POSTS FROM 2005

I ordered a couple prints from Flickr's new print service to check out the quality. Here are my comments:

• Wait time: 8 days via USPS: 11/28 - submitted order; 11/30 - order shipped; 12/7 - order received; The package was delivered from Norcross, GA, so I'm assuming that the west coast has the longest wait.
• Package contents: index print, photos, Flickr sticker, "Inspected by #179" note.
• Print quality: The glossy 4x6 prints I ordered were printed on Fujifilm Fujicolor Crystal Archive paper, most likey by a Frontier laser system. The photo quality is what you'd expect from this standard pairing, and works great for snsapshot prints. No Ofoto-style color tweaking going on here.
• Metadata: Neither the index print or the text on the back of the photos show the title that you enter into Flickr, or the EXIF capture date. Only the date of development is printed, along with "Yahoo!_Flickr" on the back — not too helpful.

Overall, a well executed service that has been long awaited on Flickr. I'll probably try a matte print, and larger sizes soon.

This year I spent Thanksgiving not sitting at home in front of a heaping pile of white and dark meat, but rather in the middle of the desert — Death Valley to be exact. Although the valley is the hottest place in the world, it was a fantastic 75 degrees the whole time. See the pictures

I couldn't get my employer to spring for the Web 2.0 conference in town, but all is not lost: the Web 1.0 summit is also convening over at the House of Shields. Oh, yeah...increasing eyeballs and pushing site stickiness through out-of-the-box paradigm shifts? Fuckin' best summit ever! I'll arrive in style in a Webvan delivery truck and a sock puppet as my date.

Google's recent release of AJAXSLT is a good first step towards unifying XSLT services in the browser. Currently, IE uses a rental-model XSLT processor, which is inconvenient for stateful Javascript applications like direc.tor because you have to instantiate a new object every time you make any change to the XSL stylesheet. Hopefully the browser vendors will converge towards a common interface, like they did with XmlHTTP, in the future.

Even though the AJAXSLT library supports Safari and Opera, it's still not ready for prime time, mostly because of performance reasons. In IE and Firefox, the AJAXSLT library is really just a pass-though for the compiled XSL services. However, in Safari and Opera the XSL transformations are done in interpreted Javascript, making it much slower than IE and Firefox. Many people have asked me if I could use this library to make direc.tor work with Safari. The answer is yes, but for anyone with more than a couple hundred bookmarks, the poor performance would become unbearable very quickly.

Cut to one week later: del.icio.us direc.tor is a huge hit! Here's what people are saying:

• del.icio.us on crack
  —Lifehacker
• ...yet another stunning remix
  —Jon Udell
• ...elegant alternate interface to your del.icio.us tags and bookmarks
  —Jesse James Garrett
• gorgeously designed Ajax-style browser for Del.icio.us
  —waxy.org
• Oh my god. del.icio.us direc.tor is my new best friend.
  —Mulling It Over
• Run. Don’t walk to try this out.
  —Lisa McMillan
• A lovely lovely shiny thing buried under quite a lot of brain-slide-offable verbiage
  —plasticbag.org
• ...this application will make you weep. Seriously.
  —Gadgetopia

The projects at my new company, Splunk, are going so well that we need to hire another web guru, ASAP. If you are an expert PHP and MySQL coder, well-versed in OOP, have substantial experience building community sites, and are available for a 2 month contract in San Francisco, let me know. We're also looking for QA and support engineers, among others.

We are a small startup, working on an IT solution that helps administrators find out what is going on in their data centers. Some call it a "Google for machine data", others call it a "super-grep". Whatever you call it, it's damn cool.

And we're in the same building as Al Gore's TV station, Current TV. Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod.

I have always been intrigued by the idea of using a client-side application to act as a service broker, integrating various services like Google Maps, Flickr, and del.icio.us. Unfortunately, after doing the research, I found that the security blocks in the browser prevent normal untrusted code to poll sites that are not from the same server, so that grand service idea couldn't be a reality. What I was able to do, though, was provide a service for a single website: del.icio.us.

Part research, part appreciation for del.icio.us, del.icio.us direc.tor is a prototype for an alternative web-based rich UI for del.icio.us. It leverages the XML and XSL services of modern browsers to deliver a responsive interface for managing user accounts with a large number of records. Try it out, and let me know what you think.

Dear Jesse James Garrett: while we are grateful for your endorsement (and I for your inbound links) — which gave this technology a marketable term and created a near cataclysmic tipping point — could you have picked a more neutral, irritating, or patent-infringing acronym? Ajax is a staple household cleaner, a pillar of domestic maintenance, not a programming methodology. Now, CORBA is a stunning, authoritative acronym that connotes technology with some serious cojones (and lets ignore the fact that many consider it a stunning failure). My favorite, though, is NORML: a beautifully ironic acronym that rivals the genius of Velcro by forcing the anti-dope crowd refer to the people they hate as "normal." Sublime.

