Some months ago the FCC — now with a majority of Democratic commissioners — implemented network neutrality rules using it’s “ancillary” regulatory powers. I’m on record as a proponent of network neutrality, taking the general position that the internet should be treated like a common carrier and/or utility, and that the only thing providers should be in the business of is delivering reliable and fast service. The moment providers become content filters is the moment their interests stop being aligned with the general good. Think of it like a road builder who also sold cars… don’t you think you’d build your roads to benefit your cars? After a failed effort to enact a network neutrality statute in Congress, the FCC stepped in, however a Federal Court has struck down the regulation taking us back at square one. But don’t worry, that’s a good thing. Read more…
Yesterday a tool I built for Service Employees International Union went live at http://ticket.seiu.org. The SEIU folks came up with a pretty good idea to take advantage of the Facebook and Twitter status update phenomenon. Instead of pushing out an identical message for supporters to publish, they created a unique number for each visitor and embedded that into the update message about gender discrimination in health care. This way visitors could easily see what number their friend was… with hopes that folks would rush to sign up and get the next number. We also generated a unique image with their number for each visitor for use with Facebook via the power of GD. After the first day we hit nearly 5000 tickets “taken”… don’t really know if that’s good or not, but the concept was pretty nifty. The campaign even got a write up in TechPresident.
Then, unrelated to anything I did, MoveOn released this really great video on the Public Option.
That may be the single best piece I’ve seen on the topic.
I know it’s been a while since I last posted about ExtJS… things have been quite busy at work and I’ve forced myself to take a sabbatical from the project that has me working with ExtJS everyday. I’ll get back to it soon, don’t worry, and I have lots of topics in the queue. In the meantime, I have a bit of a public service announcement for those who use ExtJS with git. Read more…
Several months ago I made a good faith attempt to upgrade my laptop from the reliable KDE3 to the avant-guard KDE4. Having decided not to even dabble with KDE 4.0 and the growing-pains associated with that particular release, I had high hopes for the venerable desktop environment’s 4.1 release. Sadly, the experiment ended in disaster, with too many crashes, too much slowness, and too many missing features that — at least for my work flow — were critical. I thus reverted back to KDE3 and went about my business. Read more…
In my last post I said that ExtJS is a front-end widget system. No doubt you could use it to create an entire system, front to back, in nothing by ExtJS, but that’s not my project nor is what I plan to talk about in these posts. Which brings us to the first question you need to answer when setting up your ExtJS environment: what am I going to use as a back-end? There are probably lots of right answers to this question, and a great deal of debate over which one is more right, and I gleefully leave that fight for others. For my purposes, the answer to that question is merb (it’s like rails, but better), so if that’s not your platform of choice, you will have to make some adaptations of your own. Read more…
Today I wrote my first WordPress plugin. Its purpose is to load the ExtJS libraries into a WordPress post whose category has been set to “ExtJS”… just like the post you are reading now. See, ExtJS is a heavy library, and even minimified it clocks in at nearly 600 KBs. I don’t want to have to pay that bandwidth cost if I don’t have to, nor do my readers who aren’t the least bit interested in ExtJS. So the plugin takes care of loading only when the post is about ExtJS. Read more…
To get any use out of ExtJS you need to understand javascript. It’s inescapable. This is not a framework were you are going to be writing ruby code that generates javascript for you, like you may have experienced with Rails/Prototype. There may, someday, be that sort of integrated support… but not today, and quite frankly, it would be an abomination of the framework anyway. If you are an old pro at Javascript, chances are this isn’t going to be very informative, but if the last great Javascript trick you learned was how to change the browser’s status bar, you may learn a thing or two. Read more…
If you don’t build websites, the answer to the second question is you don’t. There are better things for you to spend your limited internet time learning about… like, did you know there was a Simple Wikipedia project? I didn’t until just a few minutes ago.
Okay, now that we are just down to the web developers and the wannabe web developers, lets try and get the basics established so that future posts will have a common language we all agree on… or, at least, that I agree on and that you will be forced to understand to extract anything from my ramblings. Read more…
I really have fallen in love with the inove WordPress theme. It’s clean, yet stylish… modern, yet grounded. It is nearly perfection. But for my particular needs, it is not exactly perfect. Thankfully, the source is available and appears to be released under the Collective Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. That’s handy, because this blog is under the same license.
So, this afternoon I grabbed the source, spun up a git repository for it, and started making the changes I wanted to better fit my needs. I’ve now gotten it good enough to use on my blog, which means the code needs to be “shared alike”, per the terms of the license. To that end, I invite anyone who is interested to grab the code from its github repository. Maybe the original author will take a peak at some of the option settings and incorporate them into the official version. Read more…
In November of 2008 I traveled to frigid Chicago to attend the inaugural sprint of my company’s new content management system. It was a week long affair where we started the work of building a multi-client Merb based CMS to replace the old work horse of the company, a proprietary Zope product known as ListMonster. ListMonster had served us well for many years, but its age was beginning to show and we knew the time had come for a serious upgrade. David, as a major proponent of all things Ruby, wanted to us to either develop in Rails or a new fangled MCV system known as Merb. In the end I’m not convinced that particular decision was really all that big of a deal, as Rails and Merb as so similar that Rails 3.0 will be Merb 2.0, and Merb 2.0 will be Rails 3.0. But the Merb decision wasn’t the only big decision made that week, we also agreed to use ExtJS for all front end development. Read more…
Countdown -- LXI days #until (My apologies to those who come here to learn their roman numerals, yesterday's mistake shan't happen again.) #1 hour ago
Damn you @dwidmaier and your ability to become 4sq mayor of freaking everywhere you go! #1 hour ago
The problem with Google Priority Inbox is it assumes there exists email I can afford to not read which isn't already filtering to a folder. #4 hours ago
Exercise Report -- Weights: 7 of 7! I upped the weight on shoulder fly today... couldn't finish the second set, but still progress! #workout#7 hours ago
@Modern_Domestic and all without contacting tech support... well done! #7 hours ago
