TinyChat allows you to create a private chat room with a single click and tell your friends to visit a link from TinyChat (example: tinychat.com/kevin) to chat with you.

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Unfortunately, because it is just announced a few days ago, there is no detailed pricing.

By Matt Raible

This post was originally titled “FTE vs. Contract in this Economy”, but it didn’t seem to capture the essence of this entry. I wanted to write about why I think contracting is better in this down economy, but I also wanted to write about how you you might go about setting up your own company. Starting a company is relatively easy from a legal standpoint, and hopefully I can provide some resources that’ll make it even easier.

First of all, I believe that contracting is better in this economy for a very simple reason:

When you’re a contractor, you’re prepared to be let go.

There’s really nothing like being laid off. It sucks. It often shocks you and makes you depressed. The good part is you usually get a good afternoon’s worth of drinking out of it, but that’s about it. Severance is cool, but let’s face it – you’d much rather be employed.

As a contractor, you’re always looking for your next gig. You’re prepared for the worst. You’re more motivated to learn marketable skills. You’re constantly thinking about how you can market yourself better. Writing (blogging, articles, books) is an excellent way to do this and I believe it’s rare that FTE are as motivated to do these kinds of things.

Being a contractor forces you to better yourself so you’re more marketable.

People’s biggest fear of contracting is that they’ll have a hard time finding their next gig. In my career, I’ve rarely had an issue with this. There’s always contracts available, it’s just a matter of how much you’re going to get paid. Yes, I’ve had to suck-it-up and make $55/hour instead of $125/hour, but that was back in 2003 and $55/hour is still more than I would have made as a FTE.

The other thing that makes me believe contracting is better in this economy is I believe companies are hiring more short-term contractors than employees. I don’t know if this is because they consider employees liabilities and contractors expenses, but something about it seems to make the books look better.

So you’ve decided to take my advice and try your hand at contracting. Should you setup your own Corporation or LLC?

Starting a Company
Yes, you should absolutely start your own company. As a Software Developer, chances are you’re going to make enough to put you in the highest tax bracket. If you’re a Sole Proprietor (no company), you will pay something like 35% of your income to taxes and you can be sued for everything you own by your clients.

Should you create an LLC or Corporation? I started Raible Designs in May 1998. I started out as an LLC and later converted to an S Corp. For the first few years, I made $30-$55/hour and this seemed to work pretty well. I believe this was similar to having a Sole Proprietorship (because I was the only employee), except that I was protected from lawsuits.

In 2001, I got my first high-paying gig at $90/hour and my Accountant suggested I change to an S Corp to save 10K+ on self-employment tax. I’m certainly not an expert on the different types of business entities, but this path seemed to work well for me. It was $50 to convert from an LLC to an S Corp. I’m not sure if you can go from an S Corp to an LLC. The beauty of an S Corp is the corporation typically gets taxed at 15%, so you can run a lot of things through your business and pay less taxes. Date nights can be business meetings, vacations can be Shareholders Meetings, seasons tickets can be client entertainment and you can write off your car and fuel costs.

There’s lots of good resources on the web that describe the different business entity options. My favorite is A List Apart’s This Web Business IV: Business Entity Options. Another good resource is How to form an LLC.

The hardest part of starting a new business is coming up with a good name. My advice is to make sure the domain name is available and pick something you like. I chose Raible Designs because I designed web sites at the time. Raible is a pretty unique name, so that’s worked well having it as part of my business name. Googlability is important – don’t choose a generic name that will make you difficult to find. Potential clients should be able to google your business name and find you easily.

Once you’ve picked a name, the business establishment part is pretty easy. In Colorado, you can File a Document with the Secretary of State. Their site also allows you to reserve a name if you’re not quite ready to make the leap.

You’ll also need to get a Federal Employer Identification Number (FEIN) from the IRS. The IRS has a good Starting a Business article and also allows you to Apply for an Employer Identification Number (EIN) Online.

