my voice is my passport
{ Monthly Archives }
Many thanks to the individual who recommended the PS2 games to Diana. They are amazing.
Add that to the games I picked up on clearance a while back (that were in storage waiting for a system to play them on), and I have enough to keep me busy for months!
So until this morning, I believed AJAX was the domain of masochists - people who were willing to slog through cross-browser incompatibilities just to build a single transparent list and make their Website a shred cooler than the competition. Then I listened to this podcast:
> IT Conversations: AJAX Progress and Challenges -
> Technometria
> “In this conversation, Phil Windley sits down with Ben
> Galbraith, Bruce Grant and Scott Lemon, three experienced
> AJAX developers and evangelists, to talk about progress and
> challenges in the AJAX world.”
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1010.html
And there I learned of the frameworks: libraries of Javascript functions that abstract away all the problems with working on multiple browsers. Now, you don’t code a transparent menu from scratch; you put a menu object in your page and the framework handles it all for you. Not all features work across all browsers today, but at least now you can let the framework authors worry about that - your site’s code doesn’t need to be touched.
Prototype
This is the more polished framework. It’s also integrated with Ruby on Rails. Check the links to script.aculo.us and Rico, two effects libraries built on top of Prototype.
http://prototype.conio.net/
Dojo
This framework doesn’t have a pretty set of example pages right now, but click on the HTML files in their unit test directory to see some [i]really[/i] cool widgets. (Like the full rich text editor!)
http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly/tests/
So what’s the takeaway from all this? I think AJAX is about to go mainstream. I hope people will design responsibly and not use it for its own sake, but you should definitely consider whether your site will benefit from it. Plain-old HTML is going to look dated very soon.
Target had a Sony DSC-L1 on clearance for $170. It’s twice the resolution of my DSC-S50, and holds up a lot better in low light. It also bears more resemblance to a candy bar than a brick. :) Yay, Moore’s Law.
We took Lenny to the Phoenix Zoo this weekend, to keep him from driving us crazy and to try out the camera. Here’s a sample shot.
> “One expert warned me about the gruesome requirement for a
> ‘live test’ by fingerprint readers, necessitated by the
> likelihood that fingers might be chopped off in an effort
> to defeat fingerprint security.”
Military thumb drives expose larger problem - The Red Tape Chronicles - MSNBC.com
My big fear was always retinal scanners.
Bioinformatics companies take note. I refuse to use any form of authentication that doesn’t include a live test.
> How I Work: Bill Gates
> FORTUNE Magazine
> Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect,
> Microsoft, U.S.A.
> April 7, 2006: 5:17 PM EDT
> At Microsoft, e-mail is the medium of choice, more than
> phone calls, documents, blogs, bulletin boards, or even
> meetings (voicemails and faxes are actually integrated into
> our e-mail in-boxes).
I wish my workplace was like this. Leaving me voice mail is a good way to get ignored.
> I’m not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and
> desktop folders and my online calendar.
Same here, though I’m actually looking to integrate e-mail and calendar with a to-do list instead of vice-versa.
> using SharePoint, a tool that creates websites for
> collaboration on specific projects. These sites contain
> plans, schedules, discussion boards, and other information
AKA Wiki, right? Again, something I wish my workplace would do.
> Another digital tool that has had a big effect on my
> productivity is desktop search. It has transformed the way
> I access information on my PC, on servers, and on the
> Internet.
Damn right. I saved all my e-mail for later searching even before I had Google Desktop Search.
> If the entire week is very busy, it’s the weekend when I’ll
> send the long, thoughtful pieces of e-mail.
I wish I was Bill Gates. Then people would actually read my long, thoughtful e-mails, instead of asking me stupid questions the next week.
I’m sitting here using Google’s new calendar feature (which I’d been waiting months for), and I just had an “aha” moment. I realized that from now on, this is the only way I want to do calendaring. No messing around with a calendar app on the PC that won’t share data with anyone else…
And then I thought: hey, how long before I no longer want to mess with ANY app on my PC? Reinstallation and reconfiguration every time you upgrade hardware is something end users have no business doing, and it’s a pain even for geeks. People should be worried about their data, not their apps. And here Google is, rolling out online applications that replace the basic functionality of every piece of the Microsoft Office suite. Zero installation, zero configuration.
I’d been listening to predictions of Google taking on Microsoft for months. But now, having used one of the key apps, I can actually envision them winning.
“We’re sorry, Google Maps does not yet have video footage for this time period in this region. If you would like to contribute video that is licensed for commercial use, please click here.”
http://www.camcentral.com/
Two Sunday mornings in a row now, I’ve wandered around town looking for Joan so I can buy some turnips. No show both times.
Has anyone else ever found her? Where?
“Find all movies directed by Kurosawa Akira, allowing search in Kanji or Romaji.”
That was the use case (think “wish list item”) I came up with for my media server. I had no idea at the time how I was going to implement it, but I wrote it down anyway.
Well, I was going down the list, marking off the cases that could be implemented with my planned system, and my jaw dropped when I got this one. My God! I can do this!
