Technical musings off the beaten path.

January 25, 2006

From the Web 2.0 department:
tales from the mash pit

(Author's note: Chris Messina implored us to blog about Mash Pit. I didn't want to just parrot other excellent posts, so here's my demented version of the event.)

Four thirty. A.M., as in oh-dark-thirty. Ben and Karen will be asleep for another three hours. Uh huh. Why am I up this early? Because I have to leave for the airport in an hour. Uh huh. Why is that again? It takes me a moment to focus, to remember. Oh yes. It's because I go into berserker paroxysms of geeky hyperactivity whenever the triggerword API is spoken, and I don't stop until some kind soul utters the safeword.

In this case the fiend is Chris Messina, and the cause of the utterance is Mash Pit. It's the latest bud from the Bar Camp bush, a one-day test to see if meatspace interaction can produce cyberspace results. If successful, a number of Mash Pits would follow, each building on the the code and content of the last. It's in San Francisco, of course. I'm in San Diego, of course. "It's not that far," I think, glossing over the realities of security checkpoints, delays and AirBART. "The flight is barely as long as my old commute to Encinitas." Uh huh.

Continue reading "tales from the mash pit"

January 12, 2006

From the Web 2.0 department:
Predictions for 2006

From a comment I posted over at Peter Caputa's blog:

The Web 2.17 design ethic replaces tiny grey text and big colorful images with tiny grey images and big colorful text. Flickr repurposes itself as a freefont archive.

Yahoo, Google, O'Reilly, and Apple merge into a company briefly named YaGooFoople, then renamed Web 2.0, which manages to acquire Microsoft just before disappearing in a puff of smoke and stock options.

The US Government creates a new RSS Bankruptcy Court to provide citizens relief from crushing attention debt. Options include "Chapter 1.3-NonAttribution" bankruptcy and the more popular "Chapter 1.1-ShareAlike", which provides debt restructuring across social networks.

Ha. I kill me.

October 03, 2005

From the Web 2.0 department:
taking web 2.0 up a notch

Brian Dear just posted a ginormous, well-thought-out post on where Eventful and EVDB fit in the Web 2.0 universe. It's primarily a response to Tim O'Reilly's post asking What is Web 2.0 but it's also leading up to the Web 2.0 conference this week.

I love how well we fit in this new ecosystem. I consider that a good sign, both about the Web 2.0 concept (it's not just a buzzword) and about EVDB itself. Like I've said before, it's really refreshing to work on something that's both on the cutting edge and well-received by the general public.

UPDATE: Tim O'Reilly posted a nice response to Brian's response:

Brian Dear's wonderful point by point analysis of how EVDB matches up with the points in my Web 2.0 meme map. I'd love to see more Web 2.0 companies giving this kind of feedback!

September 01, 2005

From the Web 2.0 department:
enablers

I can't believe it took me this long. I just realized that videophones, which I normally consider to be a nice-to-have addition to voice conversation (or chat), are an amazing leap forward for deaf person. In fact, it would probably make sense to offer a video-only version of such things, to save the bandwidth of a useless audio channel.

How many other "nice-to-have" features are we ignoring, instead of enabling uses we didn't expect?

July 21, 2005

From the XML department:
consider XML namespaces deprecated

The adage goes: "XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve your problem, you aren't using enough of it." Parand Darugar has challenged that idea (or validated the sarcasm) with a compelling case for abolishing XML namespaces.

I never did warm to namespaces, personally. The idea looks good on paper: provide infinitely-extensible support for any number of document formats within a single document. In practice, supporting namespaces always seemed to require ten times more work than the problems they purport to solve, so I've avoided inflicting them on others. Now I'll treat that as a rule, and encourage others to do so as well.

July 01, 2005

From the Macintosh department:
CPAN vs. dot-underscore

I was so keen on the idea of pushing a module to CPAN that I almost didn't catch a fatal flaw in my scheme. Mac OS X (motto: It Just Works) was doing something odd to my tarball as it was created: it was adding a whole host of files that weren't there originally. Not just the .DS_Store files we all know and love (and learn to remove), but odd shadow files like ._foo.txt for foo.txt and ._Makefile.PL for Makefile.PL.

Yep. Now you might see the problem.

Continue reading "CPAN vs. dot-underscore"

June 29, 2005

From the Macintosh department:
Gee! (your app smells terrific)

The worst part of having multiple e-mail addresses is keeping on top of new messages without spending every waking moment checking each account in sequence. That's why I love Gee!, a functional little GMail notifier for Mac OS X.

Gee (I'm going to stop exclaiming it) checks GMail's Atom feed for my messages and updates a small blue circle in the menubar with the count of new ones. Pretty standard, but Gee goes one louder: clicking on the circle drops down a list of the senders' addresses (or subject, or a combination depending on preference) so that I can quickly tell the difference between spam and an important message without pulling up GMail itself. If that's not enough, Gee also lets me reset the counter so I can choose to ignore it until something newer comes in.

That combination of simple features provides the best attention-span booster I've had in weeks. Of course, I just blew any productivity gain by blogging about it, but I had to share the love.