Archive for March, 2010

The historic health care reform legislation signed into law by President Obama may be a welcome landmark or a colossal disappointment, depending on your views. But I think nobody can deny that the mammoth bill’s sheer size and complexity — not to mention political drama — are enough to boggle the mind.

 Much time and effort is required to figure out what this new arrangement will mean for each of us and our families.  Will it affect your current health plan?  Should you prepare for additional costs?  How are “pre-existing conditions” defined?

 The questions will keep coming, but you can narrow your search for answers by checking out these sources:

• Kaiser Health News – Health Reform: This daily roundup of major news coverage gives you a quick survey of current reporting, with links that you can follow for more in-depth coverage of topics that interest you. An additional Kaiser feed, the Daily Health Policy Report (http://feeds.kaiserhealthnews.org/dailyreport) also offers useful summaries.
• New York Times – Health Care Reform: You’re likely to find daily articles on the topic, and many of these articles link to more informative resources on the NYT site.
• Health Care Reform Center: From the publishers of the New England Journal of Medicine, this feed takes a more academic look at the large issues involved in the new legislation and what they mean for the health care industry.
• FactCheck.org: This feed contains updates that focus on consumer advocacy and try to reduce political confusion; several of the recent posts relate to health-care reform.  The source: Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

 Following the intricacies of this important issue could give anyone a headache. But you’d be smart to brush up on some of the feed details above before calling the doctor.

 Apps mentioned in this post:

• Add Kaiser Health News – Health Reform
• Add New York Times – Health Care Reform
• Add Health Care Reform Center
• Add FactCheck.org

Tom
- My Yahoo! Editorial

Posted by Agnes Taterode, Google Books Support Team

Got a question about using Google Books, or curious about promoting your books on Google for free? The Google Books Help Forum is now available for questions of all shapes and sizes. With so many readers and partners out there, we wanted to provide a place for folks to help one another use Google Books.

The Help Forum is also a place for our team to share tips and answer questions, as well as a great way for us to receive feedback and suggestions for improving Google Books. Don’t understand a feature? Want to ask for help promoting your book on Google Books? Or have you found an incredible older book and want to share it with fellow readers? The Google Books Help Forum is the place to do it. Our team of Forum guides is looking forward to meeting you.

Please come over and join the discussions at the Google Books Help Forum!

In previous versions of the API, services had separate methods for adding, updating, and removing items in an AdWords account. The v2009 version changed this paradigm and combined the functionality into a single method called mutate. The mutate method works on operations, where each operation defines the action to perform (operator) and the item to perform it against (operand).

While it may not be immediately obvious, the mutate method is designed to process many operations in one call. For example, the following method uses the PHP client library to add multiple keywords in one request.

function addKeywords($keywords, $adGroupId, $adGroupCriterionService) {
  $operations = array();

  foreach ($keywords as $keyword) {
    // Create biddable ad group criterion.
    $adGroupCriterion = new BiddableAdGroupCriterion();
    $adGroupCriterion->adGroupId = $adGroupId;
    $adGroupCriterion->criterion = $keyword;

    // Create operation.
    $operation = new AdGroupCriterionOperation();
    $operation->operand = $adGroupCriterion;
    $operation->operator = 'ADD';

    // Add operation to array.
    $operations[] = $operation;
  }

  // Make mutate request.
  $results = $adGroupCriterionService->mutate($operations);

  return $results;
}

It’s important to note that performing multiple operations in one request can be substantially faster then performing them one at a time. Making any request to the AdWords API comes with a certain amount of overhead, so performing more work per request can dramatically improve the performance of your application. For example, in a simple test I ran adding 500 keywords in a single request was over 100x faster than performing 500 separate requests.

Also of note is that the operations in a mutate request can contain any mixture of operators and span any number of campaigns, ad groups, etc. That means you can add a keyword to one ad group and update a keyword in a different ad group in the same request.

More information on the mutate method of a service and the operations it supports can be found in the developer documentation, and any questions you have can be posted to the forum.

- Eric Koleda, AdWords API Team

It's been a while since we've put together what's been going on in the GWT community, and there's no time like the present to do so. Below are a handful of updates and new releases that have taken place over the past few months.

