Mon, Jul 02, 2007
purple-include: Granular Transclusions for the Common Man #
Many thanks to JonathanCheyer, CraigLatta, and KaliyaHamlin for coming to the HyperScope sprint this past weekend, and special thanks to ChristinaEngelbart for hosting. Also thanks to ThomCherryhomes and others who hung out with us on IRC. The notes from the day are up on the Wiki, and I put up some pictures as well. (MEL)
The big news, though, is that Brad, Jonathan, and I wrote a cool hack called purple-include, based on MarkNottingham's most excellent hinclude. It lets you transclude granular chunks of content from any web site by using an img-like tag. Check out the examples. I think this will go a long way in making TransClusions more common on the Web. (MEN)
You address granular content either by using a fragment identifier that the document author provides (such as a PurpleNumber) or by using an XPath expression. Thanks to TonyChang for his cool interactive XPath tester. (MEO)
The planned next step is to create a Firefox plugin that adds a "Transclude" option when you right click inside of a browser text widget. This will allow you to transclude copied content, rather than paste it. Don't know whether any of us will get to this soon, so we encourage the lazy web and all you Firefox hackers to beat us to the punch. (MEP)
This was my first non-trivial foray into JavaScript, and I was disturbed by what I saw. The language itself is not horrible, although its object system makes Perl 5 look like SmallTalk. What's shameful is its API support. We had to use a very ugly, although apparently common hack to get a DOM of external web pages. This is pure silliness. The browser is already doing the hard work of parsing broken HTML and XML and turning it into a DOM. Why not easily expose that functionality to the developer? (MEQ)
As Brad dryly noted, "Welcome to my world." (MER)
/tech/purple | Posted at 11:36pm
Sun, Jul 01, 2007
Brad Neuberg on Inventing with Values #
A few months ago, my friend, BradNeuberg, gave the keynote at Yahoo's internal Front-End Engineering Summit. The video is now online, and it's worth watching. Brad's not only a great guy and a great hacker, he's an excellent speaker. He speaks from the heart with intensity and good humor. (ME6)
I want to highlight four things Brad said: (ME7)
- A good way to approach invention is, "I Against I." (The name comes from a classic punk song from the mid-80s.) Don't worry about what others will do. Instead of trying to protect your ideas by putting up walls, compete against yourself. If you're going to be put to pasture by somebody, it might as well be by you. And as Brad points out, no ideas are safe. In this day and age, you will be put to pasture. (ME8)
- Brad's section on values was tremendous. He cited two techniques for clarifying values. The first was "Mob Rule." If you were the only thing between an angry mob and some other thing, what thing would cause you to stand your ground? This reminds me of something AlanDershowitz said in the best class I ever took in college. Dershowitz said that he was willing to die for freedom of speech. I was astounded by that statement, and it made me think about the values that I was willing to die for. (ME9)
- The second technique was, "The Last Speech." Imagine you were about to leave your company and that you were asked to deliver a final speech. What would you say? This actually happened. A decade ago, JamesGosling was fed up with Sun and decided to leave. ScottMcNealy asked Gosling to write a letter before he left, explaining what he would do differently if he were in charge. Gosling outlined a vision which ultimately led to him staying at Sun and creating Java. (MEA)
- Brad ended his section on values with a story about ArchieRand, the famous expressionist painter who was one of Brad's professors at Columbia. Rand used to walk around the room as his students worked, look at them with his eyes blazing, and say, "This shit matters." (MEB)
Each of these things are worth thinking about and trying. (MEC)
/tech | Posted at 10:42pm
Mon, Jun 18, 2007
HyperScope Sprint, June 30 in Sebastopol #
Last month, we held a HyperScope sprint at JonathanCheyer's house in SanJose. (MCC)
It was so productive and fun, we've planned another one at the end of this month, Saturday, June 30, from 10am until we drop. This time, we'll be meeting at ChristinaEngelbart's house in beautiful Sebastopol. (MCE)
Please join us! This will be an excellent opportunity to learn more about the HyperScope and to hang out with some very interesting and cool people. RSVP at Upcoming or contact me if you'd like to attend, and I'll forward more details. (MCF)
/tech/hyperscope | Posted at 1:07am
Mon, May 28, 2007
WikiClock: The Next Killer Wiki App #
Got back from Montreal and RoCoCo 2007 last Friday with a pile of notes and a case of the flu, which pretty much killed my productivity this weekend. Fortunately, spring conference season for me is over, and I'm boycotting all summer conferences with the possible exception of WikiMania in Taipei this August, which means I've got plenty of time to digest and regurgitate. As usual, it'll come in bits and pieces, starting with this post. (MAV)
