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Blogs » Archive for April, 2008
WWW2008 Beijing: Day 1 - Linked Data on the Web (LDOW 2008) Workshop
Just arrived half way through the workshop… long day so far. Left from Sydney last night and haven’t slept yet, I hope I don’t nod off during the sessions.
Right now I listening to Tim Berners-Lee talk about linked data browsing and his frustration that the Web is a Read only medium. He and a small team (over the Christmas break) worked on a second version of their linked data browser Tabulator. This update took Tabulator from the Read/Browse only domain into the Write domain via a SPARQL update query.
Tim has always been very passionate about the ability to write back to the Web. The very first Web clients he wrote had the ability to write as well as read. This ability was lost in the early days and is just now surfacing again. He did admit that some would consider write is already available via blogs and wikis, but he won’t be happy until much more of the Web is writeable.
This stuff is all very new. SPARQL was just recently release as a W3C spec. The move is on to start work on SPARQL 2. One of the key ingredients is going …
You guys all suck
I was reading a bit on ReadWriteWeb today called Real People Don’t Have Time For Social Media, and it got me thinking about my attitude to the subject. I agree with the headline, but not for the same reason — it’s not that I lack the physical time, it’s just that, conceptually, I don’t have time for it.
Online social networking isn’t really social, it’s just sitting on your own in front of a computer.
I have a friend who spends all her free time in online web-cam chatrooms. To me, that’s not social, it’s the exact opposite — it’s social avoidance; it allows her to feel like she’s being sociable, when in reality she isn’t doing any of the things that define social interaction — she isn’t really meeting people, she isn’t going places or doing anything, and she isn’t taking any risks. To my mind, risk-taking is a defining factor in social interaction — it’s precisely because human relationships are risky that they’re so valuable.
Whenever we open ourselves up to someone, we’re taking a risk. When we state an opinion, or disagree with someone else’s, or admit to a weakness, or express an emotion, we’re taking a risk that the …
Real-world Gloss Effects in Fireworks
The internet — particularly its Web 2.0 version — is a very glossy place. In fact, I think if far-away aliens ever eavesdropped on our wireless internet transmissions, they’d conclude that humans must live in a hard world of polished marble, wet glass and high-gloss plastic.
While the gloss effect is probably getting a little ‘long in the tooth’, the main problem I have with it is the overall boring perfectness of the reflections. On the web, wet floors are always laser-cut mirrors, and glossy buttons always seem to exist in a perfect, evenly-lit vaccuum.
In the dirty, scratched and smudged real world, wet floors have dull spots and distortions in them and glossy surfaces warp, blur and reflect the patchy, organic world they inhabit.
Without wanting to wind the fashion clock back to the ‘distressed 90’s look’, you can give your reflections a bit more character without too much more work.
The Method
1). Let’s start with a rounded rectangle — it’s …
Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers
With just under two weeks left in our Adobe AIR/Flex competition, time is running out to get your articles in. As a reminder, we have two copies of Adobe CS3 Web Premium to give away!
If you’ve been experimenting with Adobe AIR and hitting walls due to lack of documentation, here’s a resource that might help: the team behind Adobe AIR have released a pocket guide to AIR for JavaScript developers. It’s available either for free in digital form (under a Creative Commons license) or in print from Amazon.
This is a smart move by Adobe to encourage developers to play and build things with AIR. Hopefully some of you will find it helpful in writing your article!
Download the Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers pocket guide (PDF, 1.2 MB).
Web Directions North Podcasts and Slides Online
The Web Directions North crew write:
We’ve been able to put together an excellent set of resources to refresh your memory of Web Directions North. All the slides and podcasts from just about all of the sessions are now available at our resources site. This is an outstanding collection of materials: we want as many people as possible to benefit from them.
If you weren’t lucky enough to make it to the Vancouver conference in February, you can now experience the vibe of being there from your own home.
Of course, reenacting the complete experience, including two days of snowboarding, might be a bit tough — but not impossible. I recommend falling awkwardly onto a hard surface a few times (landing on your bottom) then sitting down next to the refrigerator for a few hours with the door wide open. This last part is, of course, entirely up to you.
View the Web Directions podcast list.
The Week in ColdFusion: 9-15 April: Code crazy
For some reason, the blogosphere absolutely exploded this week. Even if you subscribe to MXNA, Fullasagoog or one of the other CF blog aggregators, check this list out to see if you missed anything…
The hype over the ColdFusion 8.0.1 release has died down a little, and there were a handful of items this week discussing what’s new. Raymond Camden discusses the changes to the CFEXECUTE tag in CF 8.0.1. With the changes to the CF licensing, John Beynon has put together a little ColdFusion license calculator in Flex to work out how many licenses are required (and their cost) based on the CF edition, number of CPUs and number of virtual machines.
