11 posts tagged “tech”

I had a nice little chat with jResig of jQuery fame tonight, on javascript hacks and the future of the fox.

As I sit here pondering whether or not to actually go to GOOG dev day tomorrow, I got wind of Google Gears by way of Twitter, and it turns out my blogged prediction a few weeks ago was not half bad:

(My out-there hypothesis: GOOG is already working on a platform to address the issues that Chris and I have raised, and will announce it at the end of May in San Jose. If they don't, you'll disappoint me GOOG!)

Well, it's the end of May now, and GOOG Gears was just announced. Offline support is, at least, a decent start.

Mozpad had another IRC meeting today, and I'm not as optimistic now as I might have been last week...

I created and started filling out this map of the mozpad universe, only to realize that the biggest moon in the Mozilla world (at least in OS X land, based on iusethis data), is actually Camino!

Thunderbird seemed to clock in at 10% market share, with Flock / Songbird claiming no more than 5% OS X market share for that application space.

I was considering earlier today making a map like so of the Mozpad world, but perhaps more like this infoviz of relative sizes, but here with area/volume being proportional to user populations, textured by OS X dock icons (but as you can see, I haven't gotten to it).

At lunch, I chatted for a bit with Thomas Sha, the fellow who led the creation of YUI, the Javascript toolkit we chose to make use of when prototyping our design tool for mashups, and asked him about the future of the open web. He made the point that openness has a cost, and that sometimes you don't want more ideas, more code, more design. Sometimes 'tis better to make something that works and then standardize later (Ruby or XHR?) rather than attempt some open standard first that nobody uses or wishes to adopt.

I don't vox so much these days.

vox ova time

Blame it on the new blogsphere bloggersphere.

If the old blogOsphere was about RSS and elevating a single voice, then the new blogsphere bloggersphere might be about that too, but more about the embracing of constraints, which is maybehow a literary form grows up.

The new forms of the bloggersphere are the tumblelog (see project.ioni.st) and twitter. New to the craze? Think (HTML) stream-of-consciousness and (text/i message) social poetry, respectively.

Herein lies the Paradox of Choice and what Mena Trott has been saying all along, now made Mathematical! by Y.T. in the form of EdgeRank, that blogging in the small is a-ok.

(And after all, really, it's the blogger, not the blog that really makes the blog*sphere go round.)

While I still futz with the algorithmic analysis of the thing, the academics amongst you should re-read Granovetter's "Strength of weak ties" but not spend too much debating, if such a bias exists, the biopsychosocialization of our oh-so-gendered society, into those who seek strong ties and those who mostly seek strength instead through the growth of weaker ties.

If you still don't get tumblelogs, let me tell you this. The constraints: IMG, video EMBED, BLOCKQUOTE, and A HREF -- images, videos, quotes, and links, no more. Tumblr makes it easy to share -- you highlight something to cite (not quite transclude), click "tumbl" and you're almost almost done.

If you still don't get twitter, let me tell you this. The constraints: 140 characters. Content, what are you doing? Want to message someone publicly? "@tony they're grrrreat!"

How is this taking off when Dodgeball tried (and then just happened to escape from enterprise-y corporate Googoo land) and Loopt still trickles on? Constraint is liberating, but as with many things, Mathematical!ness lies in the median way. Too much constraint -- publish only your location and you lack perchance the freedom to "perform". Too little constraint and you have a gallery of voxen, all but updated once or twice and then forgotten.

danah might be right in that today's youth don't generally expect privacy to exist as the older generation might. But today we have Facebook and Google, not yearbooks and yellow pages, and also spiders, data centres, and the unwashed mass compute, not quite subject to the laws of human biophysics.

Do "we" not exist if we don't twitter, tweet, or tumbelog? I don't know, but I'm glad to embrace the "new", the simpler, constrained, and your-small-circle way of this new bloggersphere.

There's been some debate this month on the future of the webapp (RIAs), with some wishing for a free platform to build upon.

HTML / CSS / AJAX are a start, but tech like Flex and Apollo just may represent the future. Unfortunately, Flex and Apollo might be gratis, but the Flex/Flash/Apollo toolchain/platform is not entirely free.

This bothers some, but I'm not so sure it's that big a deal. This is part of an email I sent to a list this morning:

I've been giving this some thought, and I feel like hazarding a claim.

"If the UX rocks, it's not free".

UX: (end-user) user experience
free: libre and gratis

Here are some examples of UX that rocks:

Adobe Creative Studio, Google, NVIDIA-powered graphics, OS X, IE7, VoodooPad, Keynote, Amazon, iPod, Halo, Toy Story, Gmail.

None of these are free. Google and Gmail are gratis, but not libre -- how do you turn off ads? Two notable exceptions to my claim are Firefox versions 1.0-1.5 and Camino, but those both required ten years of engineering effort to get to where they are (and began life non-free).

I feel like once you start wanting to appeal to and deal with the masses, you quickly learn to rely on technologies which are not free. RenderMan, IE7, optimized OpenGL drivers.

