So what can you do with Unite? Several things, including:

• Share files, including photo downloading and music streaming.
• Host chats with your friends.
• Run a web server for a simple web site.
• Leave or receive notes on your computer.

Unite requires an Opera account, and an alpha build of Opera 10b (Windows, Mac, Linux).

Opera Unite is a local web server, but it interacts with a proxy server. This means that end users don’t need to establish a firewall or set up port forwarding on their machines. They can just install Opera and go.

After starting a service, you can set three levels of access control: Public (open to anyone), Limited (open to anyone with a password), and Private (available to you). With file sharing and web serving, you also control which directory you want to make available.

Once you have made a directory available, you can send the url — in the form of http://computernickname.yourmyoperausername.operaunite.com/ — to your friends. It’s viewable in any browser, including mobile devices.

Don’t be a dummy: be a safe(r) Unite user

As with any service that lets users share their hard drive’s contents, Opera Unite can be a potential resource hog and security hole. Opera got it right by making these services easy to start or stop, and by supporting restricted access via password. Still, it’s up to users to understand how it all works.

For example, I stumbled across one user’s web server directory that hosted PHP files. Unite, however, is a simple and light-weight HTTP server. There is no PHP, which means that everything — including his database configuration details — is being served as plain text.

So there are two lessons learned:

1. Unite is a basic non-Apache server with no modules that means there’s no PHP, Perl, Python, or even server-side includes available.
2. Don’t share directories with sensitive data, and limit the number of directories that are exposed via Unite

Something else to know: Unite ties you in to the My Opera social network and makes other members aware that your services are running.

Is Unite a game-changer?

I think it depends on what the game is.

I don’t think Unite is compelling enough for most users to switch to Opera as their primary browser or to join the My Opera community. But I would not be surprised if it gained some traction with the geek set.

The concept of Opera Unite is pretty powerful. I can see this being useful as an impromptu office file sharing network, or to stream music from a computer at home to another at a friend’s house party.

Keep in mind that Unite also comes with a JavaScript API that supports file I/O (input/output). In a way, Opera is moving us closer to ubiquitous computing and the browser as OS.

And perhaps that’s the real story of Opera Unite: it is now dead-simple to give as much as you get from the web and use the skills you already have to build new tools.

TraceMonkey, Resig explains, uses a computing technique known as trace trees (PDF) which adds just-in-time native code compilation to SpiderMonkey, Firefox’s current rendering engine.

What does this mean? As Resig explains:

It means that JavaScript is no longer confined by the previously-challenging resource of processing power. With this improvement it’s leap-frogged any sort of traditional and has gone head-to-head with computationally-powerful languages like C.

In other words, we’ll get JavaScript processing speeds that are Usain Bolt-on-crack fast, opening the door for more powerful JavaScript-powered applications.

Firefox’s announcement comes a few months after the WebKit team’s announcement of SquirrelFish, which will be the JavaScript engine used in Safari 4.

Resig and Brendan Eich also point out that these TraceMonkey improvements (and presumably SquirrelFish’s improvements) in conjunction with HTML 5‘s canvas element will mean we’ll see some slick JavaScript animation and game experiences, such as this one by Zachary Johnson.

The obvious roadblock to widespread adoption of all of this whiz-bangy JavaScript+<canvas> goodness is, of course, Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer 7 does not support the canvas element. Version 8 of the browser will not, although there is a workaround for IE7 available.

Still, without the dominant web browser on board — and conceivably not coming on board for at least a few years — the widespread use of JavaScript animations may not take off for some time.

Want to check see TraceMonkey in action? Download a nightly build of Firefox (codenamed Minefield), and in the about:config panel, set javascript.options.jit.content equal to true.

Also check out Mike Schroepfer’s screencast What can you do when your browser is 7 times faster?

Markus and I did an IM-terview last night, and it’s on the site now. We had fun.

It takes advantage of Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine for an easy-to-use application for making layouts. You can import bitmap images, add rich text or plain text, and when you’re done, export your drawing as a PNG file.

One downside: it runs inside of Firefox. You have to start Firefox in order to use Pencil. It is, however, free and open source. I used it (briefly) on a Mac running Leopard (10.5.4) with no problems. It’s also been tested on GNU/Linux, Windows XP and Vista.

Prism and other single-site / site-specific browsers

The richness of the Pencil Project made me think about the browser as an application environment. And that brings me to Prism (formerly WebRunner), Mozilla’s single-site browser project.

Prism — available as its own package and as a Firefox extension — lets you turn any web site into a quasi-standalone application.

At first glance, a single-site browser seems pointless — dude, just open another tab. But I find that the minimal GUI of an SSB really lets me focus on the task at hand. It’s particularly nice when used with web applications such as Google or Zoho, or blogging interfaces.

Prism isn’t the only single-site browser available. Mac users, can check Fluid, which is based on WebKit/Safari. Windows users have Bubbles.

Browser as platform = The future of applications?

