Archive for January, 2010

If working alongside people like Douglas Crockford and on the team that created YUI (Matt Sweeney, Adam Moore, Dav Glass, Jenny Donnelly, Luke Smith, Tripp Bridges, Allen Rabinovich, Alaric Cole, Satyen Desai, and others) sounds like a good way to spend your time, read on: We’re hiring.

We’re looking for a great engineer to help us improve every aspect of our continuous integration (CI) process, including the way we build, document, test, and deploy our code. To succeed in this role, you’ll have to be:

• familiar with best practices in frontend engineering (e.g., this video should make good sense to you);
• knowledgeable about the goals and principles of continuous integration;
• interested in the emerging discipline of automated testing for frontend code (e.g. this video and the first half of this one should make sense to you, and projects like TestSwarm should be deeply interesting);
• able to solve diverse problems with a heterogeneous set of technologies (e.g. DHTML/Python/Java/Ant/linux/PHP/JavaScript);
• excited about creating a state-of-the art CI process for YUI and evangelizing it throughout Yahoo! and beyond.

YUI is an open source project, and many of the pieces you’ll be working with are part of the YUI ecosystem. That begins with our YUI Builder tools and extends to components of our existing CI process — tools like YUI Compressor, YUI Doc and YUI Test. You’ll have the opportunity to improve the tools themselves and to improve the way they’re documented and used.

The best part of any job in technology is having the chance to do influential work in an environment that both challenges and supports your growth. The YUI team provides just that confluence of characteristics: a huge, engaged community of users and developers and a team of brilliant engineers collaborating every day to improve the project.

If this sounds like your dream job, and if the people I mentioned above sound like people you’d want to work with every day, I’d love to hear from you. Tell me why you’re the right person for this role, including a link to your resume and professional portfolio, by emailing yui [dash] jobs [at] yahoo-inc.com. (Principals only; no recruiters.)

About 200 people gathered in URLs Café at Yahoo! last night to take in the first installment of the Crockford on JavaScript lecture series. Douglas took the audience through a selective history of computer science and programming languages, focusing on the evolution of those features and conventions that would later give shape to JavaScript.

While we’re working on video from last night, we wanted to share a few pictures and to let you know that we’re adjusting our ticketing limits — if you visit the lecture series page and follow the RSVP links, you’ll now see availability for some of the sessions that had previously been listed as sold out.

The Following feature will be read-only for planned maintenance for about two hours starting Monday (1/25) at 2:00PM PDT. Any new Followers or other Friend Connect changes may not save during this time.

Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Three years ago we launched Custom Domains to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year's post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you're interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.

For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:

• We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
• We will be providing a dedicated blog and help documentation to provide as much information as possible to help guide users through the migration off of FTP.
• Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.

Today we released a Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer.  We’ve released this Cumulative Security Update earlier than originally scheduled based on malicious activities reported on the web. The update is available via Windows Update and Microsoft Update. Most users configure their machines to update automatically; you can find more information on that here.

This update actually includes 236 separate packages for all the different languages and versions of Windows and IE that customers run and Microsoft supports worldwide. We release these packages simultaneously for all supported products and languages as part of this update. The complete matrix of browsers, operating systems, and languages is available in the security bulletin. At a high level, these packages cover:

• Seven operating system versions: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, 2008, and 2008 R2, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Customers run 32-bit, 64-bit, as well as Itanium versions of some of these operating systems, as well as a variety of different service packs.
• Four different versions of IE: 5.01, 6, 7, and 8.
• All supported languages. Older versions of Windows require separate language-specific packages, typically between 18 and 25. Windows Vista and later operating systems have a single language-neutral binary to update IE.

We test each security fix thoroughly with different variants of the security issue. We also test the entire package extensively for compatibility and reliability, as well as any setup, deployment, and manageability issues. Also, security updates are cumulative and contain all previously released updates for each version of Internet Explorer, to make securing any system (one updated a month ago or never updated at all) easy.

This update addresses several vulnerabilities including the one described here. Other blog posts describe specifics. Some of these vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer.  Note that IE8 users on Windows 7 have extensive defense in depth protections with DEP, ASLR, and protected mode that make remote code execution from a malicious site extremely difficult.  Microsoft therefore strongly recommends customers upgrade to IE8 to benefit from these extensive defense in depth protections.

For detailed information on the contents of this update, please see the following documentation:

• Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-002
• Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 978207

We encourage everyone to set their operating system to automatically update with the latest security updates for all their software.  You can find more information here.

 

Dean Hachamovitch

IE General Manager

 Wednesday’s 6.1 magnitude aftershock in Haiti is a jolting reminder of a tragedy whose scale we struggle to comprehend. The world has responded with resources and compassion, but a disaster of this size will be with us for years and years. 

The Internet can help us zero in on the specifics of a challenge and empower us to help in more direct and potentially more effective ways than ever before. My Yahoo! can simplify and expand the information at your disposal.

