Older blog entries for prla (starting at number 99)

No, I mean seriously. Lately I’m under the impression someone in a high place rev’ed up the time and it’s all going like twice faster. Not funny. Well, I guess that gives even more meaning to the Carpe Diem stuff, right?

Truth is, I haven’t really had much inclination for writing the past few days and that’s basically down to my focus shifting to reading instead of writing. Mostly technical stuff, opinion on the current trends of technology and all that. For the project I’m working on (I can’t disclose any details yet, not that you really wanted to know anyway) I’m all over the current trend of so-called Web 2.0 applications. What I’m working on is not exactly Web 2.0 in the same sense services as Flickr are, but it does share a lot of the same principles - or at least I’m trying to make it head that way.

I’ve read an interesting observation a couple of days ago on why Ajax may in fact be the Real Deal™ and that’s naturally due to Paul Graham:

(…) in 1996 the story about Java was that it represented a new model of software. Instead of desktop applications, you’d run Java “applets” delivered from a server.

This plan collapsed under its own weight. Microsoft helped kill it, but it would have died anyway. There was no uptake among hackers. When you find PR firms promoting something as the next development platform, you can be sure it’s not. If it were, you wouldn’t need PR firms to tell you, because hackers would already be writing stuff on top of it, the way sites like Busmonster used Google Maps as a platform before Google even meant it to be one.

The proof that Ajax is the next hot platform is that thousands of hackers have spontaneously started building things on top of it. Mikey likes it.

It seems particularly trendy these days to be exploiting the Google Maps API and building different applications on top of it. Bus Monster is an example, but so is HousingMaps and I’m sure a few others I haven’t heard of yet. So it’s interesting to see how the value is shifting up the stack in many ways and different levels:

• profitable businesses can be built from simply gluing together different powerful components - themselves built around Web 2.0 principles - and coming up with a cohesive whole that is at least equal to the sum of its parts. Obviously, the better the components you’re working with are, the more valuable your application potentially is.

• On the other hand, the “big fish” are, by default, not getting new programmers to work on the next ground-breaking feature of their services but instead buying out that two-kid startup that did just The Right Thing™. And everyone is happy in the end, especially the kids who turned millionaires - and wonder-kids-media-darlings sometimes. So, again, value shifting up the stack and the game being played one level above than it used to be.

• Even on the pure technological arena, implementing products and applications from the ground up sounds just so old-fashioned now. “Design patterns” are a hot buzzword these days - Yahoo! has just released their Design Pattern Library aswell as their UI Library - and developing Ajax apps can become quite a hairy business. Libraries have been sprouting from everywhere and many seem to do wonders - being more, or less, difficult to work with. Web Frameworks have also become better abstractions in the sense that they too harness the power of different lower level components ending up with a final product that enables developers to do a lot of stuff at once - take TurboGears for instance, which seems to do a pretty good job at stitching together a template system, an object-relational mapper, a Javascript library and a Python interface for good measure.

So these are definitely interesting times we’re living in. While performing cool hacks with Ajax technologies doesn’t seem to be too hard - and therein probably lies one of the secrets of its widespread acceptance - developing big apps using them seems to be an entirely different matter. As the amount of (mostly Javascript) code increases exponentially, careful structuring needs to be taken into account - something with which I find myself struggling with lately but is in a way understandable providing we’re dealing with a new technology, which is in fact a bundle of a lot of different components (see? Again!).

So for me, I guess it’s time to take a good look at the current state of frameworks/libraries out there and actually find the one that works best for what I want to do.

#

Finally taking the resolution of getting up earlier than usual, I managed to rise at 7am, bright and early. Actually, forget the bright part because it was still dark outside. And considering the damn kitchen lights have gone tits up, I had to wait a while before I could grab breakfast. Not good.

But anyway, the morning was decidedly productive so I’ll definitely keep doing this and see how I get on in the next few days. Today I feel fine despite having somehow managed to partake in four football (5-a-side) matches since Monday. Somehow, I don’t feel tired at all, so either I’m doing something right or I will irretrievably crash soon. Time will tell.