Once you’ve got all the documents setup, you’ll want to create a bank account for your business. I’m currently using Wells Fargo and really like how software-friendly they are. Their online banking is clean and easy to use. They also support QuickBooks for the Mac. They have Payroll Services to allow you to pay your quarterly taxes online as well as setup direct deposit, but I’m not using them.

For payroll, I use PayCycle and have nothing but good things to say about them. I have the Small Business Package at $42.99 per month. This package allows me to pay myself and employees + up to 5 sub-contractors with direct deposit. It also allows me to pay both Federal and State quarterly taxes online. Of course, if you can also get an Accountant to do this for you.

Having a good Accountant and Financial Advisor (for your retirement plan) will likely be an essential part of your business.. LinkedIn’s Service Providers is a good way to find recommended professionals in your area. For example, click here to search for Accountants and then click the change location link in the top right corner to specify your zip code.

Finally, you’ll need insurance. The Hartford has a good Small Business package that costs around $500/year. It’s liability limits have worked for all of my clients and I’m covered if my laptop ever gets stolen. For Health Insurance, I recommend using eHealthInsurance.com to find a good provider for you. I don’t get sick or hurt much, so I typically get a disaster prevention plan with a $5K deductible. For dental insurance, brush your teeth. Vision insurance typically sucks, so I wouldn’t buy it. Yes, our health care system in the US needs work and I believe if everyone had a small business, it might get more affordable a lot quicker.

Over the next few days, I’ll post some additional advice I’ve received on retirement plans, deducting a home office, drawing up contracts and how to come up with a good rate. If you’re an Independent Software Developer and have any additional advice, I’d love to hear it.

By Matt Raible

This morning, I added Dion and Ben’s talk titled Ajax: The State of the Art. Below are my notes from the event.

Ajax started out as a bunch of hacks. It showed that we could take our web interfaces and do a lot more with them. A hack isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Often, they turn into something much more elegant over time. The new browsers have many amazing capabilities that we haven’t taken advantage of yet. We’ve seen discussions on Ajax go from how to do XHR to frameworks and how rich and mature they are. Dojo is great for Enterprise Development (packing system, namespaces). jQuery is well-suited for lightweight developers (PHP). Prototype is fantastic for people who do a lot of JavaScript development and take it very seriously.

Today’s Ajax landscape is mature, really rich, and really exciting. Today, Dion and Ben are going to talk about technologies they’re really excited about for the future.

Canvas
The building blocks of the web are text, boxes and images. With canvas, it really makes a lot more things possible. You can do bitmap rendering and image manipulation. They’re showing a slide with Doom and Mario Kart running. Canvas 3D does true 3D rendering. Firefox and Opera have done prototypes of this. Can you do canvas-type things today in a browser? Yes, if you use Flash or Curl. Dion and Ben are excited about canvas over plugins for the following reasons:

• No start-up delay
• Available on mobile devices today
• Rendering fidelity with browser (especially important for typography)
• No bridges necessary (no marshalling/unmarshalling)
• Not a plug-in

The <canvas> tag originally came from Apple’s Dashboard. Dashboard’s programming model was in HTML and JavaScript. Dashboard is using WebKit under the covers. Today, canvas support exists in every major browser except for IE. The good news is there are Flash and Silverlight bridges to add support to IE. There’s also an ActiveX component that wraps the Firefox implementation and allows it to run in IE.

SVG
Dion and Ben aren’t that excited about SVG because it’s such a huge spec. We’ve been struggling with the HTML standard for the last 10 years and the thought of another huge spec for the next 10 years isn’t that appealing.

Fast JavaScript
Almost all major browsers have a Fast JavaScript implementation. Chrome has V8, Safari has SquirrelFish Extreme, Firefox has TraceMonkey and Opera has Carakan. This is exciting because of industry trends and how companies are trying to reduce computation cycles in data centers. The more computing that can be put on the client, the better. IE doesn’t have anything, but Dion and Ben believe they are working on something.

Web Workers
Interface latency is awful for applications. Jakob Nielsen once said:

0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously. 1.0 second is about the limit for the user’s flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay.

