Sid Sidberry Reads

John Jacobsen works for the IceCube telescope project, the world’s largest neutrino detector, located at the South Pole. The project’s mission is to search for the radioactive sub-atomic particles that have been generated by violent astrophysical events: “exploding stars, gamma ray bursts, and cataclysmic phenomena involving black holes and neutron stars,” according to the project website.

Jacobsen is one of the people in charge of handling the massive amounts of data collected by IceCube. In the video, shot this week at the O’Reilly OSCON 2010 conference in Portland, Oregon, John explains how they collect a terabyte of raw data per hour, then send everything to IceCube’s remote research and backup facilities using a finicky satellite hook-up.

Antarctica is one of the least accommodating places on Earth to perform scientific research with computers. It’s the driest spot on the planet — atmospheric humidity hovers around zero — and bursts of static electricity threaten the integrity of IceCube’s data stores. The lack of humidity causes the server clusters’ cooling systems to break down. And if something fails, a spare might take six months to arrive.

Here’s a short video about the future of jQuery, our favorite JavaScript library for creating rich, animated site interactions.

The interviewees are Mike Hostelter and Jonathan Stark, co-founders of appendTo, a consulting company that trains and supports jQuery programmers. The video was shot this week at O’Reilly OSCON 2010, taking place in Portland, Oregon through Friday.

In the interview, they talk a little bit about what’s next for the jQuery Core group — currently, jQuery creator John Resig is auditing mobile browsers to build more mobile features into jQuery, making it easier for JavaScript developers to make HTML5 iPad and smartphone web apps that are more “appy.” Also, there ultimately won’t be a separate pack for mobiles and desktops — the future of jQuery is one code library that works on all browsers and all devices.

See other OSCON 2010 videos on O’Reilly’s YouTube channel.

See Also:

• New Frameworks Give Mobile-Web Apps a Boost
• More Cool HTML5/JavaScript Video Players
• Get Started With JQuery

One of the most-cited advancements in HTML5 the new syntax for embedding videos on web pages without the use of plugins.

Rather than load up a Silverlight or Flash player, you can just wrap a file URL in <video> tags and the video will play natively in the most recent crop of browsers — including Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPad, where Flash and Silverlight aren’t allowed.

The design of default controls are left up to the browser vendor, but they are usually rather spartan, so the user experience is a little lacking. But since native web playback is all done with web standards, you can create fancy players in JavaScript and CSS that wrap around your video and make playing, controlling and navigating video content much more elegant.

We’ve previously told you about some great standards-based players from Sublime Video, Kaltura and Video for Everybody. Here are a few more.

[Via insicdesigns]

See Also:

• Chrome Shows Off Some Fancy HTML5 Tricks
• YouTube Launches New HTML5 Mobile Site
• Major Browser Vendors Launch WebM Free Open Video Project

Huge CSS files can gunk up your page loads, creating annoying wait times for your readers and (if things get really bad) even driving people away before the page fully loads.

The trick to avoiding breaking your user experience is to make your CSS as lean, clean and fast as possible. There are tried and true techniques for speeding things up, like using Gzip, or serving one or two files instead of dozens. There are also poor optimization methods you should avoid.

Today, we bring you an informative video from the recent 2010 O’Reilly Velocity conference on how to optimize CSS while avoiding some of the most common mistakes developers make. It’s especially useful for those of you with big CSS payloads. The first speaker is a little dry, but the fun picks up when Nicole Sullivan takes over about five minutes in.

See Also:

• Advice From the CSS Guru: Embrace Prefixes
• Got Slow Web Pages? Find Out Why With YSlow
• Dealing With Browser Differences in CSS 3

Muhammed Ali, Mike Tyson and Sugar Ray Leonard.
Arsenio Hall Show 1989. I think it’s the only time Ali and Tyson have met on a talk show like that. It’s interesting to see Ali’s reaction to Tyson, I think he has alot of respectable fear for Tyson even on stage. Of course the interviewer asks Ali the ultimate qustion - who would win between them?!

Muhammad Ali’s fight with Larry Holmes, as well as Larry Holmes, George Foreman, Ken Norton, Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali talking about how they would like to be remembered

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