RoCoCo pretty much kicked butt. Much props go to EvanProdromou, AnneGoldenberg, AntoineBeaupre, and the entire Montreal Wiki community for pulling off such a great event. Lots of participants traveled to attend, including several Europeans, which made the experience much richer. This included representatives from every PHP-based Wiki (TimStarling of MediaWiki, AndreasGohr of DokuWiki, ReiniUrban of PhpWiki, PatrickMichaud of PmWiki, and MarcLaporte of TikiWiki), which was awesome. I was happy to see old friends from afar and from not-so-far, and I met several great new folks. WikiOhana is a wonderful thing. (MAW)
The best session was Evan's, "Wiki And...," which he nefariously scheduled at the same time as my Wiki Interoperability session so I couldn't attend. That didn't prevent me from learning about his incredibly brilliant idea: WikiClock, made possible by GordonMcCreight's most excellent service, pageoftext.com. (MAX)
What is WikiClock? It's a clock on a Wiki that tells you the current time in GMT. How does it know the current time? Someone edits the time. Who edits it? Whoever feels so motivated. (MAY)
WikiClock is a great example of a totally ludicrous application of a Wiki. The point of Evan's session is that Wiki-enthusiasm can lead to overly narrow thinking. Wikis are great, but they're not the end-all-and-be-all of collaborative tools. There are a whole slew of good tools out there. Use the right one for the right job. (MAZ)
The story doesn't end there, however. What makes WikiClock all the more ridiculous is that people are actually using it. You heard me right. The buzz from Evan's session started propagating pretty quickly. If you check WikiClock right now, chances are the time is correct. And if it's not, well, correct it! (MB0)
WikiClock is that rare breed of joke, where you laugh, then you stop and think, "You know, it's really not that bad of an idea." Next thing you know, it's no longer a joke. I know of only one other joke like it: Parrot, the virtual machine for dynamic languages that started off as an April Fool's joke. (MB1)
/tech/wiki | Posted at 11:22pm
Thu, May 10, 2007
HyperScope Sprint this Saturday in San Jose #
BradNeuberg, JonathanCheyer, and I will be meeting at Jonathan's place in SanJose this coming Saturday, May 12, at 10am for an ad hoc HyperScope sprint. Please join us! This will be an outstanding opportunity to meet the team, learn about HyperScope, and help us move the project forward. If you'd like to participate either face-to-face or remotely, please drop me a line or RSVP on Upcoming.org. Hope to see you there! (M8T)
/tech/hyperscope | Posted at 1:41pm
Tue, Apr 03, 2007
Spreadsheets 2.0 and Transclusions #
A few weeks ago, I had dinner with my old HyperScope buddies, BradNeuberg and JonathanCheyer. We talked a bit about this Office 2.0 madness, and how a lot of these Web-based applications were disappointly uninteresting. Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of really nifty hacking going on behind the scenes to make this all work. But in the end, all you have is a Web-based office application. Most of these applications do little to take advantage of the network paradigm. (M2P)
A simple and extremely cool way for Web-based spreadsheets to exploit the medium would be to support TransClusions across multiple web sites. As I've observed before, spreadsheets were the first applications to popularize the notion of a TransClusion, even though they didn't call them that. When I type =E27 in a cell, it displays the content of cell E27. This, in a nutshell, is a TransClusion, and oh, is it useful. (M2Q)
With Web-based spreadsheets, if you made cell addresses universally resolvable, you could easily support TransClusions across web sites. In other words, I could transclude the content of cell =E27 from a spreadsheet hosted on my web site into a cell on a spreadsheet hosted on another web site. (M2R)
Why would this be useful? Well, why is it useful to link to other web sites? Today's Web-based spreadsheets are no more collaborative than desktop spreadsheets. In theory, they're more convenient than emailing spreadsheets back-and-forth, but they're no different in capability. Cross-spreadsheet TransClusions would break down silos and encourage collaboration. (M2S)
I would start with spreadsheet-to-spreadsheet TransClusions with an eye toward supporting TransClusion of non-spreadsheet content using PurpleNumbers or something similar. The main technical barrier is coming up with the right addressability scheme. Seems to me that the SimplestThingThatWorks would be to use fragment identifiers (which is what we did for the HyperScope). In other words, cell =E27 on a spreadsheet at http://foo/bar would have the address: (M2T)
http://foo/bar#E27 (M2U)
Eventually, you'd want persistent, non-URL-based identifiers, but first things first. (M2V)
/tech/purple | Posted at 1:40am
