Bigfrog Weblog

I've spent most of the last nine months of work coding away on Yahoo!'s BrowserPlus. And this week, we unveiled it.

http://browserplus.yahoo.com/

What is it? A browser plugin that makes it really easy to write and distribute new browser plugins. Why is this important? It makes way for Web 3.0, more fully integrating your desktop with your browser. Allows for things you'd expect from any normal desktop application like drag & drop, notifications and more.

It's been fun watching the blogs all week as other's try to figure out what it is and where it fits in. It's another RIA (rich internet application) platform in the crowded field that includes the likes of Adobe Flash, Google Gears, Microsoft Silverlight.

And some people are really starting to get it. If you're a developer and want to start playing, my teammate Skylar Woodward gives you a boost.

Though I'm still waiting to see if anyone picks up on the significance of the Ruby Interpreter...

Posted by Steven Spencer at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yahoo is well known in the industry as a startup incubator. Scores of people have left Yahoo over the years for smaller, greener pastures. The latest startup, formed by my dearly departed friends this time (lunch just isn't the same), is FlipFrame. Login, choose a frame, then add some pictures. Add your frame to MySpace or your website and you're all set.

My fellow Yahoo Cody has more details.

Sign up now to reserve a short login name...

Posted by Steven Spencer at 5:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tired of the same ole food day after day? With the magic of Yahoo! Local Search and Wheel of Food, take a spin:

Posted by Steven Spencer at 8:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After 2 ¹/₂ years of secretive development, Apple has announced their newest product: iPhone. The iPhone is a combination cell phone with camera, iPod (with Nano like capacity, 4GB or 8GB) and internet communicator with email and browser. While some other phones have these capabilities, none come anywhere near in matching the ease of use or wow factor. Almost all input comes from nature's pointing device, your finger.

But this all begs the question, what happens to the iPod? With the iPhone combining everything you need to a device that fits in the palm of your hand, does this end of life the iPod. What comes next for the iPod. Cause after all, some of us still want 80GB of music and video in our hand.

Take the new iPhone and strip off the phone and internet communicator. Add a HDD (hard disc drive). What are you left with? The new multi touch input, widescreen iPod. Now that would be cool. If my prediction is correct, we should see one by September 2007.

Posted by Steven Spencer at 6:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the second time, I was on the winning team for Yahoo's Hackday. This time I was the only developer, so it was a late night. Unfortunately, there have been no public announcements this time. But Yahoo! was busy with a major reorg, so Hackday was keep on the down-low. This time I had a feeling we were going to win. Now I'm not a believer in luck or karma, but the day just started out that way. I drove to work without hitting a single red light or traffic on the freeway. Then I found a parking spot on the first floor. Now' that's an achievement. Then, I just slowly progressed on the hack throughout the day and night, taking shortcuts at times (it's a hack after all), but feeling good the whole time. At midnight, I called it quits feeling that we had a potential winner on our hands. And it's not like there isn't competition ... there were over 100 entries this time. While I won't reveal the hack, I'm writing about some of the general techniques I use for it on my new php/javascript programming web site. If you're a programmer, follow along to see just how easy it is to get a Web 2.0 site with AJAX and animation up and running.

Posted by Steven Spencer at 8:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Steven Spencer at 2:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My iPod Shuffle arrived Thursday from the Chinese factory, engraved and ready to play. It amazing that a product can be customized and shipped from half way across the world in three days.

As with the previous Shuffle, there is no screen. To me, that's a feature. No glass to scratch. Drop at will. It holds about 200 songs and is perfect for the gym.

The size has to be seen to believed. Not everyone believed it was a real MP3 player. It's sooo small, it's a wonder there's room for a battery and circuit board.

Sound quality is great and the battery purportedly lasts 12 hours.

Highly recommended. It's the perfect stocking stuffer.

Posted by Steven Spencer at 2:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I was your age, we didn't have 20 inch widescreen color LCDs. We had monitors with one color: green. But, there was a great programming language for beginners called LOGO that used (turtle) graphics to teach programming.

