Software As She’s Developed

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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I made a little music mashup you might enjoy using. A Little Music As I was playing around with the new layout of this blog, I added a Last.FM widget to the sidebar. It looks like this: table.lfmWidgetradioeef448421daa7cdb759397e5f8ea67f8 td {margin:0 !important;padding:0 !important;border:0 !important;}table.lfmWidgetradioeef448421daa7cdb759397e5f8ea67f8 tr.lfmHead a:hover {background:url(http://cdn.last.fm/widgets/images/en/header/radio/minired.png) no-repeat 0 0 !important;}table.lfmWidgetradioeef448421daa7cdb759397e5f8ea67f8 tr.lfmEmbed object {float:left;}table.lfmWidgetradioeef448421daa7cdb759397e5f8ea67f8 tr.lfmFoot td.lfmConfig a:hover {background:url(http://cdn.last.fm/widgets/images/en/footer/red.png) no-repeat [...]

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From the dubiously-related-to-the-topic-of-this-blog department, I finally devoted a lazy few hours to getting this blog sorted! It was previously crawling, with pages loading at around 40 seconds. (According to WebWait, the premium website benchmarking tool, of course ;)). Upgraded to WP 2.5. Removed WP-Cache. Installed Super WP-Cache and set up htaccess correctly. At [...]

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