When Dave Hyatt announced some of the cool new additions to WebCore to support Dashboard etc. - via “extensions” made to HTML - my first reaction was “Hey, that’s cool!”, followed rather quickly with “but, doesn’t that break the standards?”
Things like the cool new attribute (announced here) on the input element work great, look awesome, but as a result, make the source page invalid XHTML-Transitional. Doh.
The new
element (announced here), which gives you a place to draw bitmaps via javascript (and is used by the analog clock widget in Tiger’s Dashboard), also very cool and useful, but not in the standard…
Not sure if I’ll end up using it as my email address, but dlnorman@gmail.com went live today. At first blush, it looks pretty cool. I’d love to be able to connect via IMAP, but that would probably kill the whole adsense interface that pays for the whole thing…
I’m cheap, so you can guess which one I used. Only active Blogger accounts are added to the GMail beta. Active is a somewhat arbitrary term, since you only need to have 2 posts in a weblog, with one posted sometime in the last 2 weeks. They can even be something creative like “Testing.” I’m just saying…
Eric Meyer (and a few others in his comments area) has suggested that the table top in the Tiger iChatAV app might be useful for more than just pretty reflections. What if it also served as a place to share documents? Either as icons (which, when clicked, would open said document), or as thumbnail icons that enlarge when selected.
I would absolutely LOVE this feature. Ideally, it would support sharing of static documents (PDF, images), “live” collaborative documents (SubEthaEdit workspaces), and, perhaps even group web browsing (select a web page document, and follow along with whoever is leading that document browse session…).
Perhaps the biggest part of the release isn’t even in the software - it’s in the licensing. It’s now about half the cost of what we paid, and it’s free for teaching. If you’re teaching XML, you can download it and just go. Student projects, etc… It’s all good.
There are also a bunch of great changes under the hood - scored search results, performance improvements, and other goodness.
Or, in this case, from the UK. Last night 190 spam crap comments were added to this weblog (in a span of about 20 minutes).
Despite using the MT-Blacklist plugin, ported to Blosxom. I’ve gone through and deleted the 190 spam crap comments. I’ve also turned off addition of new comments to existing comment threads. It’s easy to remove comment posts when they’re just spam. It’s harder when it’s added into existing content…
Just came across this: According the the preview page, Tiger is coming with Blosjom bundled. Blosjom is a java port of the Blosxom software the currently powers this weblog…
Looks like there may not be a satellite feed for the Stevenote this year. Failing that, there’s the O’Reilly coverage, as noted on their MacDevCenter…
O’Reilly at WWDC 2004 by Derrick Story – The Mac crew at O’Reilly has lots going on at this year’s WWDC. If you’re attending the ultimate Mac bash in San Francisco, then you might want to make a mental note about the following O’Reilly-related offerings, including book specials, O’Reilly-hosted BoFs, and our ongoing conference coverage.
Before leaving for the NMC 2004 Summer Conference, I handed King the code I’d hacked together to implement XML KeyValueCoding and the XStreamDB EOAdaptor. He needed the XML KVC part to implement an ECL client in APOLLO, so it should have worked just fine.
In usual King form, he went through my code, and when he was done, it looked like part of the EOF stack itself - all of the niggly loose ends I was struggling with were properly cauterized - no, that’s too rough - they were reworked with Best Practices and EOF methodology so they worked properly, rather than just working (yes, there is a distinction ;-) ).
I’m sure this is going to be linked all over the place, but it’s a very interesting read. It’s a reposting by David Gristwood, of an original article by Jim McCarthy (a manager on the MS Visual C++ team).
Particularly interesting and useful, it delves into the topic of “slippage”, but treats it as a necessary and good part of the process. Slippage becomes a transition from the unknown to the less unknown - as you know more, the timeline and estimates become more refined and realistic, often leading to slippage.
We’re working on a whole bunch of related (and sometimes dependent) projects here at the Learning Commons, and it’s sometimes difficult to communicate how they all fit together.
Although we are coming at several related problems from several directions simultaneously, we see them all as One Big Project, with each component making up part of a larger puzzle. Here’s the extremely simplified model of how the projects fit together:
Perhaps the easiest way of thinking about these projects is with APOLLO acting as a kind of malleable glue that can hold distinct and separate technologies together. We see things like ties to Blackboard LMS happening somehow via APOLLO, which can serve as a bridge between any of the other project puzzle pieces.
Scott Leslie is heading up a rather large initiative in BC to deploy some cool whiz-bang learning object technology across the province for a couple of very large organizations. His group recently made a decision on which technologies they were going to use, and they picked APOLLO.
Scott has written up an excellent description of his rationale, plan, and hopes for the BC/APOLLO collaboration. I really like his pragmatic stance - use what’s best for the job, and for the users. He likes Open Source, but isn’t married to it. He likes commercial software, but will use something else if it’s a better fit.
