February 26th, 2009
There’s no such thing, right? Well, if you have to carry them all around all day, maybe there is such a thing as too many.
It seems I am now “on call”. Which means I have to tote around the one and only IT-approved model of smartphone, the Blackberry. Which means I am now saddled with two slightly-too-big devices, being already the proud owner of T-Mobile G1 “GooglePhone”.
If this had happened half a year ago, when I was toting around the T-Mobile SDA stupidphone, I’d have counted the Blackberry as a blessing; that thing was an abomination. But now I’m feeling just a little too connected.
Posted in Life and Stuff, Tech Industry | No Comments »
February 26th, 2009
I don’t bother with most viral Internet memes, but this one sounded like fun…
The source material:
The band name
The album title
The cover image
I’m surprised how well the title and the image worked together.
Posted in Life and Stuff, Teh Intarwebs | No Comments »
October 29th, 2008
According to CNET, HP is diving headfirst into the Netbook market. The interesting part of the article, though, is not so much about HP, as about netbooks in general, and how they are being marketed in Europe and Asia:
It’s a dramatic increase, and the difference is all coming out of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), where Asus and Acer have been incredibly aggressive about their Netbooks, the Eee PC and Aspire One, respectively. Of the 10.9 million units that are estimated to ship worldwide by the end of 2008, 8.1 million will go to EMEA, says IDC.
Acer and Asus have done well in the region, as evidenced by Acer’s quick rise to the top of the portable PC market there. But they’ve been aided by local telecom companies, who are subsidizing Netbooks in exchange for a signed wireless service contract. It’s a model that in the past few months has thrived in Europe.
Dell signed up Vodafone for this kind of deal on its Netbook, the Inspiron Mini 9 in September, but HP’s mostly been on the sidelines in this regard, and representatives for the company haven’t indicated if a similar deal with wireless providers are in the works.
Wireless service contract to subsidize a Linux-based device optimized for mobile Internet access. Other than the physical size of the device, how is this different from Android (and, Linux notwithstanding, the iPhone)?
At some point in the near future, somebody is going to put Android on a netbook-class device, and the shape of the future of client computing will become clearly visible. And the day that happens is the day that Microsoft’s desktop monopoly will be truly broken.
Posted in Open Source, Tech Industry, Teh Intarwebs | No Comments »
October 17th, 2008
Model-View-Controller (MVC) is a design style that dates back (as so much does) to the pioneering work of the Xerox PARC facility. The idea is that applications should be separated into:
- Model: the data that the application manipulates, and the fundamental operations it performs on that data
- View: How the application looks to the user.
- Controller: How user, view, and model interact.
(Yes, yes, I’m sure anyone who cares to can pick apart my definitions. Don’t care.)
The idea is, views change all the time (today it’s radio buttons, tomorrow it’s drop-downs), controllers change moderately (add a confirmation step, tighten up the authentication), and models hardly change at all (an accounting program isn’t going to change into an MMORPG). So isolate the fast-changing bits from the slow-changing ones. And also allow different specialties — database hackers, usability analysts, graphical designers — to put apply themselves to their own field exclusively.
How do you do that in web applications? The received wisdom of the day is:
- Model: database + ORM (e.g., Hibernate, ActiveRecord)
- View: templating language
- Controller: application framework (Struts, Spring, Rails, etc.)
In other words, do it all on the server, all in one language (which, of course, fits all purposes, because it is the One True Language). Maintain separation of concerns with iron discipline and wishful thinking.
My own view:
- Model: database + RESTful web service, delivering information in JSON
- View: Static (X)HTML/CSS
- Controller: Javascript/AJAX
The controller code can be implemented in any server-side language: Java, C#, Ruby, Python, Erlang, whatever; it just needs to be able to talk to the database and send JSON over the wire. The view can be created in an HTML/CSS environment like Dreamweaver, with no worries about whether it’s compatible with the developer toolset. And the controller logic… Well, I’ve been playing with jQuery lately, and it may shock some folks to learn that coding client-side Javascript with a good compatibility layer library is actually fun.