Anything that takes longer than a tenth of a second should be pushed to a background thread. Unfortunately, there are no threads in the web. Maybe we can add threads to JavaScript? Brendan Eich has said that “Threads suck” and there’s very little chance for threads getting into JavaScript. Gears brought Worker Pools and this is going into HTML 5 as Web Workers. You could also use Java applets to do this. With the latest Java Plugin, many of applets’ long-standing issues have been solved.

Desktop Integration
The ability to build desktop apps as web apps is very exciting. There’s a few technologies that demonstrate this: Fluid, Mozilla Prism, Adobe AIR, Appcelerator Titanium and Gears. The Palm Pre demonstrates the logical extension of this. The Palm Pre uses the web stack as its developer SDK. It’s very cool that web developers don’t have to learn anything new to become a Palm developer. Desktop integration is exciting especially if we can access desktop applications like email and address book.

The Ajax frameworks that are out there have done a lot to make web development simpler. However, there’s still a lot of pain with CSS and cross-browser issues. What if you took canvas and combined it with a sophisticated grid-based layout in JavaScript?

There’s a lot of platforms out there: Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flash, Apple Cocoa and Sun’s JavaFX. The web often isn’t considered a platform. Dion and Ben believe there should be an Open Web Platform. The problem right now is there is no central location to find out how to get stuff done. You have to search and find resources from many different locations. Mozilla is putting it’s resources into creating an Open Web Platform. This site will consist of 4 different areas:

• Home
• Documentation (for different frameworks, browsers, quirks)
• Dashboard (state of the open web)
• Roadmap (what’s going on)

This is not just Mozilla, it’s very much a community effort. This is something that Ben and Dion have been working on. But there’s something else they’ve been working on too. They’ve been talking about all these cool things, but what about an interesting application to test all these technologies?

Bespin
As they looked at code editors, most of them provide awful user experiences. Bespin is the Editor of Your Dreams and contains the following features:

• Accessible from anywhere – any device in any location
• Simple to use, like Textmate (not heavyweight like Eclipse) – an editor, not an IDE
• Wicked Fast – performance, performance, performance
• Rock-solid real-time collaboration, like SubEthaEdit – it just works
• Integrated command-line, like vi – Fun like Quicksilver, social like Ubiquity
• “Self-hosted” environment, like Emacs – For extreme extensibility, but with JavaScript!

Dion and Ben are showed a screen shot of Bespin and now they’re doing a demo. The core editor has what you’d expect with syntax highlighting and line numbers. Canvas doesn’t have text-selection by default, so they had to write it from scratch. The command line allows you to get help, run core command and also to subscribe to commands that others write. You can change your keybindings to emacs or vi as well as many other settings. Much of Bespin is event-driven, so you can easily plugin new behavior for different events.

For viewing files, they couldn’t bring themselves to use a tree. Instead, they developed a file-browsing interface that looks very much like Apple’s Finder. Personally, I like Finder, but wish it had Windows Explorer’s path bar that allows you to simply type in the path without mouse clicks. Back to the command line. They’ve done a lot to make things more discoverable so users can easily find the power of the editor.

Bespin could be used to engage developers more with open source projects. Checking out projects, modifying code and creating patches can be a real pain. Bespin could be used to interface with open source projects in the cloud. You could login, modify code and easily patch/build with the click of a button. One other thing they want to do is to have the server do code-analysis as you’re developing.

Is it OK to love a software tool? You must love your software tools. What we do as Software Developers is one of the most difficult jobs on the planet. Programmers, like poets, start with a blank slate and create something from nothing. If you don’t love your tools, you’ll start resenting what you do. If you don’t love your tools, it shows in your work. – Dave Thomas at RubyConf08

Thunderhead
A GUI Toolkit written with canvas and JavaScript. Allows you to do layouts with very little thought. It’s a lab experiment that’s in progress, stay tuned for more information.

All users care about is the user interface. Dion and Ben believe there’s a key to creating compelling user experiences. It all has to do with managing expectations. It’s not that different from how you manage relationships in your life. Expectations for movies and games have changes drastically over the years. What used to be the web (animated gifs and awful web pages) has also changed drastically (video of Apple’s online store). What was cool with MapQuest got changed drastically with Google Maps. What we have today isn’t the end of the game – expectations will continue to change. However, users have different expectations for software.

