Cafe Bucky

I am at the Emerging Tech Conference in Santa Clara, CA. Santa Clara… reminds me of Los Angeles (where I grew up). I’m 100 feet from a Palm Tree, which triggers all sorts of Santa Monica/Dogtown/Beach memories.

But this entry isn’t about Palm Trees and the waft of suntan oil and surfboard wax… I’m here to learn as much as I can, and to look forward. Oh, and I am determined to have fun! (and to figure out how many cans of Guinness I can jam into my minibar)

As Tim O’Reilly put it this morning, this conference is not
as focused as many others. I’m going to sessions in the
next few days that deal with Nanotech, Lazyweb. WebDAV, Collaborative
Mapping, XML & Web services security, and well, you get the idea.
It’s a bit all over the place. The sessions aren’t going
to be real hardcore tutorials, but they should be good snippets.

One session in particular, LazyWeb as Competitive Sport should be pretty interesting and entertaining. as it’s a sort of open forum for web/internet “what if?” ideas. I am wondering if I should mention ThereThen addresses Seems like
a friendly crowd here. I haven’t seen anyone carrying around
throwing tomatoes, so that’s good - I won’t get physically hurt,
and I can certainly handle flames (all those years of Usenet…
whatcha lookin at, punk?!) Hmm, maybe a couple of folks will actually like it.

Michael Schumacher won the San Marino GP today at Imola, just hours
after his mother passed away. He and his brother, Ralf (4th), were
surely href="http://www.speedtv.com/articles/auto/formulaone/5946/">put to
it by the mix of emotions.

It’s a tribute to Michael that he was able to hold it together
at such a difficult time. Can you imagine? Imola is often emotional
(Ayrton Senna died there in 1994). For Ferrari to get their first
victory of the season (and for Rubens to pick up a 3rd place), under
such circumstances, adds another chapter to that legacy. His
mother, who avidly encouraged the Schumacher brothers
throughout their karting years, would have been very proud.

Condolences to Schumi and Ralf.

So I have changed the look of JavaJoint a bit. I feel like CSS is something that you wrestle with. For any one browser, you can get things to look perfect. But, oh! We’ve got trouble right here in (Petaluma) River City! With a Capital C, that rhymes with P that stands for Positioning.

I am consciously avoiding things like the voice-family hack. That probably makes my attempts at layout consistency that much tougher. The chief problem I am having is with narrow windows. I really don’t want the right side (links, categories, and all the rest) dropping below the blog content. I think I have things to the point where they look ok in MSIE/Netscape on my 800×600 laptop (which was a test case where I wanted to be sure the site was useable), as long as the user opens up a wide window.

Being a former QA person, I had to go and check things on Mac Safari, MSIE, and Camino. I also checked it out on Linux with Phoenix and Konquerer. Whew, it’s useable. I can stop fretting for now :-)

Yes, I did rip out the calendar - for now. I didn’t like its “I’m so wide, I’m going to mess up this div!”
behavior. Hey, I think that makes the main page table-free … We’ll see how long that lasts.

Of course, as I said back in my first post, “Start Simply”, I believe in iteration, which means the site will keep changing.

I’ve been around noisy machines for the last 20 years. It can’t be great
for one’s hearing…

A few tech innovations I want by 2010:

• no more noisy disk drives - I can even the hear the one in my TiVo. 10 quiet terabytes please.
• no more fans
• No matter how fast computers get, they still seem to take
  a minute to boot up. I want my computer to come up as fast
  as my Palm Pilot. Yes, I know it has to do a lot more. It’s
  almost as if we need quad 10 ghz processors which are
  only used to initialize the machine :-)

I’m nostalgic today, thinking of the days when Usenet was one of two
major means for having an ongoing discussion on some given topic (the
other one would be email lists) It seems to me that good information
is now spread all over the place. If you want to research something
like CSS, you might check a few web sites for articles, check a few
online forums, possibly join an email list, and search through
deja.com for news postings.

