YouTube searches for “fireworks” videos typically see a big spike each 4th of July in the United States (and a smaller one over New Years), but last week saw the biggest we’ve ever seen.
The culprit? A fireworks display “gone wrong” in San Diego, California, where the cities annual display — meant to last close to 20 minutes — was ignited and exploded all at once. Two of this past week’s most-viewed videos globally are bystander videos of the beautiful accident. Over 30,000 fireworks-related videos were posted in the past week and the most popular footage was from the San Diego display, which so far been seen over 5 million times combined.
Below you can see a graph charting weekly U.S. search interest for the term “fireworks” that puts this year’s spike in direct comparison with previous years’. (You’ll notice an unexplained rise in searches in late 2010, for which Katy Perry is the likely culprit.)
San Diego’s “Big Bay Boom ‘Bust’”, as it’s being called, is now currently one of the most-viewed fireworks displays ever on YouTube. (The #1 fireworks video is from London’s 2011 New Year’s Eve celebration.)
You can see a collection of the videos from the San Diego display in the playlist below.
There’s a reason why we never do unboxing videos, nor do we ever post them, but this one is different. It takes some unboxing videos from the apparently-extremely-well-secured Google Nexus 7. After watching this video, you’ll know exactly why we don’t do these ourselves.
The start is always the most important part of a new regime. With Marissa Mayer taking over at Yahoo, the scrutiny will be on her inside and outside of the company for several weeks. Everything she does (or doesn’t do) will be admired or criticized, heralded or ridiculed.
Even her first memo.
AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher’s knack for getting copies of internal memos paid off again as she intercepted the memo below. The gist: keep moving, you’re important, we’re going to succeed.
Digg isn’t the first social media site to fall. MySpace collapsed under their own weight. Other social news sites like Propeller, Yahoo Buzz, and Mixx never got the traction they needed. Facebook pushed out a lot of would-be social networks over the years. When Betaworks bought Digg for a ridiculously-low amount, it didn’t mark the first failure of a social media giant.
It was just the first time a social media giant fell for no apparent reason.
Digg had the traffic. It had the buzz. It had the personality. It made one major misstep with the roll out of V4, but otherwise their faults were not any bigger than any other social site (and arguably smaller than successful sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit). Now, it has nothing but a shadow of its former self and new bosses to take them towards a new direction on August 1. This infographic breaks down the Digg demise and points to similarities that may show Digg to be the tip of the social media failure iceberg.
Squirrel: it’s more than an image, it’s inception.
Wrap your mind around this: Squirrel is a single file that renders as both HTML and a JPEG image. It’s a webpage. It’s an image. It’s Squirrel. If that doesn’t make your brain explode, the HTML version contains an img element that points to … you guessed it, itself. Recursion FTW!
To see how it works, view source on the HTML page.
Squirrel was created by developer Michal Zalewski, who has quite a few other projects as well, including the interesting-looking Skipfish, a web application “security reconnaissance tool.”
With Firefox 14 out the door, Mozilla is turning its efforts to polishing up Firefox 15, due out six weeks from now.
If you don’t want to wait that long — and there are several reasons you won’t want to — you can download Firefox 15 from the beta release channel today.
There are several new features coming in Firefox 15, but none is likely to have as big of an impact on your day-to-day browsing as the memory improvements. Firefox 15 prevents most memory leaks caused by add-ons, including developer favorite, Firebug.
Mozilla has been working to solve Firefox’s memory issues for some time as part of its MemShrink effort. The payoffs for stock Firefox are already out in the wild, but for most users much of the appeal of Firefox lies with its many powerful add-ons. Unfortunately, those add-ons are often a source of memory leaks as well. Even the good add-ons; even the popular add-ons.
For the gory details about why Firefox add-ons leaked memory and how Mozilla’s developers are solving the problem, Nicholas Nethercote, head of the MemShrink effort, has a detailed explanation on his blog.
The bottom line is that the changes in Firefox 15 mean that many users with add-ons installed will see significant reductions in Firefox’s memory consumption.
That’s especially good news for web developers since the popular Firebug web development add-on has also been the source of some memory woes in the past.
There’s other good news for web developers in this release, including some improvements to Firefox’s new baked-in developer tools and a faster JavaScript engine. Also new is support for the SPDY networking protocol v3 and the CSS word-break property. For more details check out the full release notes.
A handful of the many screens your site needs to handle. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com
The W3C, the group charged with overseeing the creation of web standards like HTML and CSS, recently gave its official blessing to one of the cornerstones of responsive web design — CSS Media Queries.
CSS Media Queries are the basic building block of responsive design, which, at its simplest, just means building websites that work on any device. That way, when a dozen new tablets suddenly appear on the scene you can relax knowing your site will look and perform as intended, no matter which device your audience is using.
Now that the Media Queries Level 3 spec has been finalized, work has started on CSS 4 Media Queries, or more formally, Media Queries Level 4.
The W3C’s draft spec of Media Queries Level 4 adds three new features you can query in your stylesheets, including:
script — Query to check if JavaScript is enabled.
pointer — Query to see what sort of input device is being used (mouse, finger, stylus etc).
hover — Query to see if the :hover pseudo-class will work on the current device.
Perhaps the most interesting is the middle option, pointer, for which the user agent (your browser) is expected to return the value “none,” “coarse” or “fine.” According to the current draft of the spec, “typical examples of a ‘fine’ pointing system are a mouse, a track-pad or a stylus-based touch screen. Finger-based touch screens would qualify as ‘coarse.’”
Using the pointer query would make it possible to enlarge, for example, form controls on screens where a larger radio buttons might make things easier to select, or perhaps to change how paint flow is handled in a drawing app.
Of course, while potentially handy, none of these queries are yet supported in any web browser, so don’t go using them just yet. That said, the more progressive browsers like Opera, Chrome and Firefox will likely add preliminary support as the spec progresses. It’s also likely that some enterprising web developer will create a polyfill for older browsers before too long.
