skoop.dev

The last week I’ve been playing around a lot with the javascript xmlHttpRequest functionality that is these days better know as AJAX (what a name!). A client requested me to implement it, or at least look at the possibilities of implementing it, in their intranet. And I must say, there are tons of possibilities where using AJAX could highly enhance the user experience. No need for reloading your page anymore. AJAX will take care of it.

I’ve been using a very specific AJAX implementation called OpenRico, which is a very useful library with lots of possibilities. Very flexible. Very useful.

Using AJAX, I must admit that I’ve seen a renewed need to get into javascripting. Indeed, OpenRico provides an implentation that ensures I won’t have to do all the very complicated javascripting, but still implementing it into a system will still require you to at least know some basic javascripting. Most of it is pretty basic stuff, with sometimes slightly more complicated stuff for specific situations. But still, it was a good reason to get my some basic javascript skills.

So, for the past few days, Justus was at our place. He’s travelling through Europe for months and we planned on meeting eachother while he was in The Netherlands. He ended up accepting our offer of a place to sleep for two nights. It was quite nice. Justus is a really cool guy. On friday, I picked him up at Amersfoort trainstation, and basically we just stayed at our place for the day. On saturday we went to Utrecht, to walk around, for Justus to take some pics, and to arrange a bed for him. He’s gonna stay in Utrecht for a few days before travelling further. It was quite nice.

I’m gonna meet up with Justus in Amsterdam in a few days. On thursday, we’ll be going to 5 days off to see Amon Tobin, maybe a bit of Funckarma, Speedy J (in 5.1 surround), Richard Devine (in 5.1 surround), Autechre, and then maybe check Luke Vibert for a bit. It’s gonna be fun, that’s for sure.

It seems I missed out on another fun Internet thing lately: The puppy poo girl. A girl who had her dog with her on the subway, and her dog dumped some crap right there. She only had a a few words to spare for the elderly people asking her to clean it up: “fuck off”.

What happened next was someone with a cameraphone taking a picture, posting it on a popular website, and the hunt was on. Shortly after, they found out all information about the girl, and a public shaming campaign started against the girl.

This whole situation started a discussion about the ethics of such a public shaming campaign. I’m not sure yet how I feel about this. On the one hand, if you know something like this can happen, you might be more careful in your response in a situation like this (maybe even do The Right Thing™ and actually clean up the mess). On the other hand, is it ethical do ruin the life of someone in this massive way? Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. I’m not sure yet about that.

(Here’s the image)

In the category ‘cool and useful’, I’ll today present you with a nice Firefox extension called ForecastFox. Using this nice plugin, you can get your local weather forecast as nice little icons in your firefox Statusbar (or in various other locations in Firefox!). Very cool, and pretty useful if you want to know what kind of weather to expect.

You better believe it. Sauron exists. The hubble telescope brings us the proof. Quite scary, huh?

Packt publishing, quite an interesting publisher with books very specific (open source) software, has released a book about phpBB. Now that alone is worth a mention. I’ve had the honor of being a technical reviewer for the book. I received the book about two weeks ago from Packt, but I haven’t really had time to do a check of the whole book. However, it does look quite good.

Of course, the coolest thing of the book is the credits page: it is sooooo cool to see your own name in print, in a book!

Today I wanted to comment on an entry on Livejournal to find that they had a new identity system implemented. They now support OpenID. When taking a closer look, this system looks mighty interesting. I think I’ll have a look at how this works, see if I can somehow implement this using PHP.

Now this is cool. If you have no phone line, no electricity, but you still want to use the phone, what do you do? Of course! Get a computer, modify a bike, and create your own electricity and a wireless connection to phone over IP.

Shocking news today in the world of Apple. Apple is ditching IBM, and moving to Intel for their future products. Quite shocking, since the Power PC chip has been the core of Apple computers for, well, ages.