webdev

I had a great time this weekend at BarCampLA5 (barcampla.org). It was a great event, despite some apparent venue hiccups and dramas behind the scenes, plus delays due to traffic from the LA Marathon on Sunday. It went really well, held at the AOL facility in Beverly Hills. Kudos to the planners, particularly Jason Cosper and Crystal Williams—though an event like this really is made of the people who attend and talk and listen and socialize and sing and question and answer and game and twitter!

On Saturday I overcame my natural inclination to avoid doing talks by snatching a last minute open Session slot and doing a WordPress Birds of a Feather Q and A / Discussion. Thanks to all who attended that for your terrific contributions—I learned a lot myself and will write that up this week in a separate post. If you blogged about that session please drop me a line via email—joe [ at ] artlung [ dot ] com.

The same goes for my talk yesterday. Thanks for attending and contributing! I felt it went well. At the end there was a suggestion that perhaps an introduction to building web pages or to using JavaScript might be well received at the next BarCampLA. I’m going to give some thought. Any other suggestions as to what the barcamp audience might like to hear from an aging front-end web developer are welcome. Also, the slides from my talk: YUI 101, are available in PDF form: YUI 101.

Vaughn Hannon blogged the session, albeit briefly! Though I disagree with the spirit of these words: “A short impromptu bashing of Microsoft and Silverlight just took place…it’s coming, like it or not”. I think Silverlight is marvelous and cool, but I feel like in the competitive landscape, what I’ve learned is that the technologies that are more closed, provide less freedom, and supported by fewer vendors keep losing in the long run unless they get very wide adoption soon. And truth be told, I don’t see Silverlight busting out large. I’ll add I could be wrong, but the road of web progress is littered with cool technologies that never reached critical mass.

Oh, and I also particularly want to thank Doug Welch for lending me his laptop for my presentation and working hard to get it and the darn projector to talk nicely.

To all the folks I met this weekend and who are here because of this presentation, welcome, and feel free to introduce yourself in the comments on this post. I intend to write up the sessions I attended in another post.

And now, visuals! You can see all the photos I took at this flickr set and in the global flickr space you can search for photos tagged barcampla5. As of this morning it looks like 735 photos were tagged in that way. Lots to look at from a great event. If you look for photos tagged “artlung” you’ll find photos of me, and man, I don’t like much of what I see. Thank goodness summer is coming. I definitely felt my size this weekend and that has got to change. Oh, and I even took two grainy videos with terrible audio with my cell phone: Original Song by Madeleine Wright and Here’s a Quarter by Doug Welch and Madeleine Wright. I can’t sing but it was fun hanging out and pretending I could with the guitar-people. I also enjoyed playing a little Rock Band, singing only, of course.

Okay, I have to get in gear. Thanks for visiting, Happy Monday, and more on BarCampLA5 this week!

Movable Type went open source yesterday, and I don’t care. Too little, too late. A long time ago, it seemed like MT was the way to put together a blog. It was free for personal use, it was good, it was used by heavyweights of blogging. But I could never get past two things: the first was the fact that the license was not actually open source, not a BSD license, not a GPL license, just “you can use it and it’s free.” Well, I did use it at one job I had many years ago, giving a set of internal developers blogs to keep track of their stuff. I also experimented with installs over the years, but for this blog I went with Blogger initially, and eventually, in 2004, I went with WordPress. The second thing I could not get over was the way comments were handled in MT. I have no idea if it’s still the case that commenting in MT spawns new processes for the Perl interpreter with each comment, but I do know that messages like this one, with people complaining about the performance of MT, are nothing new. Meanwhile, WordPress has superseded MT as the blogging software of choice. It’s not without problems, but the license makes it completely hackable, and I can modify and redistribute whatever hacks I make as much as possible.

Something that’s been important to me since I started blogging was that my site would be portable, forever and ever. Anything with a restrictive license or that puts me in a position to be beholden forever is a nonstarter. I use flickr, sure, but there are options to export everything from flickr, which I take advantage of. I think it’s time to think about a mechanism to export entries from twitter, too. Despite it being so ephemeral, I’d like to capture that stuff too and move it out should I choose to.

