I just stumbled across the SIMILE project form the famous MIT and, as the screen cast above proves, they have some hot stuff to play with both online for your website and software extensions for FireFox and Thunderbird. This is almost enough to switch back to Thunderbird from the tired old, doggy Mail (Mac)!
Monthly Archive for June, 2008
I was looking at the PHP5 (no this is not about PHP) Reflection API and came across a post talking about the “Dynamic Proxy” design pattern. As I didn’t know what it was about I did a quick search and found that the design pattern had a US Patent on it! I was disgusted and appalled that design patterns could be patented. This is like putting a patent on a certain English sentence grammar.
Obviously the guys at the US Patent office don’t understand what they are allowing to happen. Imagine if 90% of all programming was patented, which can be done fairly easily, it would completely retard innovation and an sort of progress. Fortunately is this impossible to enforce in closed source code software but Open Source [OS] is another story. This could be the biggest legal threat to OS so far. Large companies who have the budget, could have teams that sift thought their OS competition looking for patent infringements and shutting them down. An ugly thought which would gain them only hatred from the developer community. Lets hope that’s enough of a disincentive…
Pictured (from left): Tobias aka klipstein (München), Norman aka matsuri (Berlin), Victoria & Nikolai aka nonken (Amsterdam) and Wolfram aka mccain (München) [note: aka’s are IRC names
Yesterday I meet some Dojo developers in Berlin for the dojo.beer() which was announced on the Dojo website last week. It was a sunny day and we hit one of Berlins many beaches next to the Spree.
Dojo is a Javascript API that I have a love-hate relationship with and have been following for 3-4 years now. It was nice to finally meet other Dojo developers and have someone to discuss the joys and woes of the prolific Javascript API, the best out there in my opinion.
It was perhaps too hot and the beer() was too easy to drink as we didn’t manage to get much decided but the idea for a community maintained Wiki documenting Dojo was thought to be a good idea. These guys setup the Dojo Campus site and so this Wiki will probably end up there.
I hope this see the drive for more European activity form the Dojo community in the future!