I want to accomplish 2 things: I want to integrate my posts to various "social media" sites better with each other, and I want to get myself kick-started back into blogging again. Due to a little work I accomplished today, this post to LiveJournal should promulgate itself over the following route:

[ LiveJournal ] => [ TwitterFeed ] => [ Identi.ca ] => [ Twitter ] => [ FaceBook ]

Pretty damned circuitous, huh? And far from a decent solution... I want to find a way to post to any of those and have _smart_ promulgation happen. I want to post to any of these and "have it just understand" to which other places/services "it" should promulgate.

Ah well, maybe come the revolution everyone will get on board with federating the Social Web. Oh right, that is why I joined the Federated Social Web Incubator Group at W3C.

Tags: federate, media, social, web

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Begin forwarded message:

From: [snip]
Date: November 17, 2008 12:45:59 PM EST
To: [snip]
Subject: [Fwd: FW: Fine day in America]

One sunny day in 2009, an old man approached the White House 
from across Pennsylvania Avenue, where he'd been sitting on 
a park bench.  He spoke to the U.S. Marine standing guard and 
said, "I would like to go in and meet with President Bush."   
The Marine looked at the man and said, "Sir, Mr. Bush is no 
longer President, and no longer resides here."  The old man 
said, "Okay" and walked away.

The following day, the same man approached the White House 
and said to the same Marine, "I would like to go in and meet 
with President Bush."  The Marine again told the man, "Sir, 
as I said yesterday, Mr. Bush is no longer President, and 
no longer resides here."  The man thanked him and, again, 
just walked away.

The third day, the same man approached the White House and 
spoke to the very same U.S. Marine saying, "I would like to 
go in and meet with President Bush." The Marine, understandably 
agitated at this point, looked at the man and said, "Sir, 
this is the third day in a row you have been here asking to 
speak to Mr. Bush.  I've told you already that Mr. Bush is 
no longer the President and no longer resides here.  Don't you 
understand?"

The old man looked at the Marine and said, "Oh yes, I understand.  
I just love hearing it."

The Marine snapped to attention, saluted, and said, "See you tomorrow."

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Tags: cat, computer, doom, feline, laptop, panic

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Current Mood: awake

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Dig it, pissed off punk bears with dye-jobs... yellow, green, orange and blue bears, punk bears with attitude wandering the Alaskan forests.

As part of an interagency effort to pacify a danger zone where hundreds of anglers daily mingle with bears expecting to dine on human leftovers, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game plans to make over several grizzlies in bright shades of drugstore hair dye. The idea behind yellow, green, orange or blue bears is to make them instantly recognizable to anyone who reports an encounter, area wildlife biologist Jeff Selinger said.

For public safety reasons, biologists have decided they need to kill bears that repeatedly intimidate people, he said, and making it easy for people to know exactly which bear they encounter may avoid any wrongful executions.

He and other biologists plan to tranquilize several bears that frequent the area, give them a shampoo, bleach the hair around their heads, shoulders and hindquarters, and then apply dye.

"This is their only chance at surviving," Selinger said.

It's a tactic that he predicted would draw scorn from wildlife watchers, though he says the state agency is "not trying to embarrass these bears.''

Soldotna-based wildlife photographer John Toppenberg, director of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, groaned when he heard of the plan. "Who wants to take a picture of a clown bear?"

[Anchorage Daily News, 20 May 2007]

Current Mood: amused

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Okay, so this is an attempt to embed a feed from my Newsvine column into a Livejournal posting.

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  A number of people have spoken about the convergence of software technologies for providing services over the Web to both full-screen and handheld devices. WAP markup has become a subset of XHTML, WAP style has become a subset of CSS, JavaScript/ECMAScript is showing up in the browser, and browsers are beginning to support the media attribute of the stylesheet-link tag. At last it is becoming possible for Web development teams to use their prior knowledge about designing & developing full-screen Web sites to integrate handheld devices into their existing sites.

