Microsoft are putting together a toolkit for doing Ajax things, called Atlas. It looks like it'll be an ASP.NET 2.0 thing, according to Scott Guthrie from Microsoft. Reassuringly, he says "the Atlas Client Script Framework will work on all modern browsers, and with any web ... [Stuart Langridge]
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Well, the weekend of LugRadio Live 2005 is over. It was brilliant. Really. If you missed it then you should be gutted, because it was brilliant.
Ade, Jono, and I had a fun-filled day on Friday driving around the place to buy loads of odd bits like ink pads and potatoes, and then Matt arrived on Friday night for the big drinking session. That was the first amazing thing: we turned up at the Hogshead pub in Wolverhampton to be greeted by about 20 people who were already there. Twenty! That’s about how many I was expecting to turn up at the actual event, and they were there the night before! Lots of drinking went on that night; we ended up in a dire nightclub called the Lighthouse. Funny story there: I was wearing this T-shirt which says on the front “Rape is no laughing matter“, and on the back “Unless you’re raping a clown“. I personally think it’s hilarious, although I concede that some people think it’s exceedingly offensive. Anyway, we go into the club, and there are two women on the door. The first points at the front of my T-shirt and gives me the thumbs-up—right on, brother! The second, obviously a bit wiser as to the perfidious ways of men, asked me to turn around. I politely refused, not wanting a knee in the testes. Anyway. A good night had by all, I thought.
The day arrived. I got woken up by Jono at about 7.30am, ouch. Packed all the shit into his tiny, tiny Micra, and off to the Molineux stadium to set up. Jono spent the next three hours rigging up the audio (he did a fantastic job!); myself and the Bald put up the magnificent LugRadio Live banner on the outside of the building. I was dead proud of how good that looked, especially since the letters were just printed on A4 paper, laminated, and stuck on the back of Jono’s vinyl Seraphidian banner. El Baldo de Maximo should be justifiably proud of how the banner stayed attached to the building all day, since he worked out how to tie it up and all I did was piss and moan about how he was doing it. Good work bald man. I also got to carve out the official LugRadio Live 2005 potato stamp with which to stamp people’s hands as they entered the door, and sort out loads of other little bits before the doors opened at 11am. And people flooded in. Did they ever. We think (and it’s a bit difficult to tell) that we had 250 people or so at peak point. That’s something like double what we were expecting, and was a very pleasant surprise indeed. We opened the show, and I got my first taste of fame: I finished off the opening speech with “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome…to LugRadio Live“, and everyone cheered. That’s a rush, that. Jono, being an actual famous person who plays gigs all the time, was dead blasé about it, but I’ve never performed in front of a cheering audience before; all the public speaking I do is presentations and the like, and no-one cheers at them. It was cool.
The day went really well. Big thanks to Rufus Pollock, who stepped in and did a main stage talk about software patents and threats to freedom on about 30 minutes notice after Sarah Ewen pulled out. Adam Sweet and his horrific suit did a marvellous job running the lightning talks room. I caught bits of a lot of talks; Simon Willison’s talk on GreaseMonkey and Gerv Markham’s phishing talk were apparently highlights, and I really enjoyed Drew McLellan’s talk about fixing your open-source project’s website. I missed Colin Watson’s Ubuntu installer talk, which is very annoying. In fact, I missed loads of things: I didn’t see a single talk from start to end, I missed meeting up with loads of people I wanted to speak to, like Mike Hearn and Omahn and loads of people from the forums, and I didn’t get a chance to have a go at the LAN gaming. I did get a chance to chat to Brian Teeman about Mambo, though, and both he and Josette from O‘Reilly seemed to have a laugh and sell loads of things, so they were all pleased too :-) Matt chaired the Mass Debate, which got lots of good responses; someone remarked at one point that Mark Shuttleworth barely mentioned Ubuntu, while Kevin Carmony mentioned Linspire in every sentence, but I think that contrast was what made them both good additions to the panel.
I had a total blast, and from what other people were saying they did too. LugRadio Live and Unleashed was fantastic fun, as well; we got to give out many silly awards, thank lots of people, call one another names, and get cheered again. Great, great fun. It was such a good day, and we’re definitely doing it again next year, especially if we can get Mark Shuttleworth to hold a sign again. Oh, and do some more T-shirts; the four of us each had custom LRL2005 T-shirts with BALD, BEARD, GING, and ANGER on the back. Quality.
