In the Never-A-Dull-Moment category, David blogs Riding Rails: Rails 2.0: It’s done! and provides a summary of new and improved features. As he said at the recent Railsconf (audio here), Rails 2.0 was not an earth-shaker as much as an evolutionary move. Looking forward to trying it out.
Author Archive | Ted Roche
The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) [dive into mark]
Thanks to Garrett Fitzgerald for pointing to this brilliant piece of writing. Mark Pilgrim writes The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts), a short and very well done piece. A must read!
Should you buy software from a web-storefront-only operation?
A client had a demo web site developed by someone else and they were really excited about the interactivity. It was a very rich client application, with drag-and-drop and sizers and interactive widgets. The client wanted my team to use the same platform, which they thought was something-Dot-Net. Once we were finally able to chase down the developer, it turned out to be a commercial Javascript library. We looked up the vendor, and it is a curious site.
They have an online store, one of those generic things with box-shots of a product that’s download only (there must be an add-on for Photoshop or GIMP to make these fake boxes, don’t you think?), an “About Us” page that has the usual mission-statement-ish stuff, but no “Who We Are” or where they are, a “Customer Support” page that lets you submit a ticket online, no history, no searching. The only contacts are email addresses (generic, “marketing,” “legal,” “info” not “bobsmith@example.com”) and an 800-number I have no doubt is an answering service. There’s no online forum. It looks like no one’s home.
Searching about them in Google, there’s their web site, of course. There are a couple of mentions about XSS (cross-site scripting) and a few other exploits posted to the usual security sites, a good sign that someone is actually using the code. A couple of echos of their press releases. And… nothing. No user communities, either a forum on their web site or an ad-hoc third party set of posts. No additional information. No one posting anything, anywhere from @example.com. This is pretty strange.
So, what’s the deal? My best guess is that this is an off-shore operation without any US representation nor tech support, perhaps even no ability to provide support in English. Between a proprietary license and questionable support, I’ve recommended we do some more research and see if some of the open source or openly-available Javascript libraries can fulfill the client’s needs.
GBC/ACM: The Real Times Newsletter for December 2007
Just got a note that the Greater Boston Chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery just released its most recent GBC/ACM: The Real Times Newsletter, a remarkable publication. Highlights: the GBC now accepts their (paltry) $10 annual dues via Google Checkout, and posts from related groups like the Boston PHP and others. Note also the Jared Spool seminar — a not to miss event!
Popup panels on mouseover using only CSS
I found this elegant little hack the other day while browsing for something completely different. I see that the code has made the rounds, and appears on sites like xmpp.com and ietf.org, but the credits seem only to lead to other marketing sites harvesting page views and hosting ads. A sample is available at http://www.phlapjaxs.com/demo.html and consists of a span tag defined as absolutely positioned and block-display, which in turn is inside an anchor tag set to position: relative. That means the block will “pop” at the location of the anchor and can display whatever text (or images or other content) is within the span. Spiffy!
Ivan Krstić, First OLPC deployment: now it’s real.
Ivan Krstić blogs First OLPC deployment: now it’s real.: “This week, Uruguay became the first-ever real, non-pilot deployment site of OLPC XO laptops. And I was there to hand out the first one.” Very cool! Uruguay is due to deploy ninetu thousand and Peru just signed up for a quarter of a million of them. The pundits can say what they want, but the experience in the field will be far more educational than the prognostications. Looking forward to the results.
On The Media talks with WSJournalist about the One Laptop Per Child
On NHPR this morning, the On The Media show had an episode on the One Laptop Per Child program. Here’s what they say on their web site:
In 2005 computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte announced his bold plan to build a laptop that costs $100 and deliver it to the world’s 150 million poorest schoolchildren in just 4 years. But the Wall Street Journal’s Steve Stecklow says competition from companies like Intel and Microsoft seems to have put that goal out of reach.
I’d be disappointed if the OLPC itself doesn’t succeed, but in some senses, it already has, spurring innovation (real innovation, not marketing slogans) in the low-power rugged laptop-form-factor marketplace. OLPC is radically innovative hardware where many of the other version one-oh products are the same old stuff in a smaller case. OLPC has screen that works in full sunlight and uses little to no power as an eBook. It has a mesh-based network capability that will allow ad-hoc networks over great distances in field conditions. Every aspect of the design was considered. These are elegantly engineered machines. The software is as innovative as the hardware, with a simplified UI that allows and encourages exploration and collaboration. I’ve contributed to the project, and I encourage you to do so.
Updating WordPress again: permalinks
This morning, I updated the blog to use permalinks (the long URLs that should permanently link to a post) to change the format from http://www.tedroche.com/blog/?p=1234 to a newer format that includes the date and a bit of the post title, like: http://www.tedroche.com/blog/2007/11/22/recommendations-for-foss-podcatcher/. This lets you see both the date of the post and title in the link, and it also is more digestable by the search engines. Rather than seeing one page named blog/ with a parameter of P that changes all the time, the search engines now see that there are twenty-eight hundred pages in that directory, each with its own name. We’ll see if it makes any difference…
Joi Ito’s Three years with ICANN
Joi Ito has a lot of history in developing and supporting and running commercial businesses leading during the internet boom and, like many of us, suspected that “it was all ICANN’s fault,” and that they should get out of the way. Unlike most of us, Joi had the opportunity to do something about it, as a member of ICANN and in his post Three years with ICANN, he learns that change might not be as simple nor easy as many of us think:
With all of its tumultuous history and bumps and warts, ICANN, in my opinion, is the best way that we can manage names and numbers on the Internet and any new thing to try to do what it does would be less fair and probably wouldn’t work.
Thanks for trying, Joi, and thanks for letting us know.
OLPC extends “Give One, Get One” program to December 31
Good news: OLPC extends “Give One, Get One” program to December 31. If you haven’t given yet, please consider it. If you have no use for an OLPC, they accept contributions, too.