 

•  The Haiti Sun – Produced by the Haitian community abroad and at home, provides a unique perspective on the tragedy.
• The New York Times – Some of the most moving international coverage has come from the New York Times, providing an extraordinary mix of personal stories, breaking news and analysis.
• The Red Cross – Just one organization providing relief to Haiti but it is a great way to keep track of the progress being made to help the millions of earthquake victims.
• United Geological Survey’s shaker maps and alerts - If you want an up-to-the-minute alert about temblors and where they occur.

 A sign of hope coming out of Haiti’s calamity is the way technology has hastened the exchange of information and stirred people to action. May these resources help you feel connected to the plight of Haiti’s people and their path to recovery.

Apps showcased in this post:

• Add The Haiti Sun
• Add The New York Times
• Add The Red Cross
• Add United Geological Survey’s shaker maps and alerts

 Jay
- My Yahoo! Editorial

Users are experiencing problems playing videos in Blogger blogs. We are investigating and will send an update when fixed.

News and notes follow from the past week in the YUI community. As always, please let us know via the comments or @yuilibrary if we missed something good.

• YUI DataTable, TabView and More on SpokenWord.org (thanks, @dougkaye): Doug Kaye wrote in to tell us about YUI use at SpokenWord.org, his fantastic audio content portal.  They’ve done a nice job bringing TabView and DataTable together in their feed browser — check out the IT Conversations feed for a sample. (Original source.)
  
• YUI 2.7.0 on the Palm WebOS App Directory: Although I imagine this site is going to evolve a lot over the next year or so, the directory of WebOS applications on the Palm website is currently running YUI 2.7.0 (including Core, Animation, Selector, Connection Manager, and JSON).
  
• YUI 2.7.0 on Reuters.com: The Reuters news service has long used YUI 2 on its news portal site.  These days, they’re running an array of YUI 2.7.0 utilities, including YUI Core, Connection, Animation, and Cookie.
  
• “YUI 3, Présentation Générale,” En Français: Philippe Le Van has created some introductory material in French for YUI 3; merci, Philippe! After you click through, use the links in the right nav to browse his YUI 3 content. (Original source.)
  
• Dan Wellman’s YUI Compressor Automator Desktop Application for Windows: Dan Wellman, author of Learning the Yahoo User Interface Library, has issued a wrapper application for the YUI Compressor.  Writes Dan: “My application wraps the YUI Compressor in a visual GUI, shielding you from the command-line scaryness that would otherwise ensue (ok, CLI’s are nice and friendly once you’ve used them a few times, but a lot of non-developers shy away from them). To minify files you just select them in Windows Explorer and drag them into the application window. The application then spits the files out into a folder on your desktop.”
  
• Iain Lamb’s Scale, Rhythm, and Typography Exploration Using YUI 2: Writes the always-thoughtful Iain Lamb: “This page is both an essay and a tool. It sets out to explore how two, intertwined concepts, often playful but sometimes cheeky, can be encouraged to dance in web pages. Drag the colored boxes along the scale to throw these words anew. For the most part, this text is just a libretto for the performance you are about to play upon it.”  Intrigued?  Check it out here. (Original source.)
  
• Matt Snider on “transition Animations” (using YUI 3): YUI contributor (and Mint.com frontend engineer) Matt Snider writes about his “transition animation” technique in the latest installment of his blog.
• Logging In With YUI and CakePHP AuthComponent: Les Green has a new YUI/CakePHP authentication tutorial up on his GrasshopperPebbles blog. (Original source.)
• Generic YUI 2 Login Widget: Les Green from GrasshopperPebbles, who has a variety of YUI 2-based modules, released a generic login widget that leverages the YUI Container class.
• Multiple Combo-boxes with YUI and CakePHP: Les Green is on fire this month with YUI-related blog posts.  This one looks at doing multiple combo-boxes using YUI on the frontend and CakePHP on the backend.  Writes Les: “I’m working on a project where I use YUI and CakePHP to fill multiple combo boxes on a page using Json data. At first, I wrote separate code with the same functionality for each combo box. Every time I needed to change the functionality, I had to change it for each combo box. After doing this multiple times, I decided to combine the functionality on both the front-end (YUI) and the back-end (CakePHP).”  Check out his full post for all the details and code samples.
  

2009 + 1 = a whole new year. We’re starting it off running working on a new set of features to enhance My Yahoo!.  I’ll start off by letting you know that we have a series of fan apps for all your favorite NFL football teams. With the playoffs here, you may want to add a few of these to your page:

• Arizona Cardinals
• Baltimore Ravens
• Dallas Cowboys
• Indianapolis Colts
• Minnesota Vikings
• New Orleans Saints
• New York Jets
• San Diego Chargers

In addition, we upgraded our Horoscope feed so that should be working for you again. We also fixed the bug where sometimes the Fantasy Sports app’s layout didn’t display correctly.

Apps showcased in this post:

• Add Horoscopes
• Add Fantasy Sports
• Add Arizona Cardinals Fans
• Add Baltimore Ravens Fans
• Add Dallas Cowboys Fans
• Add Indianapolis Colts Fans
• Add Minnesota Vikings Fans
• Add New Orleans Saints Fans
• Add New York Jets Fans
• Add San Diego Chargers Fans

Michael
- My Yahoo! Team Lead