Dividing tasks by physical location and implementation language creates a strict separation of concerns. Server-side code does not generate HTML. Controller code does not do SQL queries. View markup contains no executable code at all: there is no template language. There is zero possibility of the parts bleeding together.
Why wouldn’t this work? Am I missing something?
Posted in Programming, Teh Intarwebs | No Comments »
October 15th, 2008
Paul Ford publishes an excellent essay on intellectual property laws, and the chilling effect they have on innovation, in Learning to Fear the Semantic Web.
As a bonus, it includes this lovely turn of phrase:
I believe, as in don’t-get-him-started, that…
I will now have to use this in everyday conversation on a regular basis. Consider yourself warned.
Posted in Politics, Teh Intarwebs | No Comments »
August 29th, 2008
Tropical Storm: Computer Model Hurricane Forecasts : Weather Underground
Worrisome: some of the computer models are now showing Gustav hooking to the south. One, the NGFDL model, shows Houston in the bull’s eye.
Even if it does, I probably have nothing to worry about, given I live almost forty miles inland. Still, it looks like I need to do some shopping on the way home tonight.
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August 29th, 2008
McCain picks Alaska Gov. Palin as running mate - CNN.com
Palin, 44, who’s in her first term as governor, is a pioneering figure in Alaska, the first woman and the youngest person to hold the state’s top political job.
I guess it had to happen someday: a Candidate for the Presidential ticket (if not actually for President) who is younger than me.
Posted in Life and Stuff, Politics | 2 Comments »
August 20th, 2008
Okay, I’m a week late hearing the news, but it seems the EcmaScript (aka JavaScript, JScript, etc.) committee has cut its losses, and settled on a less ambitious next version of the standard, ECMAScript Harmony. Packages, namespaces, and early binding are gone. Which kind of leaves Adobe with a problem, as they had started implementing a lot of the ES4 features in ActionScript for Flash/Flex.
Namespaces are, in other languages, an important means of controlling complexity by partitioning the code into well-defined pieces. Maybe it’s not so essential in Jav(ahem) EcmaScript, especially in web browsers, which account for 99% of the current use cases. I think dropping them reduces the chance that EcmaScript will break out into other domains, and I think that’s unfortunate. But I’ll admit, the technical trade-offs involved are beyond my current understanding.
I’d very much like to know how this is going to affect the Tamarin project, though.
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July 23rd, 2008
I saw The Dark Knight last night (in IMAX, on the front row, by Crom). I don’t have to repeat how purely awesome the movie is, so many others have done so already.
But it took me until tonight to notice an ironic bit of casting. The Mayor of Gotham is played by Nestor Carbonell … who played a certain flying-rodent-inspired character himself, once upon a time. I bet somebody in casting had a chuckle at that one.
Posted in Media, Teh Funny | No Comments »
April 22nd, 2008
I just got an alert from Google that my website was on a danger list, that it included a link to some malware. (It’s gone now.) Sure enough, the Yahoo post below contained an IFRAME with a reference to Ghod-knows-what. After excising that, I found some link spam buried in two other posts, pointing to a gambling site. Also gone now.
I recently upgraded to WordPress 2.5, which I understand closed a major security hole. I hope that this closed that hole, and I’ll see no more of this evil nonsense.
Fucking parasites. Pardon my Anglo-Saxon, but this crap just makes me furious. Now my page is marked as “Evil! Unclean!” in Google’s index, until they get around to reviewing it again. And it wasn’t just someone having fun punking my site; this is how hackers build their botnets, using openings like this to subvert anyone unlucky enough to read a hacked web page.
(I repeat, the offending code has been removed, and if the programmers at Automattic know what they’re doing, it won’t be back. If you’re still worried, try switching to a more secure browser… like anything other than Internet Explorer. Like this or this or this.)
Posted in Teh Intarwebs | 1 Comment »