Archive for May, 2005

Somebody Shoot Me

posted May 18th, 2005, no comments

As a kid I always used to hate these things, and I still think they’re a bit silly now that I’ve grown up (a bit). But I suppose somebody is interested in my musical habits (yes, that’s you Robert Nyman and Andrew Krespanisand also Arthur Steiner and Marko Dugonjic) so I’ll play along!

Total Volume

20,0 GB, with some more music on an external harddrive. I really need to sort things out, though, there’s loads of stuff I never listen to!

Last CD Bought

RazorLightUp All Night

Song Playing Right Now

Phantom PlanetSomething Is Wrong

Five Songs I Listen to A Lot, Or That Mean A Lot to Me

Ouch, this is such a hard question. I’ll just give you five songs I think are really, really great. Wish I could add more, though!

Five People to Whom I’m Passing the Baton

I clearly wasn’t paying attention when I wrote this, but Joen and Andrew have already received it. Too bad, can’t go and pass it to somebody else now, can I?

Who’s Tracking This?!?

It’d be really cool if somebody can write a script which visualizes how this meme has spread, what the most favorite songs are, etc. To this purpose I’ve written a small Musical Baton Profile (link goes to XHTML page).

*.total-volume
Total Volume (number GB/MB/KB)
*.last-bought
Latest CD you bought
ul.favs, ol.favs
All list items will be a favorite.
ul.passing-to, ol.passing-to
All list items will be the person to whom you’re passing the baton.
a[rel="artist"]
Link to artist page, preferably on AudioScrobbler.
a[rel="song"]
Link to song page, preferably on AudioScrobbler.
a[rel="passing-to"]
Link to the person you’re passing the baton to. If possible, enhance with XFN
a[rel="musicalbatton"]
Link to a page which has musical baton content on it.
a[rel="via"]
Link to a a[rel="musicalbatton"] page from which you received the baton.

And finally, tag your post with !

An Observation About Ajax

posted May 15th, 2005, no comments, tagged ,

Two things:

  1. Hardcore DHTML hackers hate it
  2. Everybody else loves it
  3. Some people confuse it with soccer (Thanks, Anne!)

Why? Because we hardcore DHTML hackers have been doing this stuff for years, but it never caught on. Combine that with a lot of hype, and you get negative reactions to the term. Until Google put the principle to good use in Gmail. That is, the hardcore DHTML hackers it hired finally got to design a system which used it.

The attention which has been given to Ajax in the past months has largely affected… designers. UI designers, such as Duntan Orchard and Derek Powazek. But also in the back end: Ajax got included in RubyOnRails a month after the original Adaptive Parth article. These are people who haven’t been hanging around in the DHTML communities of yore [1].

The question is, why? I don’t really know [2], but I have the feeling it’s because the DHTML hackers never got to design the systems, and as such couldn’t show their knowledge and ideas. XMLHttpRequest has been here since IE 5.0, after all.

Footnotes

[1]: Bold claim, I know.

[2]: Hey, I was eleven back in 1998!

Photos

posted May 8th, 2005, no comments

Hey I got back from France last Friday. We went home a day earlier because it was raining and it was really cold. Today I had some time to sift through the 263 photos I took, and 141 have made it into Flickr (that is, the photos with my parents and sister on it are private, in total there’s a 172 pictures in Flickr). You can check them out by viewing Vosges 2005, Vosges 2005: The Candy Shop and Vosges 2005: Colmar.

This is the first time I used Flickr for lots of photos, and I have to say it completely rocks. And yes, I’m a pro member now.