Smart GWT 2.1: Smart GWT, a framework that provides enhanced widgets that can coexist on both your client and server, has released a 2.1 version. Below are some of the key features of this release:

• GWT 2.0.3 compatible
• New Graphite theme
• Support for widgets in ListGrid cells
• Support for Checkbox TreeGrid with cascade selection and tri-state checkboxes (selected, unselected, partial)
• Significant improvement in ToolStrip appearance
• Improved Print support with fine grain control over what widgets and data appears in print view
• Support for Flash, ActiveX, Applets and SVG as Smart GWT widgets
• Various performance improvements

GWT Designer 7.3: Instantiations announced an upgrade to version 7.3 of its popular graphical user interface (GUI) building product, GWT Designer™. GWT Designer v7.3 stays in sync with the major new release of the open source Google Web Toolkit (GWT) version 2.0, adding support for the new GWT 2.0 Development Mode, Layout Panels, Widgets and more. The upgrade includes the following features:

• GWT 2.0 Development Mode Support – provides the ability to debug your project with the browser of your choice. Includes multi-browser debugging, allowing you connect to multiple browsers in a single debugging session and network support, plus a view to embed development mode logging messages directly into an Eclipse view.
• Layout Panels - Employ all new GWT 2.0 Layout Panel types. Layout Panels offer a predictable, constraint-based layout system on top of standard CSS to help you reliably create a desired layout.
• Widgets - Enjoy greater design flexibility with support for all new GWT 2.0 in-line widgets (Label, HTML and Hyperlink).
• Enhanced Ext GWT (GXT) Support – Utilize added support for GXT 2.1 and un-typed GXT events.

RaphaelGWT: The Hydro4GE team has open sourced their RaphaelGWT project. RaphaelGWT allows you to integrate GWT with Raphael, a lightweight JavaScript library for cross-platform vector graphics.

Gilead Update: Gilead, an Open-Source framework for seamless integration of Hibernate and GWT, has released an updated version of its project that contains the following features:

• Predefined remote services
• A new specific transport annotation (@LimitedAccess) to implement custom access to entity fields (role based for example)
• Lazy property checking on the GWT side, to know if a null association on client side was already null on server or just lazy but not loaded (and thus replaced with null by Gilead)
• A ConfigurationHelper class, to limit Gilead configuration to one line of code

GWT MVC 0.4: The GWT MVC project, aimed at creating a layer on top Google Web Toolkit's widget library capable of implementing RIAs in easier and more conceptually guided way based on Model-View-Controller design pattern, has released version 0.4.

GWT Service Resolver: The gwtserviceresolver project has been added to Google code. Similar to gwt-dispatch, gwtserviceresolver allows you to minimize the code changes that are necessary as you add new RPC services.

GWT Mosaic: The GWT Mosaic project has added some tutorials to help developers wire up UiBinder-based elements with GWT Mosaic Actions.

We want to fix the issues that you find in the IE9 Platform Preview. This blog post is about how to write bug reports that we can understand and address. Working together, we can fix the important issues and deliver a better IE9 for everyone.

Let’s take a look at the elements of a great bug report, and use a real example from IE8.

Element	Purpose	Example
Title	Concisely summarize the bug and related information. Good titles are unique, memorable, and a descriptive summary of the symptom along with how bad the symptom affects users or developers.	AccuWeather.com Mini-Forecast sidebar gadget broken after installing IE8 Partner Build
Steps	Minimal steps to reproduce the bug listed in order.	Install IE8 B2 Upgrade to Vista SP2 (Windows Update) Uninstall IE8 B2 Install IE8 Partner Build Open Windows Help and Support
Reproducibility	Some bugs reproduce all of the time and some seem random. This randomness can be caused by content, timing, script, time of day, or language.	Always Happens
Version	Versions of IE and Windows. You can get the IE version from Help, About. This will help the team setup the right repro environment and help us inspect the right code. You should always use the latest version from the Test Drive site.	Windows Vista x86 SP2 beta IE8 Partner Build
Actual Results	Describe the behavior you observed.	The AccuWeather.com Mini-Forecast gadget display is broken (see attached image)
Expected Results	Describe the behavior you expected.	The gadget should display properly.
More Information	Include more clues to the root cause of the bug.	The issue reproduces in No Add-ons mode. This is new to the IE8 Partner Build. Attachments: GadgetsBroken(B2-PP).PNG

Unique bugs get unique reports

Each unique bug should get its own bug report. The exception is multiple sites have the same issue.