Not to be outdone, the alternative CFML engine Railo also released an updater, to version 2.0.1. The new release contains an ton of bug fixes and new features.
In the Open BlueDragon camp, the members of the new steering committee have been announced. Alan Williamson has posted interviews with committee members Andy Allan, Mike Brunt, and Sean Corfield, with more sure to follow.
Speaking of open source, Greg Cerveny has posted an interview with Raymond Camden on developing open source ColdFusion applications. It’s interesting because it seems Greg has some strong …
You’re Fat and I Hate You
So this has happened to me a few times recently (mentioning no names) — I read up on some neat trick or other that somebody’s figured out in JavaScript, and I’m like ooh that’s cool, I wonder how it works. So I follow it up, only to find out that the author doesn’t know how it works, and reading their code throws no light on it either, because most of the work is done by an external framework.
It irritates the hell out of me that so much modern JavaScript development hinges on frameworks. Not because there’s anything wrong with that in pragmatic terms, but because I’m interested in the mechanics of things, and programming with frameworks obscures the mechanics. It’s simply too laborious to work through that convoluted chain of dependencies and see what a script is actually doing. And the code of the framework itself is generally optimized to such an extent that it’s virtually illegible — great for speed and efficiency in practice, but very difficult to read and understand.
Of course, from the point of view of developers using frameworks, that’s exactly the point. The mechanics are supposed to be obscured so that the application is easier …
.NET on the ‘NET : Happy Birthday SilverLight!
It’s been another week, which means it’s time for another thrilling, or at least moderately interesting, .NET on the ‘Net post. This week, Silverlight celebrated it’s first birthday. At its current rate of half a million downloads a day, it’s still got a lot of ground to make up against Flash, but SilverLight has been doing better than a lot of people expected. I’m excited to see what happens when SilverLight 2 is released this summer. Microsoft released a preview of Dynamic Data on MSDN and plans to include it in a hotfix for .NET 3.5 later this year. Dynamic Data is a system that allows you to share functionality for similar fields across various databound controls across your app. Scott Hanselman has a good explanation on his blog.
The tutorials were a bit thin this week. Steve Orr posted a solid tutorial on creating Control Extenders in Visual Studio 2008. To go along with the Dynamic Data announcement, here’s a walk-through for using the Dynamic Data Wizard. Finally, Scott Gu posted a list of a tutorials that should help provide some new ideas to try out.
For those who haven’t heard a small search engine start-up announced some application tools a …
10th Birthday Special: Buy One Kit, Get One Free!
I’m live-blogging the madness here at SitePoint HQ.
Earlier today I took a photo of our normally conservative and professional Co-founder, Mark Harbottle, for today’s article, where he looks calm and relaxed. Yet just now I saw him strutting around the office, clucking like a chicken! And I just got off a phone call with co-founder Matt Mickiewicz that I barely understood — what words I did make out made no sense anyway! I could swear I heard both of them rambling something about a ridiculous never-to-be-repeated sale…
It must be something to do with SitePoint turning 10 years old!
Yes it’s party time at SitePoint as we celebrate our 10 year journey from webmaster-resources.com to sitepoint.com. To make sure this is a party to remember our co-founders Matt and Mark are offering one massive deal on all of SitePoint’s kits.
I think they’ve gone crazy, but their madness is your gain!
Here’s the deal: for the month of April…
Buy 1 SitePoint Kit and Get 1 FREE!!!
In addition to this offer, both kits will be shipped to you free, worldwide!
The party will be over at the end of April, so don’t miss your chance to own a SitePoint kit at a never …
Get Your Non-Apple PC With Mac OS X Pre-installed
I’ve long held the view that an Apple Mac is the best machine to use if you are a responsible web professional.
Now I’m aware that this is a provocative statement, but hear me out. I’m a Mac user, but I’m no fan boy, and this is not some kind of DHH-like blind rant. I’ve had my fair share of hiccups over the years. My reason for advocating that web designers use a Mac is not your usual “Us vs. Them” dribble. Viruses, eye candy, stability, security… whatever.
The one reason I believe that every web designer should be running a Mac is this:
You need to test your sites on Safari for Mac, and you can’t run OS X on a PC.
That’s it. If you create web pages, then you need to test those pages on Safari on a Mac. Safari for Windows is not a bad approximation of Safari for Mac, but it’s not identical.
Of course, there are multiple ways of performing cross-platform browser testing. Having access to a service like BrowserCam, having a second machine that is a Mac available for you to perform testing — these are all valid approaches. But if you’re going to buy one machine, I’ve …
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