Perhaps it is because my current main project focus so much on web application building that I feel the Ajax hype is reaching an all-time high. Web calendars in particular seem to be a dime a dozen these days and that seems to have tickled Joel Spolsky somewhat, I kid you not. He raises interesting points - though curiously none of those, in my opinion, are related to web calendars - especially when he mentions that a lot of companies nowadays are simply working towards getting bought by bigger fish. Is that a bad thing? Of course whoever works that way is basically throwing pride and enjoyment out of the window, but still, it simply comes down to business in the end of the day, doesn’t it? I see it as a great bonus, depending on where you find yourself after your startup has been acquired.

In the meantime, the web is burgeoning with interesting stuff, as far as I’m concerned:

• Still on the topic of Ajax, check out this cool tutorial about an even cooler RSS Ticker. The possibilities just seem to be limitless…
• I’ve been keeping an eye on Zimbra for a while now, despite not being a potential user, and it seems they have just released their collaboration suite after being alpha and beta for over a year now. Alongside heavy use of Ajax, it supports a plugin architecture (plugins that go by the catchy name of Zimlets), iCal, RSS/Atom plus clustering, fault tolerance and disaster recovery on its paid Network Edition. The free edition doesn’t include these but on the other hand is open source. In short, I really like how these guys work, how they present themselves and their product and how they integrate themselves within the open source community.
• Think Secret is adding fuel to the rumours of a 6G iPod - the so-called “true” video iPod - being in the works. According to undisclosed sources it will sport a virtual digital click wheel built on the display itself which “appears when a finger touches it and disappears when the finger is removed”. Wow. It seems possible that Apple will announce and roll out these babies from April 1st, as Steve Jobs promised a big announcement by then celebrating the company’s 30 years. Engadget is showing off this cool mockup:

• Finally, if you’ve ever wondered what is behind those cool Emacs programming modes, today is your lucky day.

And how about a brain teaser to end this post on a high note?

You look in a mirror, and let’s say you part your hair on the right side. You look in the mirror, and your image has its hair parted on the left side, so the image is left-to-right mixed up. But it’s not top-to-bottom mixed up, because the top of the head of the image is there at the top, and the feet are down at the bottom. The question is: how does the mirror know to get the left and right mixed up, but not the up and down?

#

That’s a Rush song, by the way.

• You’ve probably bumped into these pictures already but I can’t resist blogging about them here. Sure they’re heavily photoshop’ed but what the hell, those are awe-inspiring.
• Simon Willison posts so infrequently it’s a shame. I love his writings and find his posts to be always really insightful. This time around he was at the Future of Web Apps Summit (when do I attend something like this, anyway?) and him and a handful of other attendees took a bunch of notes about the talks in a collaborative fashion. Apparently, SubEthaEdit is good with that. It’s a good example of note-taking, too.
• Miguel has posted about the recent Xgl code release by Novell. It’s a good one-stop place to check in the demo videos of Xgl goodness. On the other hand, Linux desktops at large seem to be taking quantum leaps recently (just how quantum I don’t really know because one thing is eye-candy and usability is altogether another). A bunch of new KDE 4 screenshots have recently surfaced. They look good and simple, yeah, but I can’t see what the fuss is all about. Maybe I’m spoiled since I got into MacOS X?
• For those of you just dying to get iTunes going on Linux, there’s a somewhat hacky way of getting version 6.0 (not 6.0.2) running using Wine.

On a different note, I’ve been reading Ajax in Action and generally having a blast. I’ve read a few technical heavyweight books in my time and I can’t recommend this one enough if you are in one way or another intrigued by the whole Web 2.0 hype. And while we’re at it, check out Tim O'Reilly talk about Web 2.0 at the MySQL User Conference last year. Insightful.

Incidentally, Tiago has also been playing with Ajax lately and he’s already managed to get the XmlHttpRequest going. Cool stuff and it’s indeed very exciting that we’re clearly living in the dawn of a new era. It’s probably the first big revolution in the computing world I’m experiencing with my eyes wide open. It’s a time to learn as much as possible and make the most out of it, I guess.

#

Tiago became acquainted with Geocaching a few days ago and today him, Rui and myself went out hunting for our first two caches ever.