Integrating Handheld Design Problems

I have begun building the Center for the Handheld Web to provide a central point for information about the developing handheld Web. I have also begun integrating materials about the nuts & bolts of developing sites for handheld devices into my undergraduate Website Design & Implementation course at RIT.

As part of this effort, the Final Group Project asks the undergraduates taking the course to struggle with the issues involved in creating a Web site to provide services to both full-screen and handheld device users.

Feedback Requested

Pointers to the solutions the groups came up with and their design documents are all posted at the Center for the Handheld Web. The students would love to find out how others react to their solutions to the problems, and so would I. All of the sites have been tested on full-screen browsers as well as on handheld emulators, and many of the sites have also been tested on actual handheld devices. Most of the sites use one document tree to serve both handheld and full-screen devices, although some did take the separate-trees approach. A few sites use server-side templates via SSI or use PHP.

What do you Like? What should I use?

We would like to get feedback on two things:

1. which designs & implementations do you like the best, and why?
2. which design & implementation do you think I should actually use for the real site?

Comments & constructive criticism are very useful. The students (remember please, they are just undergraduates) can get more ideas about their design efforts by getting more feedback from more people, and frankly the whole area of building integrated sites is new enough that I think those of us doing the work professionally can gain by looking at and thinking about the solution approaches the groups chose.

Thanks in advance for the comments.

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Comment Received on Center for the Handheld Web

I got the following comment, and my reply was too long for LiveJournal to take as a comment. Here is the original comment and my reply:

Center for the Handheld Web

(Anonymous)
2006-11-09 05:25 pm (local)
(from 12.105.152.42)

Hi. I am a reformed technologist who received a forward of your email about the proliferation of Web 2.0 technologies across the mobile Web. I wanted to share my thoughts as this is an area of interest to me personally.

First, I’d like to comment on your assertion that Javascript will obtain popularity across mobile browsers. Javascript is a TERRIBLE technology as evidenced by the lack of standardization, propensity to be used for hacking, ability to be turned off inside a browser, and extreme difficultly to write effective, concise code.

What is really sad to me is AJAX and Web 2.0 related technologies. This is what happens when you put technologists in charge of technology! Technologists are very much interested in the power of their technology and how their technology is better than previous technologies. The running theme here is “technology.” But technology is not dictated by the technologists, it is dictated by the consumer,and if the consumer does not spend their dollars on it, then it is not a good technology. I am a strong supporter of Pip Coburn’s Change Function and a staunch naysayer of the Grove/Moore disruption/price theory. To return this sentiment to the mobile web, AJAX is an extension or a horrid technology. I have a chef friend who once said “if your sauce tastes bad, don’t reduce it (simmer the liquid to concentrate the flavor) because you’ll end up with a sauce that tastes a lot more like… bad.”

So that’s what I don’t like… what DO I like? Well, I like Flash a lot. It’s OO, very simple to write, much richer, provides better usability, and natively and quite easily can communicate with a server in the background. Unfortunately for the US, Flash Lite is only experiencing strong adaptation in Asia at the moment. Here in the states, Java (J2ME) rules the mobile world. Java is similar in nature to Flash of course, but much more difficult to write. But I do like Java as a mobile delivery platform.

The second biggest problem for the mobile web is that every carrier runs a different OS with different capabilities, and that’s not going to change. The BIGGEST problem for the mobile web are the devices themselves. Only crazy technologists think that the current devices are going to obtain worldwide acceptance. Does the general public have SUCH A PROBLEM with their current technology (laptops, wireless internet, mobile phones) that they’re absolutely dying to switch to their mobile devices for their Web content delivery? No, I don’t think so. And I think we’re pretty far away from a mobile device that is actually easy to navigate, not to mention the fact that the screen real estate is a major issue.

So to sum up, I think that working on a solution for the mobile web is a bit like trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. The ultimate for me would be open-source mobile OS like Linux, and/or I think the Firefox brand could proliferate themselves on the mobile web. The bottom line is that it is foolish to attempt to translate a desktop experience to a mobile device. And we could officially kill anybody’s interest in the mobile web if we start using Javascript and AJAX… the first day that people start getting viruses and spam as frequently as they do on Windows (God bless Unix), the public will lose trust.

