One of my clients was mentioning to me a huge newspaper archive that he was getting ready to put online. What he was doing with the search — trying to provide access to a huge amount of data with very good throughput speeds, all available on the web — sounded like something that the Apache [...]
As you may have noticed, I’ve got a poll over there on the left that lists some topics I might write tutorials about. I’ve been doing a ton of jQuery work lately, so I thought I might put that on the list, but there is apparently a ton of good material out there already. Specifically, [...]
Over at Manning Press, we are building a system that relies heavily on the Subversion version control system, but more and more authors are coming in and saying that they are using Git instead. Git is not, as I had originally thought, a fork of SVN, but instead a distributed system, in which every user [...]
Today I was introduced to an incredibly handy plugin for jQuery called Boxy. You know those Facebook-type modal dialogues that pop up on a web page and grey-out everything else? Well, Boxy lets you do that with one simple Javascript command, as in: $(‘.boxy’).boxy(); It includes all sorts of options as well, including a handy [...]
I’ve been hearing a lot about Second Life lately, and I think this time I’m actually going to check it out. Second Life is and immersive environment a lot like World of Warcraft, or Star Wars Galaxies, except that nobody’s trying to kill you. The really cool thing about Second Life is that everything in [...]
I rant about stupid patents all the time, but mostly because it’s very rare that I see a controversial patent that I would consider “non-obvious”. Maybe it’s because I think about how to do these things all the time, even though I rarely have time to implement any of them. Well, I’ve finally had it. [...]
Yes, you read the title right. Sun is proposing DReaM, and open source Digital Rights Management system that ties assets to a person, and not a device. Check it out: Wired News: Reasons to Love Open-Source DRM
I thought about this when I was in college, but I never had the opportunity to carry it out. Scientists are working on ways for disabled patients to control a mouse with their brain, or by thinking about moving various body parts: Wired News: Now That’s Using Your Brain
Net neutrality, in case you haven’t heard, is the concept that all traffic on the web should be treated fairly and equally. In other words, companies should not have the ability to give content from some providers special treatment while degrading (ie slowing down) traffic from other providers. Now Intel backs ‘Net Neutrality’. According to [...]
Sometimes I think if I didn’t do this for a living, I would just get out of programming altogether. I know it’s not true, because I’m just hooked on it. But I do get pretty disgusted at all of the turf wars and methodology wars and acronym wars and all of the other wars that [...]