Today, you still need an operating system on which to run Firefox and Prism. But is there room for a super-minimal OS with a Gecko-based (or WebKit-based, etc.) GUI? I’m thinking about one that runs web applications in a single-site browser (gOS is close, as is the iPhone) and still allows for richer applications such as the Pencil Project (Flock skims the surface of this). As both browsers and the languages we use to develop web sites become more powerful and feature-rich, (when?) will the browser truly become the operating system, rather than run on top of it?

Related

• Recommended: “From Browser to Platform: Mozilla Rises”
• Bubbles, a single-site browser for Windows
• Fluid, a single-site browser for Mac OS X
• Prism, a cross-platform, single-site browser and Firefox extension

[Pencil Project found via WebAppers]

Jay Pipes of MySQL AB and co-author of Pro MySQL, comes to Atlanta this month to present “Join-Fu: The Art of SQL.”

I’ve seen Pipes speak before, and his presentation was incredibly informative. If you do a lot of development with MySQL, you should definitely attend.

Related:

• Jay Pipes’s Slides for Join-Fu: The Art of SQL (I and II) (I do not know whether this will be the same talk as the one Pipes will give next month.)
• RSS for Tech Events

• Edit tracking: Tucked way down at the bottom of each post is a revision history. You can see who changed what and when.
• SSL support for your administrative panel, plus the ability to force SSL logins. That’s critical if you frequently blog from public WiFi spots.
• Press This: Post links, YouTube and Yahoo! Videos with a couple of clicks. This bookmarklet will extract a URL, or video embed code and ready it for posting.
• Better plug-in update notification: Now you’ll see a bubble over the plugins link in the top navigation indicating how of your plugins have updates.
• Theme preview: the ability to see a theme on your blog before selecting it.

Also notable — though only for what it could mean for future versions of WordPress — is support for Gears. This version of WordPress only saves CSS and JavaScript files locally. I suspect future versions will also support offline editing as Zoho Writer does now.

The 2.5 branch of WordPress will no longer be maintained, making 2.6 a mandatory upgrade if you want to keep your installation current.

I upgraded today with no problems — at least that I’ve noticed. However, since 2.6 makes changes to your database, backup your data first.

Official WordPress announcement

A description of what this document is:

This document is a code of best practices that helps creators, online providers, copyright holders, and others interested in the making of online video interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use. Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment under some circumstances.

This is a guide to current acceptable practices, drawing on the actual activities of creators, as discussed among other places in the study Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video and backed by the judgment of a national panel of experts. It also draws, by way of analogy, upon the professional judgment and experience of documentary filmmakers, whose own code of best practices has been recognized throughout the film and television businesses.

Read it. Learn it. Remember it for your next YouTube upload.

One of Plurk’s signature features is “Karma,” a rewards system that awards or removes points based on how users interact with the Plurk community.

Plurking daily builds karma. Taking a few hours or a few days away can lower karma. Having plurk-arrhea lowers karma. Invite your friends and your karma goes up. Get de-friended, and your karma goes down. Get your friend request rejected and you lose some more.

Karma, then, is a system that rewards users who practice good community behaviors — being active, but not obnoxious — and penalizes those who don’t.

But the weighting of user activity to calculate Karma has concerned or annoyed some Plurk users. Disappearing karma points = a disincentive to using the site.

I suspect users feel that way because karma is something that you earn. To lose it because of a busy day at work or a web-free vacation feels unfair. Couple that with a lack of transparency — which, much to its credit, Plurk has addressed — and you have a system in which some users opt out of the system of rules because they don’t know which rules they are being penalized for breaking.

I am still intrigued, though, by Plurk’s idea of rewarding or penalizing user behavior algorithmically rather than by community reporting or internal policing. One obvious advantage is that you mitigate some dumb mob effects.

On the other hand, your site runs risk of being perceived as a digital disciplinarian. You’re not the boss of me, dang it! Screw you and the karma-removing-horse you rode in on. I’m taking my ball and going home … or back to Twitter full time.

I think a better karma-style behavior system would:

1. Be transparent about the rules, norms, and expected behaviors.
2. Be very, very obvious about where users can find those rules, norms, and expected behaviors.
3. Always reward for use. Stay neutral on a lack of use. Deduct points only for more serious violations such as obvious spamming, or maybe obvious friend-whoring.

Elsewhere

• Plurk’s “Safe Plurking” Guide
• Plurking Help the Complete Plurk How To Guide for Plurkers old and Plurks Noobs too

The LitePacific hack for example, works well in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, but also affects Safari. If you support Safari, you will also need to create a separate set of style sheet hacks to address differences in the way Safari and IE render pages.

CSS hacks also make your style sheets much harder to read. With conditional comments, you have to maintain multiple style sheets, but each style sheet is cleaner and clearer. Granted, with each new version of Internet Explorer, you have to update your header templates. But updating a header file offers far less risk than integrating new hacks into your style sheets.

Which necessary evil do you prefer? CSS hacks or conditional comments? Speak your piece in the comments.