So what’s the solution? PROMOTE AJAX AND JAVASCRIPT, THEN START A COMPANY THAT BECOMES THE MCAFFEE OF THE MOBILE WEB. Have a scotch and call it a day.

Thanks,
David
hipsurgery@gmail.com

My Reply:

David:

Thanks for the comments. Here are a few thoughts in return...

comment on your assertion that Javascript will obtain popularity across mobile browsers. Javascript is a TERRIBLE technology as evidenced by the lack of standardization, propensity to be used for hacking, ability to be turned off inside a browser, and extreme difficultly to write effective, concise code.

Interesting comment. As a part of our Web design & implementation sequence, we teach JavaScript/ECMAScript to our students, even the non-programmer "New Media" folks. We teach them to write JavaScript/ECMAScript that works cross-platform and cross-browser. Our experience is that the language designers mostly succeeded in their efforts to create a scripting language simple enough that non-programmers can learn to write usable code very rapidly.

Tell us more about your assertions that JavaScript/ECMAScript is being "used for hacking" please, as I am not sure to what you are referring.

As to turning things off in the browser, well anything but the HTML can be turned off by the user. How is that particular to JavaScript/ECMAScript?

Don't get me wrong, I was simply speaking to the spread of existing Web browsing technologies to handheld devices. By having the trio of HTML and JavaScript/ECMAScript and CSS present in the handheld browser (even in a sub-set form), we allow existing Web content authors to "build on prior knowledge". They can rapidly learn to create content either aimed specifically at the handheld Web or that adapts itself to the display device. That educational concept of "building on prior knowledge" is a powerful one in the real classroom with real students.

You also assert that:

AJAX is an extension or a horrid technology.

Please say some more about that.

What makes "AJAX" useful to real Web site developers is that it allows non-blocking asynchronous I/O to happen, and the updating/changing of just a particular spot/area on the display device. This allows rich applications to happen with reasonable responsiveness. What would you sugggest people use instead?

That question is not about what you would like to have available to content. Rather, the question is about what actual existing and ubiquitous technology you would use instead for controller code that allows non-blocking async I/O?? That is a critical need for responsive connected applications.

In addition, you say:

what DO I like? Well, I like Flash a lot.

Flash is indeed a fun technology. It is quite problematical as a tech upon which to base site interactivity, however. It is proprietary and closed-source technology, for one thing. Thirty years of hacking for a living taught me the lesson that proprietary and closed-source technology almost always ends up being a problem in the end. In addition, the experiences of real-world site maintenance support the contention that it takes much more technical expertise to support an ongoing and changing Flash-based site than one using HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Many designers produce Flash-based sites simply because that is the technology they know ("if all you have is a hammer, then everything ends up looking like a nail"). Many companies report excess difficulties and costs in maintaining Flash-based sites, simply because they end up having to pay outsider experts to do simple content maintenance they (rightfully) think their own staff should be able to learn to accomplish. My daughter's company is now in the process of a site redesign with a new design house, simply because they got tired of having to get a design house to do simple content changes. Theirs was a Flash-based site, but shall be no more.

More to the point, the move to conform "ActionScript" (the scripting language used to create interactivity and dynamic elements in Flash apps) to be close to standard JavaScript/ECMAScript would seem to support my assertions above. "ActionScript" and JavaScript/ECMAScript are now (deliberately) so close to each other that we are able to use Flash in the first scripting-oriented course in our Web Design & Implementation sequence (basic HTML and CSS and graphics, and simple rollovers first, then Flash and ActionScript to introduce more interesting interactivity and dynamicism). It turns out to be far far easier to get their brains engaged in learning scripting initially this way, because they are starting out with building vector-based animations containing dynamic elements and user interactivity. That sort of animation is fun for the kids to build and thus more engaging to the average student.

