will NEVER support standards because it's directly bad for business. Aside from that, and the fact that every browser that will support HTML 5(ie: everyone else), will also implement it differently from each other, with different aesthetics, features, code, BUGS, etc. But even more crucial aside from those things, the HTML 5 spec itself is not even complete yet. It's not even finished, and it's not finished in a deadlock between the web giants who not only can't decide or agree on which video and audio formats are the best performance wise, but also who owns the rights to implement those formats in their browser and who'll have to pay massive royalties if the true patent/copyright holders agree to allow it at all at any point down the road. No one wants to properly look this up for a variety of reasons and so HTML 5 - supposed to bring the web together and herald a new dawn of the internet can only work if EVERYONE does in fact come together and implement it in exactly the same way; disregarding that ubiquitous HTML 5 means EVERYONE loses something, some everything. It benefits none of the powers that be to come together on HTML 5, the web is a magazine with some interaction. HTML will never push out Flash for web applications.

The other main argument is the Apple iPad - just announced. Which like the iPhone doesn't support HTML 5. Apple uses the old "Flash is too resource intensive" argument to convince you that limiting you from the full web is a good thing. The 75%+ of online media and interactive content and games you don't have access to from an iPad or iPhone or iPod. This simply isn't true. It's false. Both iPhone 3Gs and iPad could happily run the current version of Flash or Adobe AIR just like your laptop/desktop. And it's also entirely up to the developer and how they program how resource intensive they make their flash app/widget/game/etc. The only reason, listen up, the ONLY reason Apple does not support Flash, is because the Flash platform already powers so many games and useful tools and full blown applications on the internet it threatens Apple's very business model of the Itunes Store, and App Store. Apple wants companies to develop all their apps again specifically for the iPlatform and invest in it. If you made a Flash app that ran on the iPhone it would also run on Android and every other smart phone. If you invest in the iPlatform your app will only run on the iPlatform. If Apple was a monopoly the FTC would be pushing them down for their anti-competitive vindictive behaviour.

Apple doesn't block Flash support in their mobile products because they want to push innovation in HTML 5. If HTML 5 was advanced enough, or popular enough to be worth creating the caliber of applications possible on Flash, Apple would immediately configure mobile Safari to block, impede, and hinder the advancement of standards just like Microsoft with IE. In a heart beat. Apple promotes HTML 5 because they know it'll be years before it's anywhere close to where Flash is today, if ever. Apple is actually one of the powers that be preventing the HTML 5 standards from being finalized. Apple wants you locked into their platform. Apple doesn't care about advancing the web, or a better user experience, they care about the big media companies investing in their platform when they bring their content online. Apple wants the iPad to replace your tv, radio, and other media consumption devices. They do not care about the open web.

Adobe on the other hand continues to open up the Flash platform and benefits from creating a ubiquitous platform across desktop and mobile. There are fully open source versions of their Streaming and Application servers, and free and open source ways to develop for their platform. Anyone can build a Flash application, for the browser, desktop, Windows, Mac, Linux, Safari, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, etc. etc. Build one application and deploy everywhere using an incredibly powerful, scalable, and mature toolset. If you decide to invest in the Apple iPlatform, you may or may not after months of development time and costs even get your application onto a device, regardless you have to pay Apple to be a developer and submit it in the first place or even get access to their development tools, and they can remove your software from their platform and devices at a moments whim. They can and do literally remove your application from people's phones after being downloaded used without warning to backup the data put into or created by your app. Anytime for any reason. AND if you're lucky enough to get your application through all these extra months of hurdles and costs and lost revenue you're only gaining access to one small subset of mobile devices. Apple, if anything, has become the evil mind controlling overlords from their 1984 ad. Too pathetic to be ironic.

It is absolutely ridiculous to think the HTML 5 is going anywhere anytime soon, let alone even coming close to eclipsing Flash in any way. Not from Apple, they don't want anything to compete with their platform for getting applications on their devices - Flash or otherwise(HTML, Java, Silverlight), and not from anywhere else because it's just not mature, complete, or will over the next 12-24 months be implemented uniformly or consistently across browsers or operating systems. Even in the event that somehow somehow all these competitors will come together in blissful glee to reduce their own profit margins and upset shareholders in the name of benefiting the user and happy popcorn rainbows, it will still only have the capabilities of Flash 8-ish, by then Flash 11 will be out and there won't be a need for web browsers anymore because every site will have a dedicated Adobe AIR application front end and you'll use an Adobe AIR application to browse through a market place of Adobe AIR apps. Yes we're moving towards the cloud, and yes the cloud and desktop are becoming indistinguishable, but moving into the browser is only a temporary measure for some companies before they build a desktop front end for their service.

