http://softwareas.com Mahemoff's Podcast/Blog - Web, Programming, Usabilty from the Author of 'Ajax Design Patterns' (AjaxPatterns.org) Fri, 09 May 2008 08:20:14 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://softwareas.com/its-free-and-open-for-a-reason 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. ... http://softwareas.com/models-of-open-source 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 ... http://softwareas.com/fireeagle-developer-event 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 ... http://softwareas.com/hoorah-for-aptana-cloud 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, ... http://softwareas.com/unix-history-it-is-an-offensive-meme-but-i-cannot-look-away 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 ... http://softwareas.com/testing-opensocial-apps-current-challenges 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.lfmWidgetradio_eef448421daa7cdb759397e5f8ea67f8 td {margin:0 !important;padding:0 !important;border:0 !important;}table.lfmWidgetradio_eef448421daa7cdb759397e5f8ea67f8 tr.lfmHead a:hover {background:url(http://cdn.last.fm/widgets/images/en/header/radio/mini_red.png) no-repeat 0 0 !important;}table.lfmWidgetradio_eef448421daa7cdb759397e5f8ea67f8 tr.lfmEmbed object {float:left;}table.lfmWidgetradio_eef448421daa7cdb759397e5f8ea67f8 ... http://softwareas.com/music-as-shes-developed 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 ... http://softwareas.com/this-blog-fixed Google App Engine launched this week and one controversial aspect was that it only works for Python. It wasn't a big deal to me. Firstly, it's a good way for Google to limit the initial market. Secondly, Google specialises in Python and not Ruby - quoth Yegge: "One of the ... http://softwareas.com/the-javascript-grid This article explains iframe-to-iframe communication, when the iframes come from different domains. That you can do this effectively is only now becoming apparent to the community, and is now used in production by Google, Facebook, and others, and has powerful implications for the future of Ajax, mashups, and widgets/gadgets. I've ... http://softwareas.com/cross-domain-communication-with-iframes