Software Engineering

XTECH

Paul Graham - Is it possible to create a Sillicon Valley outside of the US?

Elias has an important post on something very necessary: enabling client side Javascript developers to consume any kind of RESTific data without going through the pains of cross-platform XML parsing.

It’s about time and way too late to see Sun making Java more Linux-friendly after both:

Catching the widget fever in a bad way last night’s Colbert Report episode inspired Reinier and me to create a widget based on the Backwards Bush counter.

I love TextMate!

After mucking around with Dashboard some more, I gave up last night. My widget worked fine in Safari but every time I installed my widget in Dashboard the widget would disappear. The fact that Dashboard does not give you any feedback does not really help in solving this problem.

After I had seen the innards of the Tigergotchi widget, it certainly didn’t seem too difficult anymore to build a widget of my own.

Yesterday after work on a very sunny flip-floppy afternoon caught the train to Amsterdam with Yun and Redmar.

Just handed in my registrations for both XTECH and Reboot to Marleen here at TOPdesk. Both should come through fine and send me happily off for some conference fun in May and June.

I’m getting increasingly frustrated with COREBlog the Zope based blogging software that runs this show.

If you are web developer you should already have installed Firebug because it makes life so much easier for the DOM/CSS/JavaScript programmer. Get it now (I mean it!) from addons.mozilla.org.

Nice article about continuation based webservers and their implementation in Java [via].

A gem of a presentation by Tim Sweeney from Epic about the next generation of programming languages (via).

Eind april is er eindelijk weer een bijeenkomst van Web 2.0 mensen in Amsterdam: CocoaDevHouse. Een leuke onconferentie waar veel mensen die actief bezig zijn met Web 2.0 en andere hippe techniek bij elkaar komen om de boel op stelten te zetten.

Pretty interesting article about implementing Mutex functionality in Javascript using very basic primitives (because that is all you have got).

Katie recently announced (Upcoming, Macwereld) on April 21st. CocoaDevHouse is an Amsterdam incarnation of similar popular unconferences across the world.

Good break down by David Heinemeier Hansson of the standard Enterprise bullshit and how overpriced consultants use it to cover their assess.

Ignite the European Web 2.0 conversation? I’m all for.

The Laszlo Application Platform was already quite impressive with its XML descriptors rendering into full fledged Flash applications. Now on Ajaxian you can see that they can also render into Ajax so no more Flash.

Alex Russell recently gave three presentations on JavaScript, one at FOSDEM and two at ETECH. Some of it is basic stuff, some of it is more advanced and some of it is controversial.

Ik was het ziek om elke week de films van Lumen in mijn agenda te moeten te typen (ik was er meestal ook te lui voor). Dus nu heb ik het structureler opgelost.

Alex Russell has posted his presentation on FOSDEM about advanced Javascript usage. Interesting scan and nice mix of advanced js trickery and bits and pieces of dojo.

Sun is giving away servers for trial [via] and maybe even for keeps.

I managed to make it to the Happy Clog meeting (pictures) one hour late. It was fun having a couple of drinks in de Bruine Boon and talking about standard standards stuff.

Cool stuff about pluggable type systems at Lambda. I’m not academic enough to understand all the nuances of the arguments posed, but I do enjoy any type of argument against static typing.

In the bizarre world of iframe hacks, Alex Russell brings on another one buried inside of GMail+Gtalk code.

These notes from the Carson Web Apps Summit —which I could not attend— are well worth reading.

There are some hot new videos up on Miguel’s blog showing very sizzling Gnome desktop hardware acceleration. Watch the video’s, especially the cube variant.

Two of my favorite frameworks Django and Dojo are making love [via].

Van een van mijn favoriete blogs het volgende citaat:

I recently discovered Guy Kawasaki’s blog and its content is as great as its title: “Let the Good Times Roll”.

I read Rasmus’s 30 second AJAX tutorial [via] and though it is nice enough in its own respect, it is missing two things: Dojo and Python.

Joel can be a bit obnoxious from time to time, but he is also right more often than not. The two tend to go hand in hand.

Django now too has its own screencast of making an extremely simple application in it [via].

I am running on a new Eclipse 3.2.0 in the shop right now. It’s pretty nice with some cosmetic tweaks and it feels a bit faster.

The presentations from the previous SuperHappyDevHouse are really cool. I had already seen the Using Python to get money and chicks but the following two are also very worth watching:

It seems to be slightly impossible for me to select items from a HTML control using the keyboard.

I was reading this article on the future of web technology. It gives a good overview of the current state of technology, future directions and a two way consolidation which I hope is going to take place.

Reinier implemented what I always thought was a pretty fun game: Closeline.

Stumbling on a thread in Python-Dev yields this quite funny quote by Python luminary Tim Peters:

I have seen the first place where annotations are useful on this blog by Reinier.

On my work there exists a slight tendency to use Ajax just for Ajax’s sake. So drag and drop controls, the most outrageous refreshes and hyper-dynamic webpages. Little thought is spent on the eventual user experience. I do not mind really, playing with Javascript is fun if you get paid for it.

I am currently following a course on internet technology aptly named “Internet Technology”. The contents of the course are unfortunately horribly outdated and detached from reality.

Is anybody busy writing a simple MPEG decoder in Javascript? Would it be difficult to port the standard routines from mplayer?

Paul Graham gives a great talk about evolution, open source, entrepeneurship, and inadequate management. Funny and insightful.

Nice presentation on how to get money and chicks by programming Python by Andy Smith

While we are talking about language upgrades, here are Graham Hamilton’s best dead boilerplate from Java Tiger.

I have been meaning to try out Django (=Python on Rails) for a while now and yesterday I finally managed to do and complete the tutorial. I totally love it!