Web 2.0: 4 Layer Philosophy
Good article on 4 layer philosophy in "Web2.0" design.
from http://particletree.com/features/4-layers-of-separation/
Thanks to a lot of progressive education, web developers are starting to
regularly practice three layers of separation (structural,
presentational, and behavioral) in their projects and applications.
Loosely assigned, XHTML builds the structure, CSS defines the
presentation and JavaScript (for the most part) creates the behavior.
This code segregation allows developers to create web applications that
are organized, maintainable and reusable.
I believe, however, that a fourth layer of separation is being
neglected: the data layer. This layer is represented by server side
scripts that process and retrieve information from a data source. More
often than not, we find this layer embedded messily into the structural
layer. When the goal is to build modular architectures that are flexible
and adaptable, combining structure and data processing is, in the long
run, going to be very costly conceptual mistake. Through the use of a
very promising XML technology, XSLT, we can free our data processing and
retrieval logic from our display and structural logic completely and
build web applications that are easier to understand and faster to
iterate.
</i>
Collections: Zim and Calvin & Hobbes
Both have been finally released:
Invader ZIM - House Box Complete Set (Vols. 1-3 Plus Extra Disc)
Yes YEEEESS! The complete Zim collection is finally MIIIIINEE!! Now I have the resources to bring DOOM to the DOOMED souls that stand in my path of DOOM!
Ahem. I ordered this already. The cool part about it is that if you already own the other DVD's you can just order the box with the extra disk. So many publishers come out with a collection once all the DVD's are out that I waited. Guess I didn't need to. Super cool.
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes is also here. Finally. I've been so confused trying to collect them, they're not numbered and there is a lot of redundancy with the other collection books out there. 3 paperback (archive quality?) volumes of every C&H comic ever made, each with a number so you know what and when you're reading.
But if you don't want to buy this and instead want each book individually (probably better for casual reading), here they are in order:
- 'Calvin and Hobbes'
- 'Something Under the Bed Is Drooling'
- 'Yukon Ho!'
- 'Weirdos From Another Planet!'
- 'The Revenge Of The Baby-Sat'
- 'Scientific Progress Goes 'Boink': A Calvin and Hobbes Collection'
- 'Attack Of The Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons'
- 'The Days are Just Packed: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection'
- 'Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection'
- 'There's Treasure Everywhere--A Calvin and Hobbes Collection'
- 'It's A Magical World: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection'
I'll probably order Calvin later or maybe put it on my xmas list. (Tracy, you reading this?) ;)
Google Reader
Super cool. I've been using Gregarious (web based RSS reader) for a while, and will probably continue to do so. But for the average user, this is going to be the tool to use to do RSS feeds. The biggest problem with RSS feeds for me was that I had 6 different places I might look at them. And even OMPL syncing wasn't up to snuff. Different clients, differnet machines, just a PITA. Anyway, check it out, it's worthy. Web 2.0 yay!
Banana's are great
I love banana's. I drink a banana flavored breakfast drink every day. I say that oranges are my favorite fruit but really, I eat a lot more banana's than oranges. So does the average american. The apple takes a distant second to banana's as the most popular fruit. The banana that we see in the supermarket may be going extinct:
Can This Fruit Be Saved? - Popular Science: > That sameness is the banana's paradox. After 15,000 years of human cultivation, the banana is too perfect, lacking the genetic diversity that is key to species health. What can ail one banana can ail all. A fungus or bacterial disease that infects one plantation could march around the globe and destroy millions of bunches, leaving supermarket shelves empty. A neat article. Definatly worth a read. Another clip:
Bananas have always been a technology incubator. Because they're a time-sensitive product—they need to be harvested green, then delivered to market just at ripening time—systems had to be developed to bring precision to the picking and shipping processes. Leonel Castillo, a banana-production consultant who grew up in Chiquita's corporate compound near the city of San Pedro Sula, on Honduras’s northern coast, explains that the old way was “to wait until you could see the ship coming over the horizon toward port.” Then banana workers would engage in frantic nonstop harvesting and rush the crop to the boats. Chiquita engineers developed the first radio networks in the tropics as a way to bypass this antiquated system. The fruit’s popularity also led to the development of ripening rooms whose controlled environment can slow or speed the way picked fruit ages; refrigerated steamships; and early precursors to bar-coding that allowed each bunch to be tracked by field, plantation, originating country and shipping container.
More from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana
Cricket Chirps to Temperature
"To convert cricket chirps to degrees Fahrenheit, count number of chirps in 14 seconds then add 40 to get temperature. "
The Old Farmers Almanacis so cool.
Today is Moon Day
Look up at the moon tonight and think about a few hundred footprints, left 36 years ago today by a few good men.
Retirement of the CTRVAX
So the first internet connected computer system I ever used has been
retired. "CTRVAX" was a VAX6000
series machine that served as one of the primary computing resources for
Vanderbilt University in the late 80's and early 90's. I think the year
that I used it was 1992 or 1993, I don't quite remember. My mom, a
teacher, was taking a computer training course at Vanderbilt/Peabody. I
tagged along with my mom as the little kid that was super into
computers. After asking me a few basic computer questions, a kind admin
saw it fit to grant me an account as well...'hubbarn' was the username.
My mom's was 'hubbarf'.