The curry in the Standard was…complex, on the grounds that we had way more people than we were expecting and the Standard totally couldn’t deal with it. There were people who hadn’t even been served a starter by the time that we’d finished our main courses. Red Hat paid for some of the meal, which was great: they got a lot of good PR from that, for an amount of money that they’ll probably make back by selling one copy of Red Hat Enterprise Server, so everyone’s a winner there, I think. I also got to meet Bastard No Sierra who is a deeply funny bloke. Good night out, despite being marred by the Standard’s poor performance. Next year we’ll have a better idea of numbers and will go somewhere better able to cope with the crowd, I think.
On Sunday there was paintball, which lots of people really liked; me, not really, because the mask almost broke my cheekbones every time I put it on and I spent that day and all of the next day with a splitting headache because of it. That aside, though, it was a really good addition to the weekend; a group of people all doing stuff together, and that’s what LRL was all about; the community having fun. A few of us sloped off for a dinner in a pub, while the bald and Scott James Remnant both turned into lethal gritted-teeth superkillers. I noted to Monsieur Bradshaw that his Rambo-esque hypersoldier attitude was not exactly compatible with the Buddhist unparticularised love for all things and he instructed me to fuck off. :-) Seems like people had a great day, though!
We (by which I mean Jono) are putting together both the video and audio of the talks and LugRadio Live and Unleashed, and should hopefully be releasing those for download in the next few days. That should be great; Sooz and Craig did a superb job with the videoing, Jono’s audio stuff seems to have come out perfectly, and I want to listen to it all again.
We really had a few goals for LRL: we want to show people that a Linux event doesn’t have to be a big corporate-dominated selling thing like the Linux Expo is, and I think we succeeded. I want people to think, next year, “yeah, let’s go to that, that’ll be really good!” When I go to the Expo, all the good bits are in meeting people and having a drink with them, not in looking round a stand while a guy in a suit tries to sell you Veritas Backup. I appreciate that there are a lot of people who do want that from an event, and the Expo is the thing for them; those people who go to the Expo to meet others and enjoy themselves can hopefully think of LugRadio Live as an alternative next year. Another major goal was to get the LugRadio community together, and I think that that happened really well too. Lots of people from the forums were there, and there was beer and curry and paintball to share. It’s quite moving, how everyone pulls together in times like that, and I’m really pleased (and stunned) at how many people turned up and that they (almost) all seemed to enjoy it a great deal. Roll on next year.
The legal technology team of lawyers at my law firm. Mills and Reeve , have set up a weblog called Naked Law to discuss technology law in the UK. It’ll be interesting to read things about the law here from the perspective of actual lawyers rather than the armchair activists you normally see on the net, and I can vouch for the Mills and Reeve technology team’s competence because I know them. They’re writing not only about high-falutin’ technology issues, but also those with strong bearings on the sort of people who read this, including software patents, spam, and music downloading. All too much of the commentary on these sorts of issues relate to US law (the Naked Law guys even link to Larry Lessig’s site), and it’s important to remember that the UK is not the same and, in general, is more restrictive.
One interesting divide between the technology world (especially the open-source end of it) and the legal world is exhibited in a post they’ve written about software patents. They say that “[legal] practitioners in the area … have been flummoxed by the vociferous opposition to this directive which is merely attempting to harmonise member states’ laws on the patentability of computer implemented inventions“, and go on to point out that some of the member states already allow software patents, and the UK sort of does (when aggregated with other things). It’s possible that they’re not aware of the full nature of the arguments against software patents, such as those made by FFII and others, and I’m sure they’d welcome a lively debate on this (and other) issues.
I am now leaving my house to begin to prepare for LugRadio Live. I will return on Sunday, once we’re all over. LugRadio Live: tomorrow morning at 11am. If I get any more excited I may burst. See you all tomorrow!
-----Christian Heilmann has been busy making lists; six JavaScript features we do not need any longer and DOM scripting health and safety tips. There's a lot of bad practice out there. Readers of this weblog, being the sensitive and handsome people that you are, will no doubt know ... [Stuart Langridge]
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Heard the Desmond Dekker song “The Israelites” on the radio today, and I haven’t been able to get the Maxell advert out of my head all afternoon. That was a great advert. Had a guy standing there holding up boards with the words of the song written on them, while it played on the soundtrack:
Get up in the morning, baked beans for breakfast
Sold out to every monk and beefhead
Woah-ohhhh, me ears are alight!