The iPad, iPhone, and iPod are merely secondary devices - frills. Every person with an iMobile device also has a desktop or laptop for work and actually managing their digital life. The iPlatform's position on Flash is exactly insignificant, and every single person I've seen raving for HTML 5 and the downfall of flash depends heavily on flash and its phenomenal capabilities. They're all idiots.

Ear-Drum.org Desktop 0.2.0 has been released. Check out the changelog or read the Ear-Drum.org blog post see what's new.

Download EDO Desktop and request a beta invite to get in on the private beta.

Ear-Drum.org is the brand new face of a project I've been working on for years. It's an RIA(Rich Internet Application), which is just a trendy and faster way of saying a powerful web enabled desktop application.

Ear-Drum.org is a music community in a desktop app. I've been searching for the ultimate online music community for a very long time and while a very few have come close to that before being seriously sold; hacked; or turning evil, none - and absolutely none that are currently available, come close to having any soul. It's as if the people behind them are robots in suits, anti-groove people worrying about a bottom line and completely detached from the depth of experience of connecting with another person through music. Ear-Drum.org differentiates itself with a heavy focus on collaboration, learning, and immersion, while also letting you promote your music and meet other musicians. It's for pros as much as it is for beginners and everything else in between. We can always learn from each other and expand on our abilities. Ear-Drum.org strives to be the rich and engaging environment that's required for that kind of deep interaction.

I've gone through lots of prototypes over the years trying to find the best platform, model, and everything else that goes into creating something like this, and the EDO(Ear-Drum.org) Desktop app is the output of that iterative design/development process.

The decision to launch in private beta was made pretty early on. It allows us to build out features and refine the experience with a controlled subset of users. There is still room in the beta so head over to Ear-Drum.org to request a beta invite. Be a part of the early days and help us shape the ultimate online music experience.

The Desktop app is cross-platform so Windows/Mac/Linux it'll just work thanks to Adobe AIR. To get Adobe AIR click here.

Spread the word! The more people that get involved the more people there are to collaborate with. You can help by letting people know about us with your Twitter account. Get the word out on Facebook, Myspace, and other social platforms. Link to us on social networking sites like Digg and Delicious or write about us on your blog. Pass on the Ear-Drum.org link and let's start jamming. It's gonna be a fun ride.

Sometimes you need to automate some terminal commands within your web application. I personally prefer PHP over other server side languages, and in this case its ability to run such commands are fantastinominal. There are a bunch of built in functions for securing/escaping arguments and commands, and a bunch of methods for executing shell commands. The main differences between them are the way output is returned to php. For most cases you should be fine using escapeshellarg() and shell_exec() methods - assuming you're using variables posted to your server code as arguments. You should read up on the various program execution methods over at php.net, and research all the implications and security risks involved in using them.

This post doesn't focus on their use, but instead on how to give Apache(or whatever web server you're using) root access on your server. In fact what you need to do in order to simplify your scripts is allow the Apache process to run root commands without a password. That's RIGHT, without a password. This can be exceptionally dangerous so you may want to limit this root access specifically the no-password-necessary root access only to specific programs you need to run from your scripts. Otherwise a small programming error would let malicious people take full control of your web server with ease.

The main purpose of enabling no password root access here is so you can easily run programs with a single command and not worry about being challenged for a password or having to deal with that in your server code. It's potentially more dangerous to store your root password in a public facing script than giving it no-password-root-access to a single program. A fair amount of web software and tools will have versions of their commands that can be run on a single line for this purpose.

This is for Ubuntu, but should work on most other distros with little tweaking.

First add the following line to your php script:

echo shell_exec("whoami");

This will output the user that Apache, or whatever server is running your php file, is running as on the system. Typically Apache runs as www-data, but your system may be set up differently.

Now open a terminal and ssh into your web server. Run the following command:

sudo visudo

What this does is edit the /etc/sudoers file, however using the visudo command is necessary for changes to properly take effect. Go to the bottom and add the following line to enable the Apache user to sudo without a password:

www-data ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL

The first ALL refers to hosts, the second ALL refers to programs/commands. If you only want to grant Apache sudo access to a specific program replace the second ALL with the full path to the command file. So even though you will be able to call last from your script without worrying about the path, you need to know the actual path here:

www-data ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/last

Now you should have a list of shortcuts at the bottom of the terminal, you want to "WriteOut"(ctrl+o) the file which is the same as saving it, you'll be prompted to choose the path to save to, make sure that you're saving it as /etc/sudoers, otherwise it may try save your changes as a copy.

You can now try run last from your php script by adding the following to your php script:

echo shell_exec("sudo last");

Now that it works you may want to remove the echo lines from your script, or test it with a different command since showing the world who's actually running Apache or the output of last is not something you want.

What happened: Europe called out Microsoft regarding internet explorer being the default browser in Windows. Europe gets what it wants and Microsoft will now show a menu when you first get a pc of several different browsers, the user will select one to install and be default.

