Two fairly busy days. Crash job to set up a website for SalesNet using Drupal 6. Not finished, but company is adding content first. Monday I'll hope to complete the last theming.

My first real project with Drupal 6. I just felt like a somewhat improved version of Drupal 5. Nothing really shocking, nothing large, just minor. Theming is fairly different though. And not a lot of the modules have been ported yet. So probably will be using Drupal 5 for a while.

And that, my friends, is the best description I've come accross:

JS1 favors closures (behavior with attached state) over objects (state with attached behavior)

I'm really happy with Emacs 21.1.2. It's extremely stable. Great stuff. Wish FireFox becomes that stable...

Recently also saw the State of AJAX. Although there are good parts, some parts, I think, are really misguided. He thinks JSON is much better for data transfer than XML. Yes. And how do we validate someone has send valid JSON? Not only syntactically, but also semantically. JSON is really a step backward in most cases. It's of course useful in certain others. But after a brief dabble with JSON I'm back to XML. It's the only way I can actually test easily if my server returns valid data.

Crockford complains about the graphics primitives, but SVG is a quite capable solution. CSS is horrible? It's much easier to use than any other alternative available to mankind so far.

Crockford also misses real innovation: innovation on the web is in the libraries these days. jQuery. is an absolutely brilliant new way of looking at the browser.

He believes that browser innovation has halted. That's partly true of course, but mainly because browsers are still catching up and fixing bugs. I think real innovation will come from killer apps: a particular application that will only work on one browser, but that is so compelling that other people will download that browser as well, and through such viral means the market share of that browser becomes dominant enough to take the next step. And such a browser should of course also offer a compelling development platform so those killer application writers will want to use it in the first place.

Stuart Parmenter explains, unintentionally probably, that you really need a language that has a movable garbage collector, i.e. one that can compact memory. Only one player in town and that is Eiffel: compiles to C, compiles incredibly fast, no overwriting memory, runs on almost any platform.

Lots of changes recently. Upgraded to gnome 2.20.1, which is a fairly smooth process now I understand the build system and can fix build errors.

I'm also trying to upgrade to OpenOffice 2.3 which is much harder. I.e. in the unbuildable category.

Upgraded to TeX live 2007, but in the process lost the ability to use the PDF built-in fonts, which simply look best and create very small PDF files. And no one knows how to get it back, argghh. When TeX even for its most ardent fans becomes to hard to use, it really will move to a very small segment of the market place.