Why find me kids, they buck up and a-leave me
Darling cheese head I was yards too greasy
Woah-ohhhh! Me ears are alight!
and then it said “Should have bought Maxell“, Maxell being an audio tape manufacturer. “Monk and beefhead“. Class.
Freedom must be on by default.
Yes indeed. Steven Garrity’s excellent series on “the Catch-22 of open-source adoption” gets another article, this time on office document formats, to complement the previous two, on music and instant messaging.
For a while now I’ve thought of donating some money to a charity or similar on a regular basis. However, I’d like to choose an organisation who is part of the fight against Big Media and over-extensive copyright laws and DRM and all that sort of thing, since that’s what I believe in. If I lived in the US, it wouldn’t be a difficult decision: I’d donate to the EFF. Since I’m in the UK, though…who should I send money to? The Campaign for Digital Rights don’t solicit donations, FIPR don’t seem to be doing a lot these days…suggestions?
If you don’t agree with ID cards in the UK, would you be prepared to refuse to register for one and also donate a tenner to a legal defence fund? If so, then you should pledge to do just that at PledgeBank. They want 10000 people to sign up, and they’ve already got 3400, including me, so you won’t be alone. Ten thousand of us, all donating a tenner, will give a legal fund of a hundred grand to defend anyone they try and make an example of. According to the latest surveys, 43% of the UK think that ID cards are a bad or very bad idea. Those of you who agree or are indifferent, fine, no problem; those of you who disagree, are you prepared to put your (not much) money where your mouth is? You know it makes sense: pledge your support!
More for my benefit than anyone else’s, a walkthrough on how to install both the vmware-a-like qemu and its kqemu kernel module that makes it run at a decent speed.
Follow the kqemu install instructions, but before you do the installation, install some Ubuntu packages. You need libsdl1.2-dev, and the linux-headers package that corresponds to the kernel you’re running. The headers install in /usr/src; you may need to pass a parameter to ./configure when compiling qemu to ensure that it picks them up. It should say that SDL support is on when running configure. Before running qemu, you’ll need to modprobe kqemu, and you may need to create /dev/kqemu as described on the documentation page.
Yesterday, as previously mentioned, lots of people met up to talk about JavaScript. I got to meet ppk and Dean Edwards for the first time, which was great. And we talked about things. The original idea was to talk about some fairly heavy technical stuff like what to do about the onload handler, but after Jeremy’s presentation at @media 2005 it became clear that we need less effort going into solving minor technical minutiae and lots more effort going into PR for JavaScript.
You see, developers out there seem to fall into the following categories:
Clearly we can’t target everyone at once, and the consensus was that the people to target are category 2, experienced CSS hackers. The advantage here is that they are already using clean markup and modern techniques; since DOM scripting pretty much requires this approach, we don’t have to sell these people on the benefits of web standards, because they’re already doing it.
The major flaw, it seems, is that if you’re not a programmer then JavaScript is a bit difficult to get to grips with, and CSS designers are, in the main, not programmers. For people like me, it’s easy to gloss over the basics: what a variable is, what an array is, what an object is, what a function is. You see, all the power and elegance in JavaScript, the thing that makes it really great for putting together DOM applications, is that objects and functions and arrays are all the same thing. When you realise this then a whole vista of power opens before you; if you get this and how the DOM works then everything else that’s doable, all the cool scripts and techniques, becomes obvious. Pretty much, anyway.
So, what we need is things that explain how the basics work. The issue with that, though, which Dean Edwards pointed out, is that you’re not trying to teach people JavaScript, you’re trying to teach them programming. And that’s not all that easy. If you write a guide to what variables and functions and objects and arrays are then no-one will read it because that stuff is very, very, very boring. The approach we kicked around was to carry on writing demonstrations of cool techniques, but, when doing that, throw in a bit of a “basics” explanation on one point. So, next time you write a reusable library to make tooltips appear or something, in the explanation don’t just say “and we build a list of all the tooltips”: explain what a list is and how it works. Don’t try and explain everything from first principles, just one thing. And over time, people can pick up cool reusable techniques, which everyone likes, and learn about one important building block at the same time. Look for articles along these lines from various people.
The WaSP are also going to hopefully get on board; there were four WaSPs at the meeting, which helps (Chris Kaminski being one I hadn’t met before), and they have a lot of mindshare in the community, which should help.
The brave new future we’ve talked about is coming. It’s time to show everyone else how they can be part of it.