Search for Duplicates

Before reporting your bug, please search to make sure it hasn’t already been reported. If it has been reported, you can let us know you can also reproduce the bug by clicking I can too.

Include IE Diagnostics Reports

Please include an IE Diagnostics report with every bug. IE Diagnostics is a powerful forensics tool used to gather important information for the IE team. To access the IE Diagnostics tool from the Platform Preview, on the Report Issue menu, click Run IE Diagnostics. When the report is finished, click Save Report As to save a local copy.

Include Screenshots

A screenshot of the Platform Preview rendering the page and a screenshot of how it should look when rendered correctly is a great way to visually communicate the differences you see. Use the Snipping Tool to capture screenshots. For a demonstration of how to use the Snipping Tool, visit Windows Help and How-To.

Include Content For Pages you Develop

If you developed a page that does not render correctly, include a sample of the HTML code, any scripts, and any other content required to reproduce the issue.

Reduce website problems

If you are reporting an issue with a web site, it would be helpful if you reduce the website to the core script and markup elements that are causing the issue. For more information about this read the IE8 Compatibility Test Guide.

Use Connect for Bugs Only

Please Use the Forums to ask questions and use the Microsoft Support page for support options for your Microsoft products.

Zip it Up

After you’ve gathered the IE Diagnostics Report, Screenshots and any other attachments for your report, Zip them up into one file and send them with your bug. Select the files in Windows Explorer, right-click, point to Send To, and then click Compressed (zipped) folder. This helps keep all the files in your bug report together and helps the attachment to your bugs fit within the 20MB size limit.

Security and Privacy

If you have discovered a vulnerability in Internet Explorer or the Internet Explorer Platform Preview:

• Do not report the issue in the public forum
• Forward all information regarding the issue to our Security Response Team (secure@microsoft.com)

When you use a bug report form that provides button options to designate a particular report as public or private, specify private for all bugs found that constitute a security or privacy matter. This prevents anyone other than the person filing the report and the IE team from seeing the details of the bug.

Security and Privacy Do’s and Don’ts

Do tell us about bank and other secure web sites that aren’t working, but don’t include login information, account numbers, PINs, screenshots, or other personal information.

Do tell us about email web sites that aren’t working, but don’t include login information, any email content including attachments, screenshots, or other personal information.

Thank You

Thank you for your participation. Great customers submitting great reports will lead to a great IE!

Matt Gradwohl
Test Lead

Yesterday was the day to celebrate the life of Ada Lovelace, one of the first female computer engineers.

Ada Lovelace Day began as a way to tout the success and inspiration of women in technology - so we asked some of the women of Ask.com to write a bit about the women that inspired them to take up their careers in technology - or that keep them interested in this field.

Valerie Lanard, Software Engineering Manager

I was inspired by the many amazing women around me at University of California, Berkeley's School of Information. There were two truly fearless and amazing female professors - Marti Hearst, a pioneer in search algorithms as well as translating information systems into usable user interfaces, and Pam Samuelson, who introduced me to the complex interactions between technology and law.  The student body itself was half women, technology leaders in their own right who came together from all over the country.  It was an amazing environment, where we were driven by the power of our collaboration rather than pure competition.  I had no idea how perfect the preparation would be for working at Ask.

Christine Vonderach, VP UK Product & Technology

The strength of women in technology resides not only in our ability run and lead technical organizations, but in our ability to shape the future applications, especially social technologies.  Women excel in connecting others and building networks – older generations may think of it as groups like PTOs,  or local book clubs.  But now, as social media moves to the top of the technology world, it allows individuals or groups to be influential over wider geographies, thus increasing the impact that each individual woman is capable of.  This is what inspires me…each woman making a big difference by using technology as a facilitator and making sure that she knows what is possible.

How can we build technology and applications to create opportunities on a massive scale?  Things like...expanding hobbies into careers using sites like etsy.com …empowering women in remote locations to participate in the worldwide stage through companies like Samasource …enable helping others who aren’t in our physical neighborhood via sites like Ask.com that make it easy to find ways to help when disaster strikes or sites like chipin.com where you can gather funds to meet goals.  Additionally, as a mother, I am inspired each day by my children who see technology in a new and fresh way – they see the world in a way that incorporates technology seamlessly with everything they do – no instructions necessary.  

