Apparently it’s using Webkit. Phew, indeed. Not sure I could cope with another rendering engine, assuming it’s even feasible to start one from scratch these days.
http://mikemainguy.blogspot.com/2011/09/amazon-silk-using-webkit-and-spdy.html

A very interesting discussion by Brenda Eich on 2 different patterns.
http://www.aminutewithbrendan.com/pages/20110216

For me, the most important takeaway is that all modern browsers have optimized prototype chain retrievals, so defining methods on an object’s prototype is no longer as expensive as before.

Almost unbelievable.

Nice! Now I finally get time to catch up on a few things – a full inbox, outstanding contract work, generatedata.com updates, Form Tools updates…

btw, Google just announced their latest Nexus phone, boasting Android 2.3, named “Gingerbread”. (“Gingerbread”? Seriously? Well, I guess it beats “Froyo”);
http://www.google.com/nexus/

Pretty sweet.

Ah! ’bout time! Now you can add your own menu items to the context navigation menu in Chrome (when you right-click on the page).
http://blog.chromium.org/2010/08/new-in-google-chrome-beta-more.html

This will be SODDING handy.

A recent discussion of IE9 from the IE Blog.

From a JS point of view, what I find most exciting is that the new JS engine is embedded directly within the browser and can interact with the DOM “natively” (i.e. not through an API). Functionally, JS will work exactly the same way (of course), except that a lot of the bottlenecks that we get for interacting with the DOM will be lifted. Too cool.

Tomorrow I’m off to the OSCON conference in Portland, Oregon for a full week of open source goodness.
http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010

This is the first time I’ve attended this conference. I’m hoping I’ll have a little time over the week to work on my Python adaptation of generatedata.com for Google App Engine… but we shall see.

And a big thanks to my company, Central1 for helping fund the trip. :)

– Ben

http://mayurkshirsagar.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/google-io-2010-day-1-a-more-powerful-web-in-more-places-key-announcements/

A few months ago I researched Google’s tools for graphing data, and found two: their Visualization API and their Google Charts API. Two? Odd!

Well, they just combined the two into Google Chart Tools.
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/02/announcing-google-chart-tools.html

I have some fun plans for using this in an upcoming Form Tools module to graph submission information.

– Ben

Yowzers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8488751.stm