Whew! It used to be a lot simpler :-)

This is my picture of things, at least for this morning:

• Usenet - communities organized around a shared interest
• Email - snapshot communities of two or more, often based on an event
• Email Lists - ongoing communities organized around a collection of
  email addresses, sharing a common, often very specific interest
• Bulletin Boards / Forums - communities organized around a web site,
  distinct from communities about the same subject on some other web
  site (but may have many of the same members)
• Blogs - loose communities organized around finding links by searching,
  the serendipity of following links from a site you trust. “word of link”

The thing that hits me is this: there are more places than ever to
search to find good info. Usenet had, and still has, the uncanny
ability to provide for focused discussions based on geography and/or
interests. I would love to see some sort of intersection of blogs and
Usenet, where blog postings seamlessly call into newsgroup
postings/threads, and vice versa.

I wish someone would tell me that it’s already been done. I’m
thinking it hasn’t happened. I am almost at the point where I could
draw a storyboard for how virtual newsgroups, keyword searching,
blogrolls, archived blog entries, and so on, would all fit together.

p.s. yes, I bet there are some Ivory Tower projects along these lines.
Where are the storyboards? Where are the mockups?

In the mid-80’s, I started using Usenet news. In 1993,
I wrote an idea about Virtual Newsgroups. I just mentioned
this as a comment in my Topics, Categories, Keywords, and Konfusion post. I thought I’d mention it again
in a from-scratch posting, as it shows a little history - I’ve been musing about how to search things for a while :-)

The “Something New” part is: I just implemented a way to
search this site via the use of mod_rewrite, a subdomain, and a short
script. Keywords in the URL are
transformed into a call to the Moveable Type search script.

Example: http://keys.javajoint.com/topic/rss gets transformed into:
http://javajoint.com/mt-bin/mt-search.cgi?search=topic+rss

The benefit is that it becomes easy to bookmark, link to, or type
in a search URL. I will post more details soon. There are
a number of ways it can be applied. It will also fit in
with what I’ve been thinking about ThereThen addresses

From CNN.com… Bush: Iraqis now free from ‘grip of fear’

Actually, it should read: “Bush: Free Iraqis now fear ‘rip of gear’”

I am itching to work somewhere other than the SF Bay Area over the
next year or two. I have a current resume, my own coffee cup,
great experience, and a smidgen of enthusiasm. Okay, a lot
of enthusiasm. I never say “Yeah, ship it already. Whatever.”

So, where Daniel? Some of my favorite cities I could see working
in are: New York City,
Seattle, London, Vancouver B.C., Sydney, and Melbourne.

A few impressions…

New York I love New York. I know it’s a cliche, but it’s true. It’s not just Woody Allen, Spike Lee, and Martin Scorsese. It’s not just the people at NYCBloggers.com. It’s hard work. It’s cold winters and humid summers. It’s rappers doing tumbling runs on the sidewalk outside the W Hotel on Lexington, It’s the subways, the commuter trains, the hotdog carts, newyork.craigslist.org, multiple plastic surgery residents of the UES, Jamaicans selling watches in Battery Park. It’s the blur outside the Taxi. It’s being on time, and doing what you say you’ll do. No easy friends, but once made, they aren’t Teflon. It’s a theme bar, a Town Car, Bridge & Tunnel, Metro Funnel. It’s Hell’s Kitchen, not Clinton. It’s also getting away, skip the suburbs, get to the country. So Hip they’re Broke. Do Something? Do it right. Put the token in the scrapbook, and charge up my MetroCard. Pedestrians wait for the light on their day off.

Seattle

Seattle Emerald City. Tunnel jam honk I5 exit. The 5 Spot for
breakfast on Queen Anne Hill. A Green Lake cafe on a rainy day.
Political Activism hotbed. People that read. Fremont Troll. We
defined the Craftsman House, and by golly, we’re going to build 10,000
of them. Only Tourists go to Starbucks here. Sun out, Kayak out.
Useless Monorail. Not enough bridges to the Eastside, but on the other
hand, some say “why bother going there?” Pike’s Market flying fish, on the plate
at The Pink Door for dinner.

Sydney

Sydney. San Francisco with an Overdose. Bridgeclimb first, pub
later. Friendly everyone. Urban Oz. I’ll have coffee, Long Black,
and you’re having Flat White? No Worries. Bats in the park. In the
air, the monorail that goes nowhere, underground, the stores go on for
blocks. Sudden rain soon over. JetCat Ferry to Manly Beach. No Vegemite for me,
thanks. Relax.