The role of women in technology is not limited just to those of us who chose careers to build it but, as social technologies become more and more mainstream, women are poised to be the driving force behind what succeeds - making the world a better place in the process.

Lisa Kavanaugh, VP Technology

I was actually inspired by the LACK of women role models that I encountered in my education/career. I was inspired by my mom who went to medical school as a single mother, by my high school friend a year ahead of me who majored in civil engineering, by the tiny percentage of women in my computer science program, and the challenge of being one of the few women who made it through and graduated with a computer science degree.

I am inspired on a daily basis by the women I work with at Ask.com.  Smart, strong, powerful women from all different backgrounds who come together to solve challenging problems and contribute in a passionate way.  But most of all, I am inspired by the young girls who, because of the many women who have blazed a path before them, can say without hesitation "I want to be a Software Engineer" when I grow up. Or...as my best friend's daughter says "I want to be a Computer Girl like Mom's friend Lisa".

Carla Borsoi, VP Community

I continue to be inspired by the women around me who use technology in different ways, whether it’s using it to create a from-the-ground-up business (Willo O’Brien) or to help musicians connect with their fans (Corey Denis), or how to help non-profits and NGOs use technology to better help people (Rachel Weidinger). These three women constantly amaze me with the way that they think about using technology to do new things and bring people together.

How does Ask.com fare with females? Our total workforce is 26% female, but women constitute 32% of those with a title of VP or higher. We've created, in Lisa's words, a place to come together to solve challenging problems.

We use an awful lot of the different YUI 2 widgets and components in our main application, and love them! But I’d thought it was about time to start getting to grips with YUI 3, and decided I’d have a go at bringing YUI 2’s Resize Utility over to YUI 3. I also have longer term plans to write a diary widget, and if it was going to be in YUI 3 it would need some resizableness.

The result: My YUI 3 Gallery Resize plugin. The source is available on GitHub, and here is a functional example.

I decided to do it as a plugin, rather than a widget. As far as I can tell, plugins are like a pretty handbag or a pair of ostrich-skin shoes; they pretty up an existing element, but they’re not the be-all-and-end-all. Making an element resizeable felt like a plugin to me.

To use Resize, include the code in your page:

<script src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/combo?3.0.0/build/yui/yui-min.js&gallery-2010.03.23-17-54/build/gallery-resize/gallery-resize-min.js"></script>

Once you’ve got the module on the page, making an element resizeable is as easy as plugging it in:

YUI().use( "gallery-resize", function(Y){
  Y.one( "#elementId" ).plug( Y.Plugin.Resize );
} );

It seemed quite important to me that the config and API of YUI 3 versions of components that exist in YUI 2 should be similar, at least, or as much as they can be within the YUI 3 approach. So you can use the same config objects with this plugin as with the YUI 2 version, and I’ve provided the same API methods. I wrote the plugin code from scratch, but the CSS is copied directly from YUI 2, only changing the prefix from yui- to yui3-. This should help minimize the learning curve for people making the YUI 2 to YUI 3 transition.

Here’s an example with some more options, passed as an object as the second argument to plug():

YUI().use( "gallery-resize", function(Y){

  Y.one( "#elementId" )
   .plug( Y.Plugin.Resize,
         { draggable: true,
            ratio: false,
            height: 150,
            proxy: true,
            ghost: true,
            animate: true,
            autoRatio: true,
            handles: [ "t", "b" , "l", "r", "tl" , "tr" , "bl" , "br" ],
            hiddenHandles: false,
            hover: true,
            knobHandles : true,
            useShim: true,
            status: true,
            // this is new: a selector to find child elements within #elementId
            // that should be resized in proportion to the wrapper.
            wrappedEls: "img",
            // so is this: should the wrapper 'hug' the wrapped element?
            // this'll only work with one wrapped element.
            hugWrappedEl: true
             } );
 } );

There is one exception to the consistency with YUI 2: wrapping elements. My Resize Gallery module adds some div elements inside the element that’s being resized to give you drag handles. This is fine as long as the element accepts child nodes; but images, textareas and the like don’t. In YUI 2, the Resize Utility automatically (or if you tell it to) adds a wrapper element to your image (or whatever) to make it resizeable.

