The Idea Basket

Archive for December, 2005

Back from the Holidays

Wednesday, December 28th, 2005

Hi folks! After a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Birthday (yes, I just celebrated my 23rd birthday on Dec 27th), I’m looking forward to a tremendously exciting 2006. With Intel Macs on the horizon, the continuing explosion of Web 2.0 apps, chocolate, and the release of xajax 0.2 stable (hopefully tomorrow), there are […]

Two Ajax philosophies & xajax

Wednesday, December 21st, 2005

There are many different architectural ways of approaching the client/server paradigm as it applies to Ajax. Mostly you can pare these differences down to two major camps:
A. Rich client/data server
B. Thin client/app server
What, you say? A rich client isn’t an HTML browser? Well, let me remind you that many of the bigger, badder Web apps […]

The end of Wintel? Think different.

Monday, December 19th, 2005

As much as I’m a gigantic Apple fan and own several Macs (happily switched from the PC in 2001), I have to say all these grandiose predictions of a formidable “Mactel” conglomerate seem pretty far-fetched. Windows will continue to be a dominant OS and Intel will continue to sell a bucket-load of processors through Dell, […]

xajax 0.2 release imminent

Friday, December 16th, 2005

I’m happy to report that xajax 0.2 will be released early next week in stable form and will coincide with the launch of a new domain and wiki. I will have much more to blog about next week regarding xajax, but for now, I just want to say that I’m feeling very good about the […]

I want my del.icio.us!

Wednesday, December 14th, 2005

Update on Dec 16: so it seems that del.icio.us is back up and running and all my bookmarks are intact. Yay! Needless to say, reliability and proper access to data are going to be the main concerns surrounding the Web 2.0 app space going forward, but to keep things in perspective, when you personally have […]

OOP != Clean

Wednesday, December 14th, 2005

I’ve seen plenty of OO code that is so convoluted, bizarre, and nonsensical that it boggles the mind. And I’ve seen procedural code that is clean, elegant, and does just what it needs to do.
Example: I wanted to fix a couple of issues with the presentation of my new (and growing) Blogroll, and it required […]

blummy (blimey! bookmarklets done right!)

Tuesday, December 13th, 2005

So I just found out about blummy, and my first thought was “what’s a blummy?” My second thought was that it sounded like blimey.
But blummy is actually very cool. It allows you to click just one button on your bookmarks toolbar and see all of the bookmarklets you like to use appear in […]

Category changes

Tuesday, December 13th, 2005

I renamed Nitty-Gritty Code to Nitty-Gritty Tech (because not all nitty-gritty computer geek things are about code only), and I added a new category called Cool Web Things — which I’ll fill with posts about, well, cool things on the Web. What’s next for the Idea Basket? Tagging. And one of those nifty-looking tag clouds!

Atom Publishing: the Next Big Thing?

Monday, December 12th, 2005

Read this and this, and then come back and tell me this isn’t the next big thing. I think it is. I wasn’t even aware there was a publishing protocol in the works based on Atom until today when a friend forwarded an article that was on eWeek a couple of months ago. After reading […]

Looking towards next year

Sunday, December 11th, 2005

Reading this post at Signal vs. Noise kind of ties into my personal development over the past year. I went into 2005 thinking that it’d be the year I stopped planning and inventing in my head and started producing and releasing — on a number of levels, not just computer software or Web site projects. […]