I comment about this because the Gmail ads are now spamming my programming emails with the following ad:

Ajax/Javascript @ A9.com - join.a9.com - Ajax and Javascript software gurus! Help us build our next big thing.

The link leads to a boringly generic jobs page, but the consequences are potentially dire. When is the first "Ajax Developer" title going to appear on business cards? How long will it be before clueless tech managers attempt to appear knowledgeable by claiming that their products use bleeding-edge Comet technology?

I recently joined Splunk, a stealth startup in San Francisco, to develop web services. We are preparing a kick-ass product that helps IT crews troubleshoot problems in a much more intelligent manner (read: you can stop tail -fing your files now). Our debut is going to be at Linuxworld in a couple months, but it looks like Businessweek just got the jump on us.

Coding for Apple's Safari browser is like having to work with the CEO's son: it does a shitty job and touts useless features like snapback, but you have to deal with it because if you decide to criticize it, you'll really hear it from the frothing-at-the-mouth Apple digerati.

Pre-1.3 Safari was just a joke. I can only imagine that the Gmail engineers were cursing it for months while trying to make it play well with their engine. 1.3 brought a bunch of much needed bug fixes, but then managed to break the onload handler six ways from Sunday. The Acid2 test is a quaint merit badge to slap on Apple's sash, but have you actually looked at some of the test cases? Nobody actually codes tables 37 levels deep with deeply disturbing border settings, so it still doesn't address some basic needs. My big peeve right now is that XSLT is not available as a service to javascript — it's only callable as an initial XSL transform with the page load.

This brings me to a more general rant against the state of the OS X browser: Safari is impotent; Firefox is ass-slow; IE is more stale than spam. God-damnit.

While reading The Sideways Effect (Wine Spectator, April 2005), I was suprised to see that, in addition to increased business at places like Sanford Winery and Hitching Post II, room 234 at the Days Inn — the dingy motel room that Miles and Jack stayed in — is now consistently booked.

Hold on.

A room at the Days Inn is backlogged? I think this zealotry has gone just a little too far — nay, way too far, so far that salvation is no longer an option for these people. Maddox hit it dead on with his latest post.

So in celebration of this inanity (and good ol' free marketeering), I present you with the best Sideways money-making scheme yet: The Sideways Suburban Adventure Package.

In Jason's roundup of the Adobe-Macromedia acquisition, he alludes to Tim Bray's comment that Adobe may drop Flash, and proffers Ajax as an alternative for web developers — a bit of jumping the gun, if you ask me.

Last fall, Kevin Lynch, the Chief Architect of Macromedia, asked to meet with me regarding my work on the Gmail API, under the guise of hinting at potential employment opportunities in the Experience Design group *. Essentially, he and his associate, an ex-Microsoft guy they poached from the ASP.NET group, wanted to know how the Gmail Ajax system worked, and how it worked so quickly. We also covered their new Flex platform, their take on the Lazlo project (supportive, but would ultimately rather see all efforts focused on Flex), and uses of the XML socketing support that was introduced in Flash 5.

Most of the conversation is relevant to Jason's roundup, so here are my notes:

• Flash may not be as much a lame duck as Tim made it out to be. It was obvious that Macromedia was well aware of the flat revenue generated by Flash, and was introducing Flex as a means to bring in fresh business through the professional services arena.
• Macromedia was definitely concerned about the arrival of high-profile Ajax applications as a major equalizer to the XML-socketing support offered by Flash. Since most web applications do not require the "always-on" capabilities of sockets, Ajax quickly became a viable (and free) alternative to providing asynchronous client-side callbacks. Kevin specifically wanted to explore the possibility of hooking into the Ajax system with Flash, via Flex.
• Ajax, in its currently form, falls very short of being an adequate replacement for Flash. Font support, image sampling, vector graphics (try animating a simple line using CSS) — the list of exclusive Flash features goes on and on, such that Flash will remain the platform of choice for design-heavy interfaces until other technologies like SVG make their way into the mainstream.

* I think I got played by Macromedia here. During the meeting, Kevin offered to "hook me up" if I found any of the job openings to be interesting. He sent over an email with a couple jobs links, to which I replied with interest to one of them. No response. I sent 2 more emails over the next few weeks, but never heard from him again. Seems like they were just digging for some free information.

Update: Kevin emailed me in response to this post:

...am concerned that you think I may not have been forthright with you -- I was very open with you and connected you with openings that I thought might be a match, but apparently they weren't. I'm sorry if the team didn't reply to you, they should have done that.

I have finally reached a higer state of being, as defined by Google: my name has been accepted as a legitimate search term and is no longer considered a spelling mistake. Previously, when searching for johnvey, one would be presented with the following:

Did you mean: johnny

Well, not anymore! Totally sweet.