The next course in the sequence takes them deeper into HTML and CSS, and introduces JavaScript/ECMAScript to drive dynamic elements and interactivity in a browser context. Our experience has been that these technologies ("ActionScript" and JavaScript/ECMAScript) are so close together now that students have absolutely no problem shifting from using one to using the other. They are both really about the same things: driving dynamic elements and interactivity with the user.

You also assert:

Java is similar in nature to Flash of course

As someone who made a living in industry writing a lot of code in Java and who has taught the language quite a bit, that assertion leaves me rather confused about what exactly you mean. Flash is a vector-based "method for adding animation and interactivity to web pages" [see wikipedia for a nice overview]. As they say at the wikipedia article: More recent versions include ActionScript, a scripting language which has syntax similar to JavaScript and so supporting JSON syntax (a variation on ECMA)

You also say

The second biggest problem for the mobile web is that every carrier runs a different OS with different capabilities

That, of course, is the whole point of using a scripting language within a browser context. And so pretty much all but the lowest-cost handheld devices now seem to either ship with a browser or allow installation of a browser (often Java-based for portability).

The browser with scripting and HTML and CSS is a platform-neutral tool to support user interactivity with Websites. That on a mobile device seems to me to present the potential for a powerful extension of the Web into people's everyday lives.

You then go on to say:

we could officially kill anybody’s interest in the mobile web if we start using Javascript and AJAX… the first day that people start getting viruses and spam as frequently as they do on Windows (God bless Unix), the public will lose trust.

What exactly does "getting viruses and spam as frequently as they do on Windows" have to do with JavaScript and AJAX?? One of the points of using browser-based things like JavaScript and async I/O via AJAX is to avoid the OS-specific problems endemic on Windows, and JavaScript is a tool to avoid problems like this.

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Test

This is a test document, created at the Google "Docs & Spreadsheets" site. We shall see what we shall see.

Collaboration

I also want to try out the collaboration capabilities of this site. Web-based collaborative documents are an interesting idea.

Blogging

Okay, I am supposed to be able to post this to my blog on LiveJournal as well. Let us see if that works too.

jeffs

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The Same Gut Issue

In today's NYTimes OpEd section, columnist Thomas Friedman writes that James Carville has discovered energy independence is the number one issue for Americans. What a concept. Carville was the Democrat Party strategist who coined the phrase "it's the economy, stupid". Friedman and Carville (at least in the quotes in that column) both seem to fail at making the connection between dependence on foreign oil and the economy. I would bet a lot that the American people can make that connection.

It seems likely the Democrats will control at least one house of Congress after this next election, unless Bin Laden magically appears in US custody. The problem for them then is, "What comes next?" So long as the war in Iraq continues to (literally) bleed the population and the economy, the economy is not going to get much better. The short-term question for the Democrats is: how do we get out of Iraq? The longer-term question for the Democrats is: How do we stop continual wars over control of energy?

The PRC Thinks Long-Term

Earlier this year, a very-high-level delegation of government officials from the People's Republic of China toured five nations, then visited the US. In each of the five nations visited, the PRC delegation signed some agreement concerning access to energy resources of that country. Last of all, they visited Bill Gates and finally President Bush in the US.

US Visit Inconsequential

The important part of the PRC government road trip this year was access to energy. To fuel their current era of rapid industrialization, the PRC needs access to cheap energy. Like the US during the late 1800's and early 1900's, the PRC need cheap energy to drive their economic boom. No cheap energy, and the boom goes bust pretty rapidly. The resulting unrest in China would be threatening to public order, and not just in China.

The PRC is likely to make alliances with some pretty unsavory regimes over the near-term. The PRC is trying to secure energy for future development, and one source is the world outside the PRC. They may find the twin tigers of dependence on extra-national energy and on the regimes controlling that energy to be a tough one to ride.

"Beware of foreign entanglements…" Who was it again who said that? Oh yeah, that was George.

jeffs

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