This is fine, but it isn’t so good with a plugin approach. Plugins plug in to a particular node, and are accessible as a property of that node. But if my plugin starts creating new parent nodes and attaches itself and its behaviour to that parent, the interface is a bit broken, and it gets confusing to use. So the bottom line is that you have to wrap your pictures yourself for now. This could be cast as an advantage; the wrapper element can contain a pile of images, say, and they could all be resized with the wrapper, but captions for them could be left alone.

I’d love feedback from users (in the brand new Gallery Resize forum) as to whether the plugin approach works for you — that is, do you like the convenience or would you prefer the additional convenience of a utility that automatically handled the wrapping of images and textareas? I have some other to-dos still, as well; for example, I’ve not yet got wired the Events, there’s some re-arranging odds and ends (pulling out the CSS class names), and some performance and size optimisations yet to do. I haven’t completed cross-browser testing, either; if you’re using Resize with a Mac, particularly, I’d love feedback on how it’s working for you.

Congratulations to Andrew Bialecki (@abialecki on Twitter), whose Scriptaculous-inspired Effects module won the YUI 3 Gallery Contest 2010.

Andrew, who lives in the D.C. area, will be attending JSConf 2010 next month with a complimentary ticket from the Yahoo! Developer Network. (Thanks, @ydn!)

The Winning Entry: Effects

Andrew’s project builds on the YUI 3 Animation component, adding to it a sugar layer inspired by the Scriptaculous API. The idea will be a familiar (and welcome) one for anyone used to this sort of syntax:

Y.one("#main_demo").move({ x: 300 }).fade();

The judges appreciated the utility and desirability of this package. Developers will appreciate the conciseness of the syntax and the discoverability of the effects, especially if they have experience working with it in other libraries.

We also admired the professionalism of the documentation Andrew provided for the module. Documentation is never an easy task, but it is the implementer’s first touchpoint with your code, and thoroughly documenting the project tells your audience that you’re taking its needs seriously. Andrew easily cleared that bar for us.

We can see gallery-effects showing up in a lot of use() statements in the future, and that was one of the deciding factors. Useful, expressive, and convincingly documented — in this case, a winning combination.

Thanks to Andrew for his submission. Check out all of Andrew’s gallery contributions on YUILibrary.com.

Honorable Mentions

The quality of modules we judged for the competition made this a difficult choice — there is a lot of interesting work in this group. We singled out a few other notable entries worthy of particular praise:

• Usefulness: YUI Slideshow — Josh Lizarraga’s YUI Slideshow module (inspired by the jQuery Cycle plugin) is clean, elegant, and well documented. This is a strong contender if you’re looking for an image cycler based on YUI 3.
• Uniqueness: Radial Menu — Matt Snider’s Radial Menu is a novel approach to looking at a portfolio of thumbnail- or medium-sized objects. The use case for this component is arguably narrower than for some UI widgets, but deployed in the correct context it could be quite impactful and distinctive.
• Code Quality: Component Manager — Eric Ferraiuolo’s Component Manager struck us as being well written and as being a project that helps developers manage their own code structure. While it won’t make your page shiny, it might help make your application work better, and that’s worthy of an honorable mention in our book.
• Documentation: YUISand — Lauren Smith’s YUISand module, which is a slick implementation inspired by Quicksand for jQuery, was both well documented and interesting. It shared high marks in the documentation category with James Punteney’s commendable and modular Slideshow Base/Slideshow Animated tandem, Josh’s cycle-style Slideshow, and several others.

16 Modules in 17 Days

This was a short-running contest, but despite the narrow window there were 16 eligible modules submitted, and none of them disappointed. In fact, many of them may end up making a compelling contribution to one of your future YUI 3 applications. There was an image magnifier, two video modules, a wrapper for YUI 3 DataSource to make it work with YUI 2 components, a carousel widget, and a DOM-creation sugar module, and more.

With these recent arrivals (along with several others from the past few weeks that were not contest-eligible), YUI 3 Gallery is up to 82 modules. They range from the foundational to the whimsical, but the resource itself is already one of the most valuable aspects of the YUI 3 developer portfolio. (And it may get even more valuable quite soon.) Remember, as of the coming 3.1 release (just a few weeks away) you’ll be able to use all of these modules directly from your use() statement with no additional configuration or overhead.