Well all that is old is new again. If you're fortunate enough to be equipped with a Mac from this millennium, check out NodeBox. NodeBox is a (free) Mac OS X application that allows you to create graphics with the Python programming language. It's really quite easy to get started and you can see results with just one line of code:

# draw a small rectangle
rect(10,20,50,50)

Now that wasn't hard.

Katherine saw me playing around Saturday morning and asked for a flower. No problem:

# create drawing area and move towards center
size(500,500)
translate(100,200)

# green plant body
fill(0, .9, 0, 1)
star(105, 150,4,100,20)

# flower color
fill(.9, .6, 0, .6)

# draw 1 flower pedal
def draw(r):
    oval(0,0,210,60)
    rotate(r)

# draw flower pedals
for i in range(9):
    draw(20)

# draw red stigma
fill(.9, 0, 0, .9)
oval(80,5,50,50)

The result:

Too much fun. If you want to learn how to program, this is a great way to start.

Posted by Steven Spencer at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yahoo! is opening up Hackday for outsiders, employees not required. Sounds like a lot more fun too, with workshops, campings and live music. Check out open Hackday here, but be sure to move your mouse pointer over the text as the website first appears encrypted.

P.S.

If it rains and we find ourselves listening to music and hacking in the mud, can we call it Hackstock?

P.P.S.

I'm still waiting for my Hack Day trophy from our June win.

Posted by Steven Spencer at 6:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With the world so uncertain, it's time to be prudent. With both of us working at two leading internet companies, why put all our eggs in one basket. Let's diversify, just a little. So here's my proposal: 50% of my stock options for 50% of your stock options?

Deal or no deal?

Posted by Steven Spencer at 8:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Steven Spencer at 5:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With Friday's going away party behind me, I have two weeks of unemployment/vacation before starting at Yahoo. One of the biggest unknowns in switching jobs is are you going to like who you work with? Although the interview was a full day, that's really not a lot of time when you're meeting 10 people, and they're doing most of the questioning. But with the magic of personal publishing and the internet, it looks like I can keep track of what the new group is up to. There's even a picture of the new boss, case I forgot.

And speaking of unemployment:

Funny thing about weekends
When you're unemployed
They don't quite mean so much,
except you get to hang out with
all your working friends

Spaghetti Western by Primus

Got all my lunches with my working friends out of the way last week. So this week is lunches with the underemployed: housewives, kids and sister-in-laws.

There's a video of the new office in Burbank starring my future coworkers. Fun. Should have started a week ago.

Posted by Steven Spencer at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Steven Spencer at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jawbreaker has finally hit 100,000 games played. The high scores are very hard to beat now, but it does keep track of your personal best, so don't be discouraged.

Posted by Steven Spencer at 8:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Site Advisor offers a browser plugin for IE or Firefox that gives you an indication of the safety of a website. Sites are given a red/yellow/green label depending on how Site Advisor feels that the site protects you from spyware, spam, viruses and scams.

On top of that, Site Advisor overlays these indications on your search results:

Really useful software. Check it out.

Posted by Steven Spencer at 9:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Listening to NPR on the way home from work, I heard what I thought was a new term: The Great Firewall of China. Performing a search on one of those great firewalls, I found that the term isn't so new. To do business with China, the search engine companies do have to filter their results removing entries for the likes of Tibetan independence, Falun Gong, and Dalai Lama. Of course, search engine companies aren't the only ones that have to censor content. Microsoft blocks certain blogs and Cisco provides China's law enforcement much technology to block China from the WWW.

Some of those companies testified before Congress this week and draft legislation was introduced to Promote Global Internet Freedom and provide Minimum Corporate Standards for Online Freedom. Whether this Bill passes and how much it is watered down remains an open question, but the guests on NPR think something will come out of these hearings.

Censoring the internet is a game of cat and mouse. For every site blocked, 10 more spring to life. For every word blocked, a misspelling routes you around to blockage. As the internet expands to every corner of the globe with global communication at your fingertips, it's hard to see how countries are going to keep their users within national electronic borders.

For more information, RConversation leads the charge.

Posted by Steven Spencer at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One inopportune quote about "Big Brother" from our Product Manager months ago and the product is branded forever :-(

After beta testing its "Big Brother" database appliance with a handful of customers, Symantec is moving ahead with plans to bring the device to market. The Californian company is also toying with the idea of selling the appliance's monitoring technology as a software product, according to a Symantec executive.

