Software As She’s Developed

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 […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

A problem with the current opensocial gadget spec is that there's no relative path support. This means you end up hard-coding any references to Javascripts, CSS stylesheets, images, and services which are distributed along with your gadget. This is not good. For example, you may have a "prod" setup and a "dev" setup. While developing, you [...]

[Read more →]

Writing a multi-timezone clock gadget, I found myself needing to convert timezones in Javascript. This is one uncharted area in Ajax/Javascript - unfortunately, there is no timezone library to my knowledge. Unfortunately, there's no public JSON service to tell you what time it is right now in Tokyo either. I could create one without too [...]

[Read more →]

Just as I was writing this post on ignorance of open source models, there was news of a major publisher making a print edition of Wikipedia. This led to backlash reactions which illustrate exactly the kind of misunderstanding that arises when people don't get open-source licenses (via ReadWriteWeb. The whole point of Wikipedia is to provide [...]

[Read more →]

Controversy arose in several open source projects last week: Ext JS, SpringSource App Platform, and the SWF/FLV specs. Dion has a good summary and concludes with a reminder that most people could care less: Finally, I know that 99% of the developers out there may not even care, let alone users. There are open source wonks [...]

[Read more →]

I discovered at last minute a developer event on Yahoo! FireEagle at Covent Garden tonight and decided to rush down there. FireEagle is pretty intriguing as the first serious attempt at an OAuth API (though Google Contacts now qualifies too). For me, that was the main draw; but the actual service it offers is also [...]

[Read more →]

Aptana Cloud has now been announced. This is exciting news and a step closer to server-side Javascript world domination. You don't have to use Javascript, as the platform offers several engines, but from my perspective, the most exciting thing is the inclusion of Jaxer. So it should be easy to deploy server-side Javascript to a [...]

[Read more →]

Dion is to blame for the trivia that follows... The new rage seems to be piping this to your blog: history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head It reminds me of history class at school. Always painfully boring, which is such a crying shame, as history itself is [...]

[Read more →]

At present, the OpenSocial containers are new and the whole process is still quite difficult from a developer's perspective. These are unfortunate barriers to adoption which the containers could overcome with some redesign. The challenges at present are: Manual signup and approval process required. Even to get onto the sandbox area, you have to go [...]

[Read more →]