Software As She’s Developed

I’m listening to Steve Yegge’s talk on branding from last years OSCON. He talks about how languages are branded, e.g. “Java” is enterprise. One of his main points is that brands are “const identifiers”, i.e. it takes an entire generation to change brand perception, so it’s often more effective to simply re-brand. e.g. GTE had a […]

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Wolf Logan’s talking about paleosocial patterns (TOOLS Web 2.0 Patterns workshop). Very cool. Marking - making permanent, public, marks. Dog marking its territory, “I was here” graffiti. e.g. blog comments, forums, guestbooks. Being obnoxious gets the comment noticed more. Pointing - indicating resources to others, can be with opinions. Reputation will dictate how much people care. e.g. Reviewing/rating sites, Digg. Competing - comparing […]

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We’ve done a little group exercise at the TOOLS web 2.0 patterns workshop. Designing a video website, with heavy emphasis on mashing up, e.g. show videos from youtube, grab recommendations from netflix, grab friend lists from Facebook, etc. Here’s the full feature list (click for full image): And the design: We eventually identified features, at back end and […]

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In under 5 minutes, a few quick notes on questions I was asked and general feedback on the talk. Someone asked me if I’m involved in the project (ie contributor etc). I think the talk gave that impression too much, like I’m an evangelist :). Doesn’t help that I had a mail gadget open in the […]

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It’s belatedly dawned on me how OpenSocial makes a great server-less Ajax platform. When you create an OpenSocial gadget, you’re building a lil Ajax app that performs much coolness that would normally require a server, but doesn’t. Effectively, you’re delegating the duties of the gadget’s host environment. All you have to do is write a […]

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I have the honour of delivering a keynote at the Tools Europe conference in Zurich next week, as well as at the “Mining Web 2.0 Patterns” workshop, which, as you can tell from its title, I’m looking forward to participating in. The workshop chairs are Dragos Manolescu and Joe Yoder. The keynote is on OpenSocial, Gadgets, […]

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I just realised there’s no good executive summary for OpenSocial. Every resource fluffs about the “social” aspect and forgets about the UI aspect. The UI aspect, essentially a gadget specification, is just as important as the social aspect, notwithstanding its absence from the “OpenSocial” brand name. I’m not a fan of the name “OpenSocial” […]

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I’m a redundancy fanboy. In visualisation, different formats suit different personalities and different tasks. With version control, the usual format is just a text log. This is good if you’re scanning for specific terms, but pretty ordinary for other activities - e.g. to get a feel for general trends that have arisen, the pace […]

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Firefox 3.0 ticker tape parade Today is Firefox 3.0 landing day. Maybe tomorrow as the servers have been down for many hours now. Funny how Twitter is up, but Mozilla is down…it feels like today is the Juneth of 18. Anyway, this is great news as you could wile away a few lazy hours tweeting and […]

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I’ve been thinking about what language and framework to use for my next hobby projects. There has always been a frustrating trade-off between language quality and ease of hosting. The languages I know best are: Ruby (+Rails), PHP, Java, and Javascript. So these will be my options. What I’m looking for is a hosting environment which […]

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