The name AJaX comes from one article written in January of 2005which was the first to use the acronym AJaX. In it is mentioned the technology (i..e the one function ‘XMLHttpRequest’) had been around for some time and is probably the only significant contribution that Microsoft has made to the internet’s development to date.
Continue reading ‘The significance of AJaX’
Archive for the 'rant' Category
Semantics in regard to HTML markup is a murky water. This is because web pages are usually not an essay style document, which HTML was designed to markup, and contain information that is not actually relevant to what the page is about. Examples would be: menus, shopping cart information, summaries of forum activity, and the other half of HTML design: user/human interfaces. To say or even think that HTML can encapsulate all the “meanings” that human language structures can come up with (which are actually infinite), not to mention the non-language structures found on web systems representing a computer system interface, is naive. It is also an assumption that has never been backed up by any standards body in argument and thats because its simply wrong. The Microformat standard and now POSH process seem to be unwittingly dealing with the problem without understanding it. This is actually an applied philosophy problem!
Suppose ‘consciousness’ could be defined as the ability of a ‘being that can learn’ to understand how its self learns. Thus it then has to ‘decide’, a rudimentary idea in our perception of ‘consciousness’.
I think this explains to a degree then our ‘personality’ which we use to direct our experiences in the world and thus our learning. We, in a manner, feed our learning what it likes best: pleasurable experiences.
If this is true, what does it say about the ‘Turing test’ and there for the way forward for AI research.
There have been 68712966 versions of the ‘Charles Darwin‘ entry on Wikipedia. You might think the Christians have a bit of a chink in their arguments armour. I mean, you don’t see the Buddhist suppressing information, even if they think its a lie.
So I’m in Berlin and things are going well. Have a large unfurnished room on the 1st of May with at least one über cool flatmate (the other to be found in the next few weeks) and a broken arm due to my experimenting with “bicycle catapulting”, a new sport I hope to put my name to. I have also made progress on the social front and have meet many super friendly, young Germans, all busy doing their thing and doing it well, as far as I can tell. Also, they have painted the TV tower at Alexander Platz like a giant pink ‘fussball’ (see photo, thanks to bollin @ Flickr).
Continue reading ‘Nationalism is so last century’
Declan had a funny rant about the latest of Microsoft’s attempts to win our web development hearts back and flamed a Microsoft Stooge in the process. But why do they need to win our hearts? You don’t see Apple playing this game and Mac people are almost on par with Mormons when it comes to ranting about their shiny toys.
The major complain I have against Microsoft is that they are followers. They want to control the market place but don’t know where to take it. Open Source and the Standards groups have been leading the way with web technology since Mozilla.org started up. Microsoft is still in beta with their IE7 that touts the ‘latest technologies’ (i.e. RSS, tabbed browsing, CSS1) that FireFox has had for a couple of years now, and even Safari, the product of a much smaller company, is already up to speed. Hell, even Opera is leaving IE behind in the browser game.
Continue reading ‘Never trust Microsoft again’
Gather round, gather round and hear the ‘The horrible tale my friend had with eBuyer’
Continue reading ‘The horrible tale of eBuyer’
I use Sage to manage the RSS feeds I like to track. I track my friends del.icio.us links RSS feed. When you add a URL to del.icio.us you get to leave a comment on it, like a note. This note comes up with the link in Sage. What I’d like to do is reply to this comment. Comments on del.icio.us bookmarks. Could be in interesting idea.
I heard about a technology that lets you leave notes on URLs for you friends. A Firefox extension could be developed to get all the comments that have been left for your current URL.
Also would be handy is if del.icio.us let you bookmark RSS feeds and then acted as an aggregator for you. I guess this would be pretty server intensive, like a universal cache for all the webs feeds worth bookmarking. People could then leave comments on all the articles coming though. It would be like a web on top of the web: MetaWeb!
I remember I had a long and ugly debate with Bernard and Sara one night over a couple of bottles of wine. I proposed that with the advent of cheap media devices, and internet community sharing sites, we would not have to rely on the commercial main stream media completely anymore for information on current events. As the media becomes more restricted by the powers that be independent amateur media might be the way forward for democracy.
Examples from the recident London bombing:
- The London Bomb Blast Pool
- Wikipedias ‘7 July 2005 London bombings‘ entry was up to the minute
- London Explosions @ Londonist
Update: Seems I’m not the only one thinking this way.
Drupal treats taxonomies like any other entity and so you can have as many as you like. You then associate them with module types and when someone creates an instance of a new module (Node) they are given the option to select which term(s) (i.e. category) they want to put the data in. Modules can have more than one taxonomy associated with it. In reality all data is treated the same and the taxonomies make the bumps in the landscape. we had the problem that you couldn’t associate one bit of content with another but someone wrote a handy module to do this. It basically allowed parent child relationships between the data of different module types i.e. so a an ‘Article’ about a course could have ‘Events’ listed with it to book those courses. The interface became unintuitive because the admin had to make then both separately and then separately make the associating between the course description and the booking listings.
I was thinking that you can globally use a flat Tag like taxonomy for organiising data and have small fixed hierarchies for building composate data types e.g. if you want to do a booking system you could have a ‘Gig’ which can be made up of three smaller modules ‘Address’, ‘Event’, ‘Price Tag’ (for buying tickets). This would be a small hierarchy but grouped as one entity and perhaps appear on the site under ‘Festival listings’ and also with the band when you look at them. Parts of the Gig could be used separately e.g. the Event which has a Date could be used in a Calendar of what’s on in the Festival, and the Price Tag might appear in the shop with other band merchandise.
I’m thinking this mini hierarchy thing will present one face for entering the data for a ‘Gig’ to the three ’sub modules’ of Gig, ether as a series of forms or some how as one form (avoiding conflicts with field names etc) and processed as one.
The way that the mini hierarchy can be put together using Tags I’m thinking is that they will all be given Node ID’s (all module instances will have one) and have the same Tags as the ‘Gig’ is given but the sub modules will automatically be give the ‘Gig’ node ID as a tag, so when you view the ‘Gig’ anything with the Gigs Node ID as a Tag will appear with it. The only problem this leaves is ordering of content on the screen which is no trivial matter and a problem that Drupal had too but I’m working on an answer.