Archive for October, 2008

I read my feeds on a semi-regular basis of about two weeks. It's a pretty intensive process because I watch about three dozen feeds, but it always pays off being well informed.

• SourceForge has been redesigned which is a perfect example of how to screw up a site of great usability. I'm astonished to see how bad it became. I'm not a usability engineer, but it's clear to me that it's a mess and I can't believe that the largest open source software repository on Earth doesn't have any decent usability folks.
• Ubiquity looks like an extremely powerful tool for streamlining various web related tasks. Aza Raskin basically took the core idea of Enso and transformed it to work within Firefox which makes much sense to me in a web-centric world.
• How To Become a Better Programmer by Not Programming - I personally code less and read more nowadays. I also manage the technical side of Wondeer and my management role gets stronger and stronger. Architecting Wondeer is a pleasurable challenge, it takes different level of skills than developing small applications.
• How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevant in Two Easy Steps is one of the most interesting talks I've ever seen on the topic of brand psychology and marketing. Did you know that it takes one generation to change people's mind about a brand that have made a terrible image?
• 10 Most Sought-after Skills in Web Development - Good compilation!
• It's pretty refreshing to see truly creative designs, although I think that some sacrifice usability.
• Banshee has been ported to OSX and work is underways to port it to Windows. I'm happy to hear that because there's a great potential in cross-platform Mono applications I believe. Your application gets more popular this way, you get more contributors and your work can be enoyed by many more people. It's also a great way to build a migration path to Linux for users.
• Extreme JavaScript Performance - It seems that Chrome's V8 engine is not the fastest JavaScript engine anymore. I'm happy to see that JavaScript gets transformed from an interpreted to a compiled language. This will empower web developers to do computation-intensive stuff on the client side making web applications conquer the world.

How to build extremely responsive applications

• All I/O happens in background threads within Chrome. I think it's the only right approach to take when building perfectly responsive applications.
• Synchronous I/O is never ok, says Havoc Pennington and he's absolutely right. Even if one uses the native VFS API of his/her beloved platform things could go wrong because not only disks are slow, but there could be various abstraction layers beneath that can slow it down further, like RAID mirroring, encrypted block devices, slow or unreliable network connections in case of networked filesystems and who knows what else.
• The future is multithreaded anyways so it's time to learn parallel programming on a deeper level. I think that the Parallel FX Library may be the best way to do that.

The web will never be the same.

If you asked me about one or two years earlier whether I consider the web as a serious application platform my answer would be a definite no-no. I couldn't see the real potential in the web because all I saw was a couple of messy technologies not designed to build serious applications upon them and I was right about that in a certain degree. The web was designed to serve static documents, that's probably all that Tim Berners-Lee have had in mind when creating HTML. No one would ever think that client side scripting, cascading style sheets, the document object model and various related technologies evolve to such an advanced level that it makes developers able to create extremely sophisticated applications on it that can outperform their rich client counterparts.

Add Cloud Computing to the mix and you have your own datacenter so you can infinitely grow your application as the need arises. I'm very surprised that some tech leaders think Cloud computing is a hype, because it makes me question their ability to make informed decisions.

jQuery is my most beloved piece of the big equatiation of the new web. Its semantics is so powerful that I'd rather call it a metasyntax on top of JavaScript. DHTML development sucked in former times and I admit that browser bugs and icompatibilities didn't vanish, but jQuery powered development is a parallel universe that's a more productive, fun and friendlier place than it ever was. It must be pretty clear nowadays that jQuery is the #1 JavaScript library on the planet as more and more big companies tell us that they're using it and integrate it into their own frameworks. I think John Resig is a green alien skillfully masking his real identity, coming from the space with the goal of taking over the world of DHTML development.

New-Window Links in a Standards-Compliant World - Seems like some folks at W3C have smoked too much crack. My conclusion: Never use XHTML Strict, stick with XHTML Transitional.

Update (2008-10-22): It seems like it's possible to use GPG with Firefox with FireGPG.

I've officially abandoned Evolution in favor of the GMail web interface which I use in Flock using the Gmail and Google Apps Sidebar Remover Greasemoney script.

I'd like to use GPG, but I'm fed up with Evolution. It has a friendly and helpful community on #evolution and I appreciate their help, but the software itself is a disaster in my opinion. It crashes twice a week, duplicates some of my emails seemingly randomly, slow to close and it's a memory hog. I find GMail's interface much usable, it's really a pleasure to use.

I'll automatize fetching my mails to my localhost on a regular basis, since I don't like storing important informations solely in the cloud.

I've always loved laptop keyboards because of their good mechanics and compact form factor. After making some search I've realized that one can order them individually, but I'm surprised to see their prices. I don't understand why they are so expensive compared to PC keyboards.

• http://www.priorityelectronics.com/laptopaccessories/laptop-keyboards.htm
• http://www.laptoppartsworld.com/components/