One of my goals in the new year is to create some kind of simple online game in JavaScript. I’m almost at a point where I have free time, which is so awesome.

Also, I’m learning some of the libraries and frameworks for JavaScript—to that end I’m experimenting with some of the frameworks—this weekend it was jQuery—and I managed to rough a simple “the objects run away from your mouse” exercise.

jQuery is really powerful. It also seems to be really heavy as a download, and I’ve not tweaked that, but the syntax is just “pretty”—I was IMing a bud about the syntax and he found it ugly as sin, but I think it’s really beautiful.

So at http://joecrawford.com/ there’s a simple little exercise. Everything is in the source for the page, only jQuery itself is in a separate file.

Comments, suggestions, ideas about making games in JavaScript, about jQuery, about thinking about game programming are welcome.

Yesterday I managed to write a post that was not: a single photo with a caption; a list of links; a random snippet of lyrics; a few words begging you off until I could really blog. Today, I have some links, but there are very many, and I hope to provide some context for each.

First up, with my slightly increasing free time, I have more time for random seeking out of interesting links. Some of the best I’ve found have been via a subdomain off reddit.com—the site is http://programming.reddit.com. I’m not a reddit member that I can remember. I also don’t participate in digg. Why? Just time I suppose.

The first piece of news that’s worth knowing is that Andy Baio of Waxy.org will be pursuing his blog full-time in the new year. I’ve been reading Waxy for a long time, and I wish him well in his new Post-Yahoo! and Post-Upcoming.org years!

Next up I have a pile of news about web and mobile development:

The SDK for Android Google Handset is out. The Android platform is darned interesting to me. The more I read about mobile, that is, “cell phones;” the more I think that it’s inevitable that more of what I do will end up on cell phones. I look forward to learning more about this.

Speaking of Mobile, did you know that the free web browser for mobile devices (it fits on my M500 Samsung mobile phome) Opera Mini 4 came out of beta? Well, it did, and it feels slightly faster, though by default the “start page” of the browser no longer has the field that shoots searches directly to Wikipedia, it does have a configurable search box. Power to you Opera! You’re a good egg!

For those of you who are interested in all things JavaScript, you should know that the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries iterated version numbers. Read more about Prototype 1.6 and Scriptaculous 1.8 on Ajaxian.

Speaking of AJAX: There’s a nifty Google API for their search products called AjaxSearch. I look forward to a chance to use it on something public!

The “J” in AJAX is “JavaScript”—sadly, the state of JavaScript is so dismal that Douglas Crockford himself advises folks to install the FireFox plugin No Script. I find that a bit terrifying.

Also terrifying is the matter of capturing key events using JavaScript and the difficulty thereto: Here’s more than you ever wanted to know about this problem cross-platform and cross-browser.

Problems like this are the reason I have embraced libraries for functionality like this. Let someone else sweat out the details between the browser versions. I just want to write code.

Speaking of writing code, Google released an API for Gmail that exposes its’ functionalities to GreaseMonkey. This kind of extensibility is wonderful, but it has me vexed because I have no idea what I’d change about what I build now to make them ready for GreaseMonkey. I intend to learn though.

Enough tech! Now, here are some fun cutenesses:

ze frank sings! “and somehow I get over it”

John Scalzi went to the Creation Museum and all I got was this (excellent) post on his blog: note: colorful language and excellent reportage. No time to read? Check out his photo slideshow as well. Really funny stuff.

Jon Armstrong is married to a stubborn, stubborn woman. And that’s funny.

David Byrne went to Ikea and all I got was a darn blog post. He’s awesome though. Really.

Want to read me talk voluminously about tortilla snack food options? Read this. I love a good tortilla.

What I don’t necessarily love are disturbing and tentacled Orangina ads: here and here. NOTE: Disturbing and tentacled Orangina Ads are contained there. Please view responsibly. Also, the Oranginas I can get at lunchtime have high fructose corn syrup. Sad.

Now? Video time! Paul Rand on Design:

Whoa, we just veered back on-topic. Best to stop that! Let’s learn how to dress for success.

Speaking of success: History Channel. City Of The Future: Los Angeles 2106. It’s pretty darn cool. It feels rather more realistic than it would have in the past. I guess that’s normal for futuristic predictions.