Bobby van der Sluis is very kind about my book in the first review of DHTML Utopia. Cool. He does bring up a couple of small points, some of which I agree with and some of which I don’t. For example, I don’t think that people should be introduced to the old DOM0 ways of doing things; I’m a firm believer in the idea that people with only DOM0-capable browsers shouldn’t get the benefit of JavaScript enhancements. Since pages must always have a non-JS fallback, I think that if you don’t have a reasonably recent browser then you should have to live with that fallback. While this is a touch unfair on people who are still running Netscape 4 and can’t upgrade, catering for DOM0 browsers makes code much harder to write for not very much benefit. He also takes issue with my use of Sarissa for the XMLHTTPRequest examples, suggesting that “it would have been useful to explain the different flavors of XMLHttpRequest and XMLHTTP first, so you learn how to use it to create simple applications, and discuss the use of a script library later for the more complex examples“. I find using it manually such a pain in the arse (all that “is MSXML2 installed? no? try another Microsoft library“) that in essence you’ll need to write a minimal wrapper library yourself just to successfully create an XMLHTTPRequest object in a cross-browser fashion. If you have to include a library regardless, then you might as well include one that makes it easy to step up to more complex apps later. Whether Sarissa is the best choice for an all-round library is something I leave to posterity to decide.
Thanks, Bobby; you didn’t spare my blushes (“currently the best book on the market for learning how to apply modern JavaScript and DOM“), and if the book impresses most of its readers in the way that it’s impressed you then we really could be on our way to a newer and brighter web. Hooray for that idea, I say.
The concept of Design Patterns is familiar to many; short explanations of reusable techniques which you'll find yourself adding to applications again and again. The Ajax Patterns Wiki is the beginning of an attempt to apply this pattern-gathering process to Ajax applications. Wh ... [Stuart Langridge]
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So, with my new-found skills in asking for an ashtray in Italian, I’ve been pondering something that I haven’t thought about since days at school learning French and German. What’s the point in having words in different genders? I mean, frankly all it does is make a language harder to learn for no reason that I can see. To take a parallel example, I understand that some countries (memory tells me that it’s the Swedes, but I might be wrong) have abandoned the difference between the formal and informal “you” forms (“tu” and “vous” in French), deciding that it’s old-fashioned and pointless and that everyone should address everyone else informally. Sounds like a good idea to me. Similarly, why not abandon the idea of gendered words? This would be easier for the Germans, who could just unilaterally declare everything as neuter; the French might have more of a problem, since you might ignite the ire of feminists if you declared all words masculine and vice versa for feminine, but…why not do it? What advantage does having gendered words bring to the language? It’s possible, I suppose, that a language might have two identical words with different meanings that differ only in gender, but firstly that’s a bit dim, and secondly English manages, with words like “set“, which has got about forty different meanings, to distinguish word meanings based solely on context. That has to be a pretty rare case anyway, I suspect, so: is there any reason why it shouldn’t be abandoned? I’ll be honest, I can’t see the Academie Française going for it, but I can’t see why they shouldn’t.
So, this weekend, the powerhouses of JavaScript will be meeting up and talking about various cool things that can be done in the language. I said I’d show up and hold their coats as well :-)
Many cool people there: Peter-Paul ‘quirksmode’ Koch , Dean ‘IE7’ Edwards , Simon ‘the barbarian’ Willison , Jeremy ‘cooler hair than you’ Keith , and anyone else who wants to come along and argue about the noble language that is JavaScript. Probably the word “Ajax” will be mentioned once or twice, too, in between beers. ppk has a list of stuff to discuss while we’re in the pub, said pub being the Old Thameside Inn in London. Come along; at the very least you can buy ppk a pint for running quirksmode for all these years. See you there.
Magnificent Dilbert cartoon which I imagine will be gone and unlinkable soon.
Wally, talking to the PHB: “I couldn’t buy the software I need to do my job because of your freeze on expenses. And our I.S. policy says I can’t use the freeware version that is readily available. So I used the week to develop some new coffee-sipping noises.”
Yes.
Well, I’m back.
Italy is really nice. Really nice.
The pizzas are, too. Heh.
So, all in all, it was a lovely week, and I’m glad to be back. Not glad that I have to go back to my job the day after tomorrow, though. Bah. It’s taken me nearly the whole day to catch up on mail and feeds and forums and whatnot, too :-)
This website belongs to Stuart Langridge. Contact details are available. Don't eat yellow snow. Valid HTML5, at least in theory, except for the bits that aren't because I'm that futuristic that I'm ahead of the spec, oh yes. HTML5 help from Bruce Lawson, among others. Fonts from the superb FontSquirrel. End.