Thanks to everyone who submitted modules. Andrew, have fun at JSConf!

The women of the Yahoo! Finance frontend engineering team are some of the most talented engineers I have ever had the privilege to work with. Their passion for best practices, accessibility and the end user make building the world’s biggest and best finance site an absolute pleasure. On the eve of shipping a massive update to the Yahoo! Finance site that will take our codebase global and push it into data centers around the globe, I find myself feeling incredibly lucky to work with these women on a day-to-day basis. I asked the women on the Yahoo! Finance frontend team to think about what brought them to frontend engineering and what it’s like to work on one of the world’s most frequently visited web sites.

Julie London

I built my first website in 1998 when animated GIFs were considered cutting edge. I was working as an anthropologist at the time and never imagined that the 5 crummy little web pages I built for San Francisco State University would be the beginning of a path that would eventually lead to Yahoo!.

I love frontend engineering because I love to be challenged and I love to solve puzzles. My job is never boring. The landscape is constantly shifting and to excel you have to keep learning.

Working at Yahoo! keeps my ego in check. I work with brilliant people on a site that’s used by millions of people.

Diana Liu

I first got involved with web programming when I worked as a Co-op student during my undergraduate studies. I was working at Hewlett-Packard on their internal web sites and web tools. I was exposed to a wide variety of tasks, but I soon found myself attracted to frontend engineering. I love being able to write a few lines of code, hit the refresh button on the browser, and immediately see results. The instant satisfaction is overwhelming. I love working on the tier closest to users. It is important to me that I provide great experiences to users, and as a frontend engineer I can often influence the usability and design of web pages.

Yahoo provides extensive training in frontend technologies, and it also has a high standard for the code that we write. Yahoo pushes us to write accessible code. To me, it is very rewarding to know that people with disabilities are able to access the features of Yahoo! Finance because I write code that supports assistive technologies.

I am proud to tell people that I work on the biggest finance site on the net. It is a huge responsibility knowing that I write code for millions of users worldwide. At the same time, it is an incredible feeling to know that I am helping people getting things done easier because of the code I write.

Helena Rajan

All of us know the proverb, “Face is the index of mind”. I would compare frontend engineering to the face and backend engineering to the mind. That says it all. The site is firstly judged by the look and feel, then comes the other characteristics…and that is what I’m into and this is what keeps my daily life interesting.

It’s an awesome experience to be working in finance. Not everyone gets the opportunity to work on a product which is seen by millions of people in the world daily, and I’m grateful to have that opportunity. This project has given me the privilege of working with some great technologists and it helps me learn something new daily.

Shweta Hayatnagarkar

Frontend engineering is an amazing domain — you get to develop the coolest software that end-users actually see and appreciate. You are constantly developing features that impact the user experience. In addition, you get to learn and work on cutting-edge, state-of-the-art technologies which are continuously evolving. Yahoo! provides a solid platform for frontend engineering.

It’s a double-edge sword — on one hand you get a satisfaction that whatever you develop will be used by millions of users across the globe, on the other hand you have to be constantly on your toes to make sure that the site is running perfectly. Thus it’s challenging and satisfying at the same time.

Yahoo is a fantastic place to be a frontend engineer. The frontend infrastructure and continuously evolving frontend research, not to mention our millions of users, makes developing at Yahoo! a most interesting, challenging and satisfying work experience.

Betty Tso

I also started building websites during the time when animated gifs were a hit. After studying Computer Science, I focused on high performance web site development. I joined Yahoo! as a frontend engineer, and it has been very rewarding to see how different frontend technologies have evolved the online user experience and made the web an everyday part of people’s lives.

My focus on the Yahoo! Finance frontend team includes analysis and development of ways to improve site performance and user experience. I also help other Yahoo! properties to identify performance bottlenecks and suggest solutions for improvement. I enjoy sharing the purple spirit with people outside of the company, and I was one of the representatives in Massachusetts Institute of Technology university recruiting program.

It’s going to be my 4th year at Yahoo! in a month and, looking back, it has been such a fulfilling journey. I get to work on a website that impacts millions of people’s daily life, and I get to work with some great talent in a friendly, busy, crazy and fun team environment.