Developing Upwards

I couldn't even pluralize "dominator" because Nintendo won't let Sony in the door. Nintendo has the handheld game market locked tighter than Fork Knox. This won't be the first place to call out the "Apple is entering the handheld gaming market" flag, but I do think I can lay out the steps they would (or should) take that can lend credibility to the idea. If nothing else, I hope someone there is reading. Apple can't do this alone, but they have a very good friend in another company with a name that starts with A: Adobe. The pair would be the ultimate contender into the very tight market and the approach is amazingly simple. Flash is coming to the iPhone and iTouch, and I'll hope they make bookmarking Flash games easy and give us the option to "fullscreen" them on the devices. Explicit offline caching wouldn't hurt either. The next step is obviously to allow flash apps and games to be installed directly for quick access and immediatel...

This is my dream so don't squash it for sounding trivial. This is my window to the world, the tools of my job, and the outlet of my creativity! I want the Perfect Keyboard and the Perfect Mouse. Operate as NiMH battery chargers when plugged into USB for power Lighted keyboard to type in darker conditions. Must be adjustable Must be configurable to PC and Mac layouts Would be handy to configure to DVORAK layout, as well Retractable USB cables Keyboard functions as USB hub, even wirelessly Scroll ball instead of a scroll wheel . I do love my Mighty Mouse Weights for mouse, with storage in keyboard Trackball (or even a nub) in the keyboard to lean back and browse with Splittable keyboard with locking adjustments I am going to spend the rest of my life replacing perfectly good keyboard and mouse combos if no one solves this simple list of requirements. The adjustable keyboard is probably the hardest part, combined with the other requirements I want fit into it. I'd like to pull th...

Twitter does a lot of queuing. I mean, a lot . We know other people have a need for some good queuing, so much that Amazon even released Amazon Queue Service, not so long ago. There has never really been a common queue server, and maybe that is because its so simple that no one has really had the need to push one hard into the public eye. At least, as public as our eyes are. Enter Starling, the internal queue system of Twitter, recently released to the public. Written in Ruby, and I don't even mind! Pointed there by my ever-pointing buddy, David Novakovic, Starling does nothing absolutely remarkable, but someone has to get the light. What is interesting is their choices. Starling uses the MemCached protocol, so your clients are probably already prepared to use it, they just need to treat the queues a little different from the mappings. The typical MemCached get-operation now removes the item from the queue. The keys function is identifiers for the queues. I don't think it could...

So I vowed to write more and blog more and the year has plenty of time left in it, so don't worry about me. The past month has been amazing, and that's why I haven't had the time to write. I'll be scheduling it soon, so a resurgence in content is imminent. I try to keep on my tech topic, but I do far too little activism on the things I believe in, and its high time I changed that. Don't worry, politics will not become a staple of this blog, but I'm likely reviving my personal blog. But, no one reads that, so how vocal can I be about something with no readers? Today is Blog for Choice Day We're supposed to be a logical bunch. We spend out careers thinking about things and being intelligent. When you think about something long enough, there are obvious realizations that everyone comes to. People that think about tracking version changes all realize you need goof version control. Any group of people trying to coordinate understand the need for issue trackers. S...

This is a follow up to my first How To Walk Backwards to HTML 5 article. The one comment I got in this first Twenty-Four hours pointed out a lack of explanation on my part for a few things. I know about the current HTML 5 specification. I've read most of it, reviewed plans and others' reactions, etc. My views on HTML 5 are not out of a lacking of knowledge, but are a reaction to my knowledge of HTML 5. I think what HTML 5 looks to be shaping into is the wrong direction. The creation of the layout specific tags is a response to what was coined "div hell", but it isn't the right solution. We all have different needs for what we need HTML to represent and it gets abused into representing everything from resumes to tetris clones. Abandon schemas and doctypes and just let us write the tags that have meaning for our cases. Hey, we can do that with XML namespaces! Give us to the tools to discover formatting and layout rules and control the pages intelligently. If you ne...

So this is my obligatory start-of-2008 post. I know I haven't written much lately, but work was busy and then there was the holidays, and I'm making a commitment to really revitalize my blog. Part of that may be that my adsense, after years of blogging, as only hit half the required minimum balence for payment . But, I'm not in it for the money. Not unless there was a lot of money in it! For 2007 this means... that I need to wrap up the last year We moved back to North Carolina when the Pennsylvania winter cleared up, and I'll admit that the summer was a bit rough. I lost my most steady contract when funding went sour, shortly before the movie, but you know what? Staying home with the family was great without a lot of work to be done, and we got by OK. I enjoyed the time. After a while, I started CharPy, the Charlotte Python Group. We're still small and growing, but the first meeting gave me a lead on a full-time position at SocialServe.com, where I'm now happil...

The more peeks I get at the HTML 5 spec, the more I dread it. We have barely shaken the last strongholds of crap-HTML since gaining some sanity some years ago. We put content in pages and we control style and layout in CSS, supposedly. Now, we see upcoming tags like article and nav and section, and all of it harks back to the days that were so dark in the web. I don't understand it. If anything, we should take the suggestions of Douglas Crockford to heart. I want semantics in my content, not layout or anything related to it. I want themes and templates understood by the standard, not developed by a thousand projects in parallel resource squandering. Any complaints I make about the upcoming HTML spec is completely trivialized by the fact that there is an upcoming HTML spec. Do you know how long it has been since any major shift in web formats? We're talking pre-Mozilla days here. I can't imagine the migration required with an internet the size we have today. The web makes...