Why is this? I think the thing is that whereas developers are willing to freely give their work and scratch some collective developer itch through code and other deliverables, the same is generally not true for interaction designers, artists, writers, musicians, and other "content creators". Dev culture might be remix culture, but for the most part, Content culture isn't there quite yet.

Two weeks ago, I went into an Apple Store to say goodbye to my MacBook Pro.

She had a bad fan, said the overworked Mac "Genius", and went into the shop.

During that week, I realized this, that absence makes the heart grow more OS X.

And so, after I got my baby back, I started to take her into lab every single day.

Hot OS X apps:

I'm watching Mike Pinkerton on That Other Video Site talk about Camino. I love Camino, even if it doesn't support Firefox extensions, most importantly gestures, colorful tabs and Firebug. So I browse in Camino and webdev/proxyswitch in Firefox 2 dot ugly oh.

It's nice to hear Mike say what I had suspected for some years, that the Mozilla community didn't bring in the hacker community as much as they might have hyped or liked, for reasons that might include XPCOM and C++.

Plainly put, hacking on Mozilla is hard. Firefox extensions seem to have drawn a small dev crowd, but extensions seem to not mix too well, break, and that kind of thing.

Looking forward, I think Mike might be onto something when he talks about how Leopard might help Camino shine. As webapps start to Suck Less, I think we're going to see (or we should see!) OS X native apps that embed Camino and sparkleflash with CoreHotness and the like.

But beyond the browser-as-platform, and think we're going to see (or again, should see) the growth of web-as-platform, in a way that's accessible to designer/coder hybrids. Adobe and Microsoft have hedged their bets here, but I'm going to push for open standards, tech, and source here, and see if I can't go-with-the-flow and see if the world is down with what I have had the chance to visage in my webby dreams.

I just posted a brief announcement of my most recent finals week hack on the JRuby user mailing list.

I've been staying up late this week cobbling this little script together, finding what seem to be bugs in JRuby, the iCalendar gem, the Ruby Cookbook, and maybe even Google Calendar.

Check it out. It might even work.

(how to stay) jinsync.com

.with ruby luv,

~L

My 中文 final went well -- I think -- and this week I've started to hack some scripts in JRuby and, along the way, started to clean up, organize, and fill out the JRuby Wiki.

I definitely see a bright future for JRuby, and it's nice to be able to contribute to a youngish project that seems as if it's destined for deeper impacts.

I came up with a possible name for the mini-project I started worked on, inspired by the Chinese measure word 斤 (as in 千斤, qian1 jin1). The last couple days I worked on it to the point where it's barely useful, but I know that a more functional version would have fairly wide appeal.

I'm thankful that I'm in a place now where I can contribute in a meaningful way to a community that's now small (JRuby users) and imagine contributing, more generally, to a community that might even larger still.

Taking a break from learning the nuances of Jython (for research) and 学习汉语, I tried to see what I could do, programmatically, with the Samsung SGH-D807 I bought at Berkeley.

I had started using mobile gmail -- written in Java ME -- and wondered if I could write my own apps.

It seems the answer is yes, but trickily so :).

First, I develop an app in something like NetBeans Mobility (or Sun's toolkit), then emulate and test with something like mpowerplayer.

Given a JAR, I create a JAD. The JAR has the source and data, while the JAD seems to be installation related metadata. For example,

MIDlet-Jar-URL: Code.jar
MIDlet-Jar-Size: 2313
MIDlet-Name: TheRose
MIDlet-Vendor: Me
MIDlet-Version: 1.0.0
MicroEdition-Configuration:CLDC-1.0
MicroEdition-Profile:MIDP-1.0

(Skipping a field seems to generate an 'attribute missing' error, and sometimes the sizes mismatch when you grab other people's MIDlet JARs you find online. Also, you might need to wget the URL and change the MIDlet-Jar-URL if it points to a http:// address.)

On my MacBook, I drag the JAR and JAD to "Bluetooth File Exchange", to beam it to my D807.

To install, you type *#9998*5282# pw: 235282.

According to a sysinfo midlet I ran, the D807 supports CLDC-1.1, MIDP-2.0, MMAPI-1.0, WMA-1.0, and Mobile 3D.

My cell phone has a 1GB flash drive in it... what can I do with that? :)

I'm back at home now, in NewYork, for Thanksgiving break.

It's been fairly quiet and I've been chilling out, BoobTube and YouTubing myself silly.

(Tech aside: I'm writing this in Firefox 1.5.0.8 rather than in Firefox 2 cuz the Colorful Tabs extension doesn't play nice with FF2 the last two times I checked. First, it wasn't compatible. Then, it ran, but obscured the tab close buttons.

I've been trying out IE7 instead, and I quite like the interface. IE7 zoom also works on images, unlike FF zoom.)

I came across this quote today. I first saw it attributed to Einstein, and later to Charles Kingsley. I like Einstein so I'm going to err on the side of citing him :)

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about. --Einstein