Alan Cooper has done some interesting work in this area. The software designer needs to focus in on a user’s goals. There are basic things you can apply to all users, for instance “sex sells”. An example of this is Delicious Library. This application allows you to keep track of things in your home such as books, movies, music and games. They made $500K in 3 months and made $54K the first day, with no advertising.

The quality of any software is determined by the interaction. If the interaction isn’t good, it will poison the entire experience. Donald Norman has a good quote: “Attractive things work better”. In society, this is often called “Dress for Success”.

The Open Web is hear to stay because it has:

• An Easy Programming Model
• Easy Remoting
• Extensive Customization Vectors (e.g. GreaseMonkey)
• Easy Deployment
• Great Widgets
• Great Visual Effects
• Great Mobile Story
• Desktop Integration
• State-of-the-Art Plug-ins

Bespin is a tech preview that they hope to release next week. Thunderhead will be released at the same time.

Conclusion
This was a great talk and easily the most inspiring of the conference. Dion and Ben always do a great job and the sexiness of their presentation made it all the more appealing.

Engineers in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer group continue to refine a new security feature designed to block malicious scripts that can be injected into trusted websites to steal email and account credentials. Judging from the magnitude of the problem, their task may never be completed.

Among the multitude of revisions introduced in last week’s release of Internet Explorer 8 were tweaks intended to make the browser’s cross-site scripting (XSS) filter better withstand tricks for concealing malicious characters in web addresses. Some of the world’s foremost web application security experts helped, an indication of the difficulty of containing the threat.

One fix enables input to be treated as a stream of individual bytes rather than characters, a change that prevents attackers from evading the filter using Chinese characters in web addresses. Because of the way certain characters, including “<” are rendered in Chinese, bad guys were able to sneak them into malicious URLs that weren’t detected by versions of the Microsoft beta browser.

A similar technique that uses a PHP function known as “stripslashes,” which removes backslashes from strings, had also been used to bypass the IE XSS filter. The protection now generates additional signatures that offer alternate interpretations of the input.

Other fixes involve scenarios that use extremely long UTF-8 sequences or injections of FORM and ISINDEX elements. Nulls in HTTP responses and Object tags using the CODETYPE attribute have also received attention.

Over the past few years, XSS vulnerabilities have emerged as an Achilles Heel for some of the biggest and most sensitive websites. In December, researchers found several XSS flaws on the site of American Express that potentially could have allowed attackers to steal users’ authentication cookies. Other sites that have been bitten by the bugs include Google Mail, Yahoo, MySpace, and Facebook.

XSS attacks allow attackers to inject hostile code into a targeted domain by taking advantage of a common practice among web developers who allow one website to link to images and scripts hosted from a second site. When Microsoft’s XSS filter encounters code that’s hosted on a different site, a heuristics engine inspects the URL and POST data and uses regular expressions to identify possible XSS vulnerabilities.

This is an extremely tall order for any browser. The ability of one site to link to code hosted on another site is a key architectural design at the heart of today’s website, so filtering carries the risk of breaking many websites if not executed carefully. And the list of techniques for evading such filters is long and only getting longer.

Several top-flight researchers helped Microsoft pinpoint the weaknesses. They include Yosuke Hasegawa, 80sec, Ronald van den Heetkamp, Amit Klein, and Gareth Heyes.

Microsoft’s goal seems to be to protect users against the most dangerous XSS threats without degrading the performance of legitimate websites. Contrast that with the NoScript extension for the competing Firefox browser, which does a great job of blocking many XSS attacks but also has the potential to confuse many less-sophisticated users.

The constantly expanding number of ways for bad guys to evade the Microsoft filter means its design is likely to remain an iterative, ongoing process with plenty of additional tweaks to come.

