Dylan Schiemann

Adam Rifkin provides an outstanding recap of January’s 106 Miles

Kevin Laws asks “Is RSS for real, or is it today’s Social Networking?” in his article rss – really something special?. The article itself is an excellent summary of the current RSS business landscape. Of course, social networking is nowhere close to reaching it’s potential… I’ll talk more about that when I have something interesting to say. Of course, according to David Sifry of Technorati, everything we do online and offline is just a set of events. Meaning that the event space includes both feed formats and social networking applications.

Mark Jen was fired by Google recently due in part to comments made on his blog, as mentioned in my entry complaining to complain. Tonight I had the chance to meet him at the latest 106 Miles event. He seems to be a pretty nice guy, and dumbfounded by how quickly his comments caught fire and eventually led to him being fired. Update: A chat with Mark Jen, and a summary of the 2nd 106 Miles.

Google unleashed Google Maps today and did a pretty amazing job. Of course, there are always people that just do not get it. Yes, I know that Python is a cleaner language for development. But if you want to write responsive web applications, you need JavaScript, the most widely deployed, misunderstood, functional-like language in the world. Curly braces and all.

Alex wrote a rant about our struggles with adobe svg, http requests, and closures.

It’s no surprise to people that work with me that I’ve been spending a lot of my time lately on Dojo. This week, Jesse James Garrett wrote an article on A New Approach to Web Applications, and Matthew Haughey followed up with an article about the rise of web applications. They have both written excellent pieces, with one exception. They chose an awful name to describe these types of web applications that I just cannot endorse.

Related to this, nevow looks like a potentially interesting mod_pubsub analog, and Hula also looks promising.

Regarding Dojo itself, progress has been slower than we would like, but steady. We have finished a significant portion of the core “plumbing” for the project, and we also have our first widget, a button, that can be constructed from markup in HTML and SVG namespaces. We still have a lot of work to do on making our widget system better, especially in the world of SVG. The current SVG button could be described as hacky at best. A button is a surprisingly complex widget, at least if it is done with any sort of sane flexibility and constraints (cSVG and laszlo’s constraints mechanism). Other things we are actively working on include our event, IO, data binding, and dojoml, our xml application declaration language.

xml.com is running an article on hacking OpenOffice.org. In addition to the cool tips mentioned in the article, it also mentions that there will soon be support in the product for python scripting!

The EFF has created a list of endangered gizmos. Categories include extinct (i.e., dvd x-copy), endangered (iPod), and saved (vcr).

Mark Jen, while raising some valid points about compensation at Google, really misses the boat when he talks about the various employee perks Google offers. What he does not seem to get is that Google is in many ways trying to help him and other Google employees waste less time on the annoying little inconveniences in life. They are in fact respecting the value of his time, a lesson few companies get. So while this may result in him spending more time at work, it should result in him spending even less time in traffic on tedious errands.

Firefox seems to be everywhere now. In addition to the countless obvious places such as the NY Times Ad, Don’t Click on the Blue E!, the cover story of this month’s Wired, and the rampant speculation now that several firefox developers have been hired by Google, to the more person interactions I have recently while wearing my Firefox t-shirt. The range covers the entire spectrum, ranging from the misinformed (“That’s my search engine”) to a DMV employee raving about Firefox when I had my license renewed, and shaking my hand, thanking me for contributing to the project.