Big Brother is the first product to emerge from Symantec's Advanced Concepts group, formed in early 2005 with the goal of bringing Symantec research projects to market.

We call it SDAS - Symantec Database and Audit Security Solution.

Read Article

Posted by Steven Spencer at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Symantec is having a programming competition for college students later this month. We had an dry run of this in January to make sure everything worked (two of my squash partners won first place). The prizes are quite substantial -- $10,000, $5,000, $3,000 for the top three entries. The contest runs for only 1 week, so the prize money is quite significant for a little investment of your time.

Good luck!

Posted by Steven Spencer at 7:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I feel violated. Looking at web stats, I noticed a number of hits from MiniJuegos.com. Following the link, what do I find but a wholesale copy of Jawbreaker here:

http://www.minijuegosgratis.com/juegos/jawbreaker/jawbreaker.htm
(not linked on purpose)

One difference is that they don't have the statistics of number of games played, average score, etc. Now my license does allow for this, but still, how about a little credit were credit is due.

Posted by Steven Spencer at 3:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm not the #1 Steve Spencer on Google. From the looks of #1, it's good to be #2.

But I like Yahoo's search results even better:

Posted by Steven Spencer at 12:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jawbreaker is rapidly approaching 10,000 games. The search engines have discovered it so we're now seeing over 1,000 games played per day for the first time. And I haven't held the high score in over a week. My previous best of 1,510 (not shown above) was beat with 1,572 and more recently 1,992. That's tough to beat.

Posted by Steven Spencer at 2:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Steven Spencer at 3:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Steven Spencer at 12:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Apple stock is at an all time high. Any wonder why?

From Amazon's Electronics Top Sellers list:

Posted by Steven Spencer at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now I know 9/11 changed a lot of things, but when did the CIA start spying domestically?

I've been getting mailed the W32.Sober.X@mm!zip worm for the last few days. There are a number of things that stand out here.

• Department@cia.gov?? CIA Agents apparently don't get their own mail boxes. It's a security thing. They can mail you, but you can't mail them back.
• Subject: does the CIA remove the spacebar for security reasons
• All those billions in tax dollars they recieve and they still don't know my name or even my gender
• I'm not a grammar freak, but: list ... are attached
• Isn't the body of the email awfully terse?
• Doesn't Steven Allison have a position or is that on a need to know basis
• Sure is strange to send questions in a zip file (it's actually a windows .exe)... why not include the questions inline?? Hmmm. This is why you never click on unexpected attachments from unknown senders.

From:     Department@cia.gov 
Date:     Fri, 25 Nov 2005 20:24:02 UTC
Subject:  You_visit_illegal_websites

Dear Sir/Madam,

we have logged your IP-address on more than 30 illegal Websites.

Important:
Please answer our questions!
The list of questions are attached.


Yours faithfully,
Steven Allison



++++ Central Intelligence Agency -CIA-
++++ Office of Public Affairs
++++ Washington, D.C. 20505

++++ phone: (703) 482-0623
++++ 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., US Eastern time

question_list.zip (54k)

Posted by Steven Spencer at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Steven Spencer at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My friend Stuart's ultimate goal was to make money in his sleep. If his customers resold his software, and he made a small commission on each of those sales, he would make money in his sleep. Well, that was 90's and now there's a whole new way to make money in your sleep. Web advertising.

How do you make money with web advertising? Start a blog. Make it interesting. Attract an audience. Then sign up with Google or Yahoo to have them place targeted advertising on your website. When someone views your website and clicks on an advertisement, Google or Yahoo will pay you. Pennies a click. Now it doesn't sound like much, but with a big enough audience it adds up.

There's relatively few top flight bloggers that get the tens of thousands of hits a day needed to make a tidy sum. But if you're one, you can make $100 per day. Like Russell Beattie, who blogs about technology in the mobile [phone] space.

Unfortunately this site, humble little Big Frog doesn't make nearly as much. But I'm averaging $20 per month which is enough to pay for this website and a Starbucks or two. Not bad for a night's rest.

Sign up today.

Posted by Steven Spencer at 12:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)