Musings

Tim Bray over at Ongoing talks about AJAX Performance. His point being, that we should use AJAX to offload heavy computation from the web-server to the users browser. I suspect there’s a huge system-wide optimization waiting out there for us to grab, by pushing as much of the templating and page generation work out there onto the clients. In particular, when you’re personalizing a page, assign all the work you can to the personal computer sitting in front of the person in question. ...

One of the really bad things in the blogosphere is keeping track of all the comments you made around other blogs. And if you use a news reader to aggregate the RSS feeds, it’s even worse, because you don’t even see any comments - unless you visit the blog in your web browser. Enter CoComment by a team of Swisscom Innovations. Laurent Haug also has his fingers in it somehow. This application keeps track of the comments you posted and comments to your comments. It integrates as a bookmarklet, but Firefox users can take advantage of a Greasemonkey script to handle the really difficult taks of hitting a bookmark prior to posting. ...

After talking to quite a few people about my idea of open sourcing the course materials for my Rails course I decided to go ahead and just do it. The advantages outweigh the drawbacks as far as I can see them: Advantages Giving something back to the community -> Good karma Having other people look over the documents could lead to ideas for improvement (what Scoble has had happen to his “Naked Conversations” book) Having other people actually see that I’m doing something (Cory Doctorow commented that he was more worried about obscurity, than about people downloading his books) Showing potential customers about what they can expect from the course Drawbacks ...

One of the things I’ve been thinking about ever since announcing the Ruby On Rails Training in Zurich is if I should “Open source” the course materials (maybe even making the development process open, so everybody could see where I am, what I’m doing) Today I attended a talk by Cory Doctorow who talked on “Digital Restriction Management (DRM)”. One of the analogies to protected content he gave was as follows (paraphrased) ...

In true geek tradition (reboot7, then Tweakfest) I’m heading of to Lift06 today. Lift is organized by Laurent Haug whom I met at reboot. Kudos to him for taking on the task of organizing a conference that pulls together a really impressive set of speakers. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing those people: Cory Doctorow Bruce Sterling (whom I first saw at Tweakfest in Zürich) Marc Besson about Digital Identity Regine Debatty - we make money, not art Stefan Mastrogiacomo about Organizational Design Xavier Comtesse about the internet and the other peoples revolution Chris Lawer on co-creation of knowledge Sigurd Rinde who finally talks about Thingamy Euan Semple about Knowledge Management (yep - that word is still in use) Hugh MacLeoad - global Microbranding Robert Scoble - changing Microsoft, one blog posting at a time Of couse I also look forward to meeting all of the people I met in Denmark: Henriette Weber Andersen, Geoff Jones, and all the others) ...

Still working on a PC? Here’s something to take your mind of the frustrations… Technorati Tags: computer, flash, pc, game