If you love being outdoors, Mother Nature is for you a good companion but you never heard of Geocaching before, I strongly suggest you spend some time around Geocashing.com, particularly its FAQ page. For us, it’s been a real thrill, we’ve been having jolly good fun and best of all, one can actually breathe out there in the field. Looking for the “cache” itself is cool, but the way I see it, it’s just a means to an end. And the end is enjoying a good walk, a good sight, a good laugh along the way.

I’ve documented our first two quests in my Geocaching page, complete with the pictures we were able to shoot using our mobile phones (no digital cameras available this week, unfortunately). Because the only thing we have available is pretty much the GPS coordinates of the cache site - and possibly sparse and less than helpful hints - we usually are pretty much clueless as to what the setting looks like. Today was such a pleasant surprise that it’s hard to put it down into words. Paradise lost? Maybe. The pictures speak for themselves, I guess. Each cache contains a logbook so anyone who finds it can write a few words to actually log the feat. It was fantastic to sit down and read logs from people coming all the way from Spain or Holland, for instance.

Oh and if you’re interested in Geocaching in Portugal, you might want to check out the Portuguese geographic distribuition of caches (via Tiago). Wouldn’t it be nice to use the Google Maps API for this, too? ;)

Finally, one thing I was happy to learn about the Geocaching community is how aware of the environmental problems they seem to be. There is a pretty cool initiative called Cache In, Trash Out, which basically supports the idea of cleaning up whatever trash one may find in the cache site.

So for tomorrow, we’re planning to go out and find at least another one, a few miles away from where we live. And if you’re interested, you can always check out the aftermath in my geocashing page.

<update> Update: Bruno Rodrigues has written in (see comments) providing a really interesting response to my “disguised” plea for a Google Maps interface of the geographic distribution of caches. Check it out! (from Geocaching@PT)

#

Earlier today I’ve taken some time to write a short introductory text on basic usage of Subversion (SVN). It’s not meant to be advanced by any means, just a quick overview of the basic set of commands that enables you to use SVN just fine for developing small-to-medium sized projects. For example, it does not make use of the branching features.

Find this primer on the internal Subversion page.

#

A day that didn’t turn out quite as expected but left me gasping for air nonetheless. Finally catching up with the news in the evening and there’s actually a lot of jolly good stuff making the rounds. So, I’ll try to be short and sweet:

• Following yesterday's post, Guido van Rossum has written in again telling us of his experiences now putting Django and Cheetah head to head.
• With the GPLv3 tentatively scheduled to go final by 2007, we’re all in for a long discussion, flame war and other assorted mischief. After Linus spoke against it on behalf of the Linux kernel, Alan Cox takes the opposite seat in a recent interview. Basically it all boils down to the different perspectives in which they see the DRM issue. Honestly, I’m not sure on this one, so I’m not taking any sides. Not that it matters, right?
• Someone has decided to use the Google Maps API to present the Web 2.0 Innovation Map basically geographically pinpointing dozens of recent Web 2.0 applications stateside. Looks neat, doesn’t it?
• It took them a long time, but they’re finally realizing the shift into Web-based applications. There are now rumors that Microsoft Office Live is just around the corner. I’ll be looking forward to check this out, because I’ve always been of the opinion that the Office applications are the best in their field bar none.
• A list of must-have software for the Mac. Looking at it, I regularly use Adium and… that’s it. Oh well. I should check out Quicksilver sooner rather than later, though.

Oh, and Tiago? We need this

#

Half of my short vacations before getting into the next term are now gone. One week to go. Had the chance to catch up with some movies - I especially recommend The Woodsman for a great Kevin Bacon performance.

Other than that, one of the things I’m involved in is starting to get some traction again and will demand my full attention over the next few weeks. More on this as it develops.

As it is, the picks from my usual nightly web browsing are particularly geared towards the kinds of technology we’ll be using…

• Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python who incidentally is now working at Google, has recently asked the community to teach him about Web frameworks for Python. Many suggestions ensued, and he has today issued a follow-up on the subject. Interesting reading, though I’m surprised he didn’t pay much attention to TurboGears. Or not attention at all.
• AJAX is the current buzzword in the web development arena and there are many issues worth discussing that surround it. For instance, when requests are sent to the server, what should the Ajax response be? XML? HTML? or JSON?.
• I wish I could attend The Ajax Experience to be held in San Francisco, May 10-12. It sounds like the definitive AJAX meetup and the list of speakers is the cream of the crop: Jesse James Garrett, who coined the term, Bill Scott, creator of Rico, Bob Ippolito, creator of MochiKit, Bredan Eich, creator of Javascript, Eric Pascarello, author of Ajax in Action and many others. It would be great if all the talks were recorded and given away on the web like they do over at Linux.conf.au.