That’s it for now! Onward!

Blurbomat points to the review of MacOS 10.5, “Leopard” on Ars Technica. Anil Dash has no sense of humor about one icon.

I wish Windows had included Mac networking by default years ago. Sadly, no. Maybe something based on:

I upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.3.1. Bugfixes and an easy transition from 2.3. I’m so glad I chose WP so long ago, and not MovableType. WP is the open source winner. Speaking of WP, they moved Gravatar to their infrastructure which has gone well, the blog High Scalability pointed out Making Gravatar Fast Again. Cool stuff, and will help them avoid “crashing hard” moments. The Gravatar article pointed to Varnish, a tool I had not looked at but which might be appropriate for some projects I’m part of.

Thomas Barnett points out that Bush said he’s relevant. If you have to declare you’re relevant, you’re not. I just wish he wasn’t commander-in-chief. Can we fast forward to the next administration? This one is making me tired.

Philip Greenspun has some new original thoughts on non-profit donations. I wish he did more writing like this. In 2003 I said of him: If anyone can be considered a model for my own experimentation and thoughts on how to put together a personal site, it’s Greenspun. Greenspun has been accused of being an egoiste and of being insensitive in his use of metaphors, and more. Bottom line: he thinks deeply, and I admire him. Still true.

I dug the drawings, I laughed. How can I feel like a flying squirrel? The answer: Sleep Sack!

Heaven and Here is still around. And they are blogging about the best television show ever, The Wire. It’s coming again in January. Yes, I said EVER.

Binary Wolf points to InciWeb and an amazing map of the Witch Fire.

Greg’s Cool Thing points out a post on a Windows utility to check and see what processes are using a DLL. Potentially very useful.

Robot writing out Bible nonstop – this sounds a lot like the The Nine Billion Names of God for some reason. Are you there God? it’s Me, R2-D2.

Japan Probe points out the world’s most dangerous hiking trail. Yikes!

Lines and Colors points to the work of Allan R Banks, Classical painter. http://allanbanks.com/ is a slow site, but worth the load times. I’ve also been meaning to point to this post on the Pre-Raphaelites, also from LaC. Also pointed to there is this very in-depth study of one painting: Millais’ Ophelia.

Slashfilm says “See Blade Runner: The Final Cut on The Big Screen.” I’ve decided to do it. Thursday night at The Landmark. Hit me on email ((( joe at artlung.com ))) if you want in.

Some of you have asked more about my Mom—really, the latest info I have is pretty much contained in this post over here. And for more background on my Mom, check out the magazine article.

Have a great week and be well. I hope all of you affected by the fires are getting back to normal.

Don’t use oxygen and smoke, please.

Thomas PM Barnett, a great Powerpointer, mentions that Al Gore has his Nobel Prize because of his PPTs (actually Keynote, but same difference, presentation software).

Read/Write Web has good thoughts on Microsoft’s playing catch-up with Google on a number of web tools. I like competitor for Google. It means we’ll keep getting innovation. And don’t count our Yahoo. They are building a lot of stuff these days.

The cartoon where Jesus, Mohammed, and the unseen Barmaid talk are usually good. Like this one: Snake.

Free To Play notes a study that says of the time kids ages 2 to 17 play games, 91% of it is on free games.

WebKit now has an implementation of a local SQL database (via John Gruber). That’s odd, and cool. It seems to be what Google Gears is trying to do, or what Flash does with its Local Shared Objects. All of these kick the butt of mere cookies for storage. The real thing they allow is to allow web applications to work without an internet connection. What’s WebKit? It’s the engine inside Safari and KDE browsers. This local storage thing is being discussed with great enthusiasm these days seems like. It’s still a great time to be working on web stuff.

Last night Leah and I visited a bookstore after dinner and I looked at a book called Beautiful Code. It’s got a chapter by Douglas Crockford. I’ve not bought it yet, but it’s been added to my “to read” list. I’ve been trying to write my JavaScript according to his code conventions.

