Misc Cavalcade!

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!