Finally, there’s a really interesting article in John Carroll’s blog about GPLv3 and the influence of Richard Stallman. I agree with most of his points and find the whole piece to be very insightful and clear-minded - something RMS himself seems to be having trouble at. Carroll debates key issues and I found this part especially funny. Quoting Stallman, when asked about how influential the community can be on the GPLv3 development:

No. I will still be making decisions. The committees are going to take all the comments and boil them down to issues. Then they will start addressing the issues and looking at the various options. They will also try and decide how to deal with these issues, but ultimately I will be making those decisions. And, of course, if the community has found a good solution, they make that job easy.

To which Carroll says:

In other words, your input is all very nice, thank you very much, but I am king and will decide what goes into the GPL, though it would be nice if you agreed with me. That’s democracy under a dictatorship.

Funny. But true. And ultimately one of the reasons that may well lead to the demise of free software as we know it.

And oddly enough, while others, like Linus Torvalds, are positioning themselves and their projects away from GPLv3, others feel like now is the time to get their feet wet. Of all times.

#

Results of this morning’s news hunt:

• Color Schemer is a very nice lightweight color picker, particularly geared towards web development. This would have come in handy last night, but, alas, I only found it this morning.
• Computer generated images just keep getting better and better. These are just stunning. Jaw-dropping. Unbelievable. When will games look just like this?
• After all the Windows-on-IntelMac hype cooled down a bit, there are the first rumours about the iBooks also getting to make the switch - complete with the mandatory black version gossip.
• Parts 1 and 2 on the future of HTML, by developer Edd Dumbill.

And in the mean time, it seems it is snowing in every part of the country, except here. Damnit!

#

You know when you do a lot of little things but somehow the total amount of work done is less than the sum of its parts? That pretty much tells you how my evening has been. However, it also means my short-term TODO list is now way shorter than it was a few hours ago.

For what it’s worth…

• Upgraded to Firefox 1.5. I’ve been using Safari as my main browser ever since I bought my iBook, but a couple of days ago I’ve finally switched to Firefox - which had been my choice for a good while before I went Mac. Importing the Safari bookmarks was a breeze and the only thing that bothers me is how the shell-like shortcuts (namely Ctrl+A and Ctrl+E for beginning and end of line respectively plus Ctrl+K to nuke lines) somehow don’t work. This bites particularly hard when I’m writing in text forms, like this post right now. Oh, and no spell-checking. Any ideas on these, anyone?
• Finally figured out how to have my customizations really stick across different sessions on Aquamacs. I just had to click ‘Save Options’… no comment. I blame the years using Emacs on Linux and all the complicated manual configurations, via .emacs and the like. I should just blame myself, though.
• A long overdue filesystem cleanup took place. Despite being an obnoxious piece of junk, Finder didn’t get much in the way this time, and it took me only about twenty minutes to clean up all the accumulated cruft inside my home folder and below.
• Fixed all the link color craziness around here, the colors now being uniform across the site. This was due to the CSS merge between Wordpress and DokuWiki, because of the markup plugin. Speaking about it, I should clean it up and make a new improved release with all the latest goodies we’ve been hacking into it recently.
• Signed up for a Technorati profile. From now on, each post here will have a set of tags associated with it, as you can already see on the bottom of this one. I’ve automated the process in a way that for generating these tags, all I have to write is:

<technorati>
<tag>firefox</tag> <tag>safari</tag> ... <tag>technorati</tag>
</technorati> 

Humm, in hindsight, I guess I was busy afterall. No wonder, it’s 4:30 in the morning.

Last but not least, in the most warm-hearted spirit, I’d like to pay a little tribute to a buddy of mine who’s been the best possible companion for the last four years. Today he passed away but I refuse to feel sad, as he left nothing but fond memories and good times and because he himself was never sad, always full of joy to the very last of his days. The pet heaven has just become an even better place.

We’ll never forget you, matey!

#