To start with, a random screenshot from a video from 1989:

I enjoy his music very much. He got his name from a vision of Oral Roberts:

May 25, 1980, while overlooking his religious center which was in financial difficulty:

“’I felt an overwhelming holy presence all around me. When I opened my eyes, there He stood … some 900 feet tall, looking at me … He stood a full 300 feet taller than the 600-foot-tall City of Faith. There I was face to face with Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God. I have only seen Jesus once before, but here I was face to face with the King of kings. He reached down, put his Hands under the City of Faith, lifted it, and said to me, “See how easy it is for Me to lift it!”’”

“Oral recalled that his eyes filled with tears, and Jesus assured him that He would speak to the ministry’s partners and that the City of Faith would be finished.”

On to Misc, or, continuing the misc!

Ubuntu has a new version out—7.10. A few weeks ago, our houseguests brought with them a sad, cheap Wal-Mart laptop that would neither boot nor behave. I installed Ubuntu (6) for them and it’s given them what they wanted, a basic email and photos and web browsing machine. I have been impressed and as my Windows 2003 Server machine gets lamer (remember that?) it makes me think seriously about converting it to Linux. There are several apps I would miss: FileZilla, TextPad, Paint.NET, iTunes. We’ll see. I’m not really a zealot about open source, but I’ve been following Mark Pilgrim’s posts about switching to Linux and it has me intrigued. And it was great to install an OS on an x86 Machine and not have to dig around in boxes for stupid Activation Keys and do Windows Activation. It might be great for me too.

MAS read a book about SuperFoods, and the list he posted has me interested. Here’s the Cliff’s Notes:

1. Beans
2. Blueberries
3. Broccoli
4. Oats
5. Oranges
6. Pumpkin
7. Wild Salmon
8. Soy
9. Spinach
10. Tea
11. Tomatoes
12. Turkey
13. Walnuts
14. Yogurt

And what’s this? An obscure fact about “protocol relative links”—cool! Http-https transitions and relative URLs, via Simon Willison.

The Harold and Kumar sequel might be called Harold and Kumar go to Guantanamo Bay. That’s as crazy as the first movie was. Harold and Kumar is a dumb movie I really like.

“Guilty Pleasure” movies have been a topic at work of late… two I really like that are not necessarily great movies are Necessary Roughness and Under Siege.

Yes, San Diego Voice and Viewpoint’s website is still under construction. Yes, it’s sad when newspapers, even niche ones, don’t have websites. What year is it again?

Oh, the thing that powers the avatars on my site and over on Leah’s site is called Gravatar. They got bought by WordPress.

I got the new Cat and Girl book in the mail! See, look, here’s proof I got it:

Buy one!

Dave Segovia is reintroducing himself. He’s a heck of a character. Drop by his blog and say “Hi!”

Over on BlogHer, Laura Scott mentioned leahpeah’s recent posting about uncomfortable subjects and readership.

David Foster speaks about a basic question cancer warriors have about why they would get cancer if they did everything right. He’s got the same kind of cancer my Mom has. Here’s a quote:

But they are beating up themselves and their lifestyle for no reason. It is true that some behaviors—like smoking cigarettes—cause cancer. But many—if not most—cancers have nothing to do with how healthily you live your life or how many vegetables you eat or vitamins you take.

And lastly, the estimable Jeffrey Zeldman points to the A List Apart Web Survey Results, which make for some interesting reading.

Have a great weekend!

I’ve been reading and listening to lots about animation, and one of the more fun things has been Spline Cast, a podcast about 3-D animation.

My favorite podcast right now is Dave Ramsey’s 1 hour version of his show. Don’t bother with the 3-hour version, it’s not really free.

My previous favorite podcast is Harry Shearer’s amazingly witty, terribly dry podcast “Le Show.” Supremely funny stuff to me.

The coming Scriptaculous 1.8 library looks like it has some new and powerful stuff in it.

Douglas Crockford’s latest comments about worrying about the security of JavaScript where many sites are pulling JavaScript from several tom-dick-and-harry websites (for ads, maps, calendars, photos, etc.) are interesting: Making JavaScript Safe. His concept is AdSafe. If you want to see him talk about the need for the tool prior to the announcement of AdSafe, check out this Google Talk on Gears and the Mashup Problem (Incidentally, this is the kind of thing I watch while I do the dishes):