POSTS FROM June 2005

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.