I don't remember a lot about the class...I was too busy playing around with stuff they weren't teaching. I think they were teaching e-mail...which I had of course already mastered on my local BBS. At the time however, I didn't have real internet access at home, instead relying on AOL and 'The Nashville Exchange', a local internet connected BBS...so this was a new and exciting world for me. I immediatly found the 'Remote Hosts' and 'Internet' menus and started playing with NNTP and remote BBS's. I tried to get onto other servers but couldn't really figure out what was going on and ended up looking for files with Archie. I remember using 'Gopher' and 'FTP', which I thought was pretty neat. This was before the 'web' so that was about as close to you could get to what most people today think of when they hear 'internet'. I remember downloading the Anarchists Cookbook, which I already had downloaded from a local BBS at home, but it was neat to do it over the 'Net. I think it was stored in my CTRVAX account...hopefully for a suprized admin to find when they cleaned my account. After the few hours were over, we left and I was hooked. I convinced my parents that the internet was the future.
Anyway, kinda sad to see the CRTVAX go...but quite remarkable that it was rendering services up until a month ago.
/nostalgia
London and the Social Net
First, I would like to say that what has happened in London is a complete tragedy. Whatever s**thead organization that did this needs to be drawn and quartered. Or turned into a glowing hole in the ground. Violence begets violence, whatever.
I am completely amazed at how blogs, flickr, technorati and wikipedia have provided coverage of this event. It's a testament to how well these social systems work. I went to CNN long enough to not be satisfied with the content. I went to Google News, but only got the same Reuters crap. Then I was sent a link for the London bomb pool for Flickr, which showed me pictures of the tragedy and the famous double-decker bus that the media kept mentioning. Which was totally ripped to shreds, horrible. Then I hit up Technorati for 'London' and read Londoner's blogs on the subject, a great number of which had been affected by the event. Then I hit up the Wikipedia article, which was marked as a 'current event - information may change rapidly'. And it was, at a rate of 4.17 edits per minute (2 hour average around lunchtime yesterday). Totally incredible that I got this much coverage without really checking out mainstream news channels. The "blogosphere" has been on my critical systems for communication map for a while, but Flickr just stepped into place along side it.
Back on 9/11, I calmly drove to work that day, talked to my co-workers who were trying to set up cable so we could check out CNN. I browsed Slashdot and found a few links to digital cams and digital pics that New Yorkers had put up of the event. At one point, I found someone who had a big directory of all the images that they had found and more were popping in by the minute. But it was instantly killed by huge amounts of traffic. A mirror popped up, I quickly mirrored it locally and provided everyone at work with the coverage of the event we couldn't get on CNN's site, thru the TV or other 'hub and spoke' style media outlets. If we had Flickr, Technorati and if blogs were more prolific back then, it would have been vasly easier to get the 'news' when we all needed to see it. It's apparent to me now more than ever that the mainstream media will be relied on less and less as enabling software becomes more and more popular.
Yosemite/Sequoia Birthday Trip
So, this last weekend, my dad and brother took me to Yosemite and Sequoia for my birthday. Thursday, I left work early to drive up to LA to meet them at David's work. The traffic was horrible even though I left at 2:45pm. Yuck, I don't ever want to do that again.
We drove thru the night and stayed in a crappy Motel 6 in Fresno. I know that the 6 is a low end motel, but this was compounded by being a low end Motel 6. I slept terribly.
The next morning we dragged out of bed and made the rest of the drive from Fresno to Yosemite. We arrived about 9am and had breakfast in Oakhurst, just outside of the park. The day was amazing...we visited Glacier Point, which had a great view of all the wonderful waterfalls of Yosemite. We then ventured down into the valley to visit Bridal Veil Falls...which was generating so much mist it was like getting rained on sideways. We had lunch in the valley and swarms of mosquito's attacked us, more specifically, David, who was eaten alive. So we retreated and went to Yosemite falls, which was more majestic and less...wet. Still very misty though. We went to the Mariposta Grove to visit the trees. Very very cool. The trees were huge!
We decided to head back to Oakhurst where our campsite was located and start dinner and get ready for bed. We checked in late and didn't have any firewood to start a fire. David had brought some charcoal but we had some really nice neighbors that gave us some Eucaliptis and Oak to burn in our fire pit. We roasted hot dogs and had some beer and then went off to bed. I actually had better sleep that night in the tent in my old military sleeping bag than I did in the hotel in Fresno. Much better.
The next day we woke up and decided that we had seen all the good points of Yosemite and decided to go to Sequoia. We had breakfast again in Oakhurst and then headed out. Sequoia was really cool, the trees were much larger than the ones in Yosemite. We went to see the Grant Grove, which included General Grant and General Sherman, the largest organism by volume in the world. Pretty incredible. Then we went to the Giant Forest which was just more huge trees. We did a 3 mile hike loop around the Forest. Got some great pics. We headed home about 5pm or so.
We stopped at a fruit stand near the grapevine and bought some of the best tasting fruit I've ever had in my life. A few hours later we stopped in a small town to eat dinner, then headed back to LA. Dad and I stayed at David's for the night and then the next morning (Monday) we headed to SD.
It was a great trip. This was my first trip to see redwoods and it won't be my last. I loved it, it was a great birthday present. Dad left on the following day, Tuesday at 6am. I wish it could have lasted a month! :)