I was just reading comments on Digg relating to the story, a group a people that are supposed to know about tech, and I couldn't be more frustrated by the complete lack of understanding even amongst those people.

The biggest problem people have with the ruling is "it's Microsoft's operating system, they should be able to make whatever browser they want default."

I would agree with that but it's a lot deeper than that. Microsoft has majority market share. Internet Explorer not only doesn't follow web standards, but the IE team seems to deliberately work to go against web standards in instances where there's no performance or technical benefit to do so - Internet Explorer is vastly inferior when it comes to performance. It's another issue entirely that they deliberately don't patch security holes because just like Facebook, identity theft and viruses infecting users' computers translates into big bucks and 3rd party businesses solidifying their position as a platform(ie: people promote the use of Windows because they know it'll make users more prone to exploitation, and so they can sell you security software to fix problems that should be stopped on the operating system level.)

Anyway back to web standards, the Internet is an open place, Internet Explorer is a political tool used by a company to force the majority of people who just use the default browser to use a shitty browser that can't handle most of the web innovations and standards (Internet Explorer 8) and that leaves users behind so that a hugely significant amount of people are still using Internet Explorer 6! It's like 10 years old for fuck sake.

Web developers and designers often have to create sometimes entirely different code and severely limit the functionality of web apps just to get it to show up marginally correct in the various Internet Explorer attrocities still in wide use for no other reason than Microsoft wants to dominate the world and aims to do it by being directly malicious toward it's users and incompatible with the rest of the web to lock it's users into a sick cycle of dependence.

The reason Europe stepped in is because it's not just the saps that by their products that are affected, it's the entire Internet. Everyone is affected by the majority of people using some variety of Internet Explorer. Easily 60%+ of a developer/designer's time goes into trying to get a website to work in IE and deciding what features to take out because of it.  Google got so frustrated they developed Chrome frame, which is an Internet Explorer plugin that renders pages for IE. They did this because Internet Explorer can't/won't keep up with the rest of the web.

It's about time someone did something, Internet explorer is so insecure to it's users, and so detrimental to the web it's difinitively malware and Microsoft should be sued for intentionally distributing it at all with their software.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

Visit the above link, a brilliant essay on productivity derived from programming.

It's strange thinking of how drastically my life has adapted to writing software over the years, especially the last year, compared to people I know who don't[read: everyone I know]. But this guy nails it. I guess there's something about programming that just moulds you into a certain behaviour set. It's like if I broke a chunk off Canada, floated it out into the middle of the Atlantic and started a civilization - leaving it for a few generations. Then mailed them an essay on small island civilizations they'd be like "Oh shit! Hey guys, someone wrote an essay about us," and you wouldn't actually have to visit the island to write about it.

What you should take from the essay is that it's all about context. The more context you can fit into your head about a given anything, the better you are at innovating. And when the technological advantage is even - meaning using a computer vs. using a typewriter, brilliance can only be judged on context.

via @AndrewWarner via news.ycombinator, via paulgraham

In Firefox, when you type stuff into the main url bar (the "Awesome Bar") it tries to do a Google I'm Feeling Lucky search. So if you typed in wiki it would figure out you wanted Wikipedia and take you to Wikipedia.org, it would even take you to the localized version, and when it's in doubt it shows you a standard Google result.

To get this in Chrome add a custom search engine. Use the following as the url.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnI=Im+Feeling+Lucky

If you make it the default, then any keywords you type into the url bar (the "Omni Bar") will run an I'm Feeling Lucky search. Or you can set the keyword to l. So to use the custom search you would type in l wiki.

Finally, just got this email:

It's finally here: Google Chrome for Mac. Available today in beta!

Hi there,

Thanks for signing up to hear from us regarding Google Chrome for Mac! We're excited to let you know that Google Chrome is now available in beta for Mac OS X.

Here are a few fun facts from us on the Google Chrome for Mac team:

73,804 lines of Mac-specific code written
29 developer builds
1,177 Mac-specific bugs fixed
12 external committers and bug editors to the Google Chrome for Mac code base, 48 external code contributors
64 Mac Minis doing continuous builds and tests
8,760 cups of soft drinks and coffee consumed
4,380 frosted mini-wheats eaten

Got taken to this page.

Where if you click on the lego image, you can see the Google Chrome Staff in lego form.. keep clicking for closeups. (not here, first go to the google chrome link one sentence above then start clicking)

Then watched the new ads(there's a bunch of them, at the end of each use the in movie menu, or click here):

Then read the blog post announcement here.

Where they had this video:

And also mentioned the Linux beta, and extensions.

Then I installed it and tried it out. It's fast. So I finished writing this in Chrome. Wonder how this will affect browser market share.