Omega is celebrating the landing on the moon 40 years ago on 20th of July, 1969 with the limited edition Omega Speedmaster Apollo 11. If you’re unfamiliar with Omega’s “Moonwatch” story, when an electronic timing system malfunctioned on Apollo 11, Niel Armstrong used his Omega Speedmaster Professional to keep track of time.

The Omega Speedmaster Apollo 11 40th Anniversary Edition keeps many of the Omega Chronograph Moonwatch technical features including 42mm size, shatterproof hesalite crystal, black tachymeter bezel, and Lemania hand-wound movement.

Microsoft has restated that its next milestone release for Windows 7 will be the Release Candidate test of the OS and not a second beta.

The software giant’s Windows development boss Steve Sinofsky said in an official blog post on Saturday that there will only be one beta of Windows 7.

Many will see that reaffirmation as a clear sign that the Vista successor may land at some time in 2009. Some have predicted that Windows 7 could arrive as early as the third quarter of this year.

However, Microsoft is sticking characteristically to its guns about when it will let the operating system loose by remaining silent on when it expects to ship Windows 7.

“The obvious question is that we know the pre-beta was October 28, 2008, and the beta was January 7th, so when is the Release Candidate and RTM? The answer is forthcoming,” said Sinofsky.

“We are currently evaluating the feedback and telemetry and working to develop a robust schedule that gets us the right level of quality in a predictable manner.

“Believe me, we know many people want to know more specifics. We’re on a good path and we’re making progress. We are taking a quality-based approach to completing the product and won’t be driven by imposed deadlines.”

Partners are continuing to receive builds from MS, said Sinofsky, who also insisted that making the operating system a successful release involved collaboration industry-wide.

Microsoft first announced its decision to only release one beta of the OS at the Professional Developers Conference in October last year, when it dished out a pre-beta version of Windows 7 to attendees at the event.

Sinofsky reiterated the firm’s delivery plan: First to provide a public beta – which arrived on 7 January – followed by a release candidate build, after which the product should RTM. But it’s unclear at this stage whether the RC build will be made available to public or private testers.

Companies that missed the opportunity to register their trademarks with the new .tel top-level domain (TLD) will get another opportunity with the opening of the landrush period from 3 February.

The sunrise period of registrations reserved for trademark owners ran from 3 December to 2 February. The .tel TLD will be open to all from tomorrow until 23 March.

However, domain registry Telnic will be charging a premium price during the landrush period to discourage domain name speculators and cyber-squatters, according to the firm’s chief executive, Khashayar Mahdavi.

The .tel domain differs from regular TLDs such as .com and .uk because, rather than store IP addresses for web servers, it links directly to content and information stored on the domain name server. A .tel address therefore offers companies a single page to publish all contact and communications details, which can be kept updated in real time, explained Mahdavi.

“It is a tool for companies, public and governmental agencies and individuals, and a lot of people are now realising how powerful this is,” he said. “We are the convergence point for telecoms, the internet and directory services.”

The new TLD could be a big success, depending on how well organisations want to market their .tel domains, according to Thomas Herbert, product manager at hosting firm Hostway.

“For businesses it is an important one, and I think it will take off and be adopted far quicker than, say, .mobi,” Herbert said. “So firms must remember that it is better paying the $400 [£280] now than arguing in a [dispute resolution case] later.”

The domains will be offered on a first-come first-served basis to guarantee the fairest method of distribution, said Mahdavi.

What does a Sith Lord drive on the weekends when he’s not preying on weak Jedi? An Ariel Atom of course.

(via Kinod)

Microsoft released windows 7 for testing purpose only on last January 9th, 2009. I am one of them who downloaded it. I tried to install on both of my PC and laptop but with no luck. I had problems on both that Windows 7 did not start properly (blank black screen) after successfully installation. Successfully installation? huh. Those problems solved when I install Windows 7 on VmWare. Surprised? It comes with few applications since it released as testing purpose. I don’t have plan to use Windows 7 right now. Thinking of why they released Vista? Now I’m happy with oldie XP and Vista. This is the snapshot from Windows 7 in VMWare.

You can download Windows 7 from Windows 7 official site. Remember that Microsoft limits download to 2.5 millions downloads.