nb.io - blog

Real Artists Ship

Congrats to our homies at Particle for shipping Roboto! Ericson's got a bit o' backstory on the crush3r blog, as Domainr led them to Roboto's (way cool) domain.

Annual Review Board scam: How is this legal?

We got this letter in the mail last week:

  

It appears to be official, tax-related LLC correspondence from California's State Department, which could be expected this time of year. It's got something that looks like the State seal in the upper-left corner. It's got our CA LLC Number, and looks just like the standard CA forms we periodically receive.

I was about to get out our checkbook to deal with it, when I wondered about that $228 number. I'd researched CA LLCs before we started the company, and thought the only ongoing fee is an $800 annual tax. A quick Google search for "CA Annual Review Board" revealed the scam on Yelp and elsewhere.

Motherfuckers.

How can this be legal?

We're on GitHub

Yesterday Cameron finished migrating all our stuff, open source and otherwise, to GitHub:

http://github.com/nbio/

We'd been using Subversion thus far (Hosted Projects for our products and Google Code for our open source), and were perfectly satisfied with it, but we just plain got the git religion so a move was inevitable. Here's what's there for hacking:

• CSSHttpRequest: cross-domain AJAX using CSS for transport
• CHR-on-Rails: a Rails implementation of CHR
• rack-contrib: CHR for Rack apps
• nbio.django: our homebrew Django middleware

Geeking Out over Breakfast

Admittedly, the three of us that make up nb.io are pretty geeky. We like to geek out about technology, gadgets, sports climbing, and especially, breakfast.

When I wake up each morning, I’m thinking about a few things: coffee, food, a shower, what time I need to leave to meet up for the workday.

Coffee and a shower? Easy. I set up my teapot before I get in the shower and five minutes later I can make a french press of Blue Bottle and sip on it while I catch up on feeds or email.

Historically, the least predictable part of my routine was breakfast. I’d get sick of eating the same thing every day. Eggs, bacon, french toast, pancakes? Yum, but who has time for that? Cereal? Boring. Hot oatmeal with fresh fruit, raisins, nuts? Now we’re talking.

That’s where the Zojirushi rice cooker comes in. Probably the best gadget for keeping us eating healthy breakfasts regularly, we all have one. We’ve agreed that whomever is hosting the workday sets up steel cut oatmeal in their cooker to be ready when we arrive. It brings a whole new meaning to the term “breakfast meeting.”

How do you encourage lively discussion and punctuality in your workspace early in the morning?

Ruby 1.9.1 RC1 in Search of the [Snow] Leopard

Hot on the heels of the release of Ruby 1.9.1 RC1 (faster! less suck! tastier interpreter!) comes a quick and easy set of instructions for building and installing it on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Sweet! I'll be dropping Ruby 1.9.1 RC1 onto my laptop right away.

jQuery 1.3

Something we’re excited about is today’s release of jQuery 1.3, which includes the wicked-fast new selector engine, Sizzle.

We’re looking forward to integrating jQuery 1.3 into Domainr, particularly the new live event delegation feature—allowing us to dump cumbersome post-AJAX fixup code.

Congrats to John Resig and the rest of the jQuery team!

CSSHttpRequest for Extjs

Woohoo! David Davis implements CSSHttpRequest for Extjs:

“Ext.ux.CssProxy allows for cross-domain AJAX like Ext.data.ScriptTagProxy, but with some differences. When you use Ext.data.ScriptTagProxy (JSONP), you allow untrusted JavaScript to execute in your domain’s context. With Ext.ux.CssProxy and CSSHttpRequest, the data is parsed out of specially crafted CSS avoiding any JavaScript execution. See CSSHttpRequest for more information on how to generate the CSS.”

More info, examples and source

Announcing CSSHttpRequest

Randy just took the wraps off an updated, fully baked version of CSSHttpRequest (CHR), which now has encoders for Python, Ruby and PHP, and works in all modern web browsers.

It evolved from his earlier CSS-RPC hack, an attempt to provide a mechanism for safe, cross-site AJAX via CSS. CHR's second version used @import statements to load third party JavaScript in a sandboxed iframe with limited privileges. Its callback mechanism was constrained to a single anonymous lexical closure which wrapped the window.parent variable, and the rest of the iframe’s JS context was trashed, wrecking window, cookie, document, etc. Unfortunately it didn’t work in Internet Explorer, because those JS variables are write-only.

What eventually became CSSHttpRequest needed to be:

• Simple: no need for proxy code on the host server, so that any site could implement a web mashup with any web service that implements CHR
• Secure: no execution of untrusted JS code, nor leaking of cookies from the primary (host) site
• Robust: must work the same way on all modern web browsers (IE6+, Firefox 2+, Safari 2+)
• Capable of sending and receiving reasonably large amounts of data (~2KB send, unlimited receive)
• JavaScript-only, no requirements of Flash or other plugins
• Fast

Today's release addresses these requirements—Happy Holidays from nb.io!

Congrats @ceedub!

Huge congratulations to @ceedub for finishing his Masters in Computer Science from USF!

Domainr Initial Coverage

Domainr has been out for a few days, and so far the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Some of our favorites:

Lifehacker

“Domain name search engine Domainr suggests web site addresses that make clever use of non-.com top level domains, subdomains, and folders, like del.icio.us, burri.to, or stop.spamming.us.”

Laughing Squid

“Domainr is a new search engine that helps you explore top level domains to find unique domains, letting you know if those domains are available for purchase.”

Download Squad

“In the past, you might have used one site to come up with a slick web address that uses a fancy top-level domain, and then another one to see whether your new creation is available. Domainr condenses the whole process into one step.”

KillerStartups

“What this site does, then, is let you explore all these sites that have strayed from the conventional domain names format along with the traditional ones. This elastic search tool also intends to provide a comprehensive overview of websites, as it covers both top-level domains and those who might not be that popular or attract that much traffic.”

Hackernews

“This is a killer interface. If it gets the behind the scenes stuff problems, others have already mentioned here, taken care of, it will get used a lot.”

onfocus.com

“Find domain names for your projects beyond the big three.”

…and last but not least, thanks to Andy Baio for his much-referred link!