Making Edgy Eft less Edgy

Posted on by John

Kubuntu Ever since I upgraded my (K)ubuntu install from Dapper Drake (6.06) to Edgy Eft (6.10) I’ve had a few rough edges. This morning I finally sorted them out.

The first was related to my Dell Lattitude D810’s touchpad – an Alps Glide touchpad. Ever since the upgrade it has been fundamentally unusable, moving the cursor so slowly I’d have to drag across the trackpad itself two dozen times to get the cursor halfway across the screen.

The second was related to using XGL and Beryl – hitting the keyboard combination Shift-Backspace would terminate and restart XGL, making me lose whatever unsaved work I had in that session. (I never knew how many times I hit Shift-Backspace until this).

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AjaxWorld Expo

Posted on by John

Ajax World Conference and Expo

Theme: Rich Internet Applications

Begins: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 at 8:00 AM

Ends: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 at 5:00 PM

Location:

Roosevelt Hotel

New York, NY 10017

USA

Registration fee: $1695

Last date for registration: Wed, 21 Mar 2007

Last date for paper submission: Mon, 19 Mar 2007

Speaker: John Eckman

Link: AjaxWorld Expo

Experience AJAX, RIA, and Web 2.0 Knowledge and Best Practices at AJAXWorld Conference and Expo 2007

In March 19-21, 2007 over 1,000 developers, architects, IT managers, and software professionals of every stripe will be converging in New York City to attend the East coast AJAXWorld Conference & Expo — the most comprehensive meeting on the most significant technology subjects of recent times: AJAX, Rich Internet Applications, and Web 2.0.

Delegates will hear first-hand from the creators, innovators, leaders and early adopters of AJAX, and a slew of leading vendors will provide sneak-peeks of the very latest frameworks, tools, products and applications during the conference, which will have over 100 sessions and presentations given by 125 different speakers – the largest AJAX-focused speaker faculty ever assembled in one place at one time.

Conference & Expo 2007 East will be jump-started with a full one-day “AJAX University Boot Camp,” personally led by Web 2.0 and AJAX guru Dion Hinchcliffe, followed by the Main Conference and Expo over the following 2 days.

Topics include:

  • Enterprise AJAX | Mobile AJAX | AJAX with Java
  • Toolkits/Frameworks: TIBCO GI | JackBe | Spry |
  • Client-Side: ( Dojo | Script.aculo.us | Prototype | Open Rico | Yahoo! UI Toolkit | Google Web Toolkit )
  • Server-Side: ( DWR | JSON-RPC | SAJAX | Ruby on Rails | Backbase | ThinWire )
  • Extending AJAX (Flash | Flex | Laszlo | Atlas | XUL)
  • Real-World AJAX and Web 2.0: Case Studies
  • Lesser AJAX, Greater AJAX
  • Microsoft Atlas for ASP.NET
  • AJAX, Web Services and SOAs
  • Security in the AJAX/Web 2.0 Era
  • How Java, AJAX, and Web 2.0 Work Together
  • AJAX Offline (LAJAX)
  • The Present and Future of JavaScript
  • The State of the DOM
  • Integrating CSS Into AJAX/Web 2.0 Apps
  • Comprehensive XMLHttpRequestObject
  • A Venture Capitalist View of Web 2.0
  • AJAX and Comet
  • AJAX and the Browser
  • Mashing AJAX

Enterprise Blogs Could Be Sweet, Too

Posted on by John

Interesting exchange last week about Intel‘s new SuiteTwo product, announced at the Web 2.0 summit, which is an appliance (hardware) bundled with solutions from:

Josh Bancroft, an Intel employee, and self-described “Technology Evangelist and Geek Blogger,” was fairly critical of the launch announcement. Josh critiques the product for being proprietary and expensive, pointing out that free, open source tools are available to accomplish the same goals. In essence, he criticized Intel for operating in a traditional product development mode rather than the new Web 2.0 paradigm: offering a web 2.0 product wrapped in web 1.0 clothing:

Do you know what all of that feels like to those of us who actually get excited about arcane, geeky ideas like having company-wide blogs and wikis? It feels like a big company trying to embed their marketing axe in our heads, and manipulate us into convincing our bosses to spend the money on these tools. Thanks, but no thanks.

Josh’s post is well worth reading on its own, as a critique of companies trying to continue to operate in traditional proprietary software models, but it’s especially worth reading given that Anil Dash (from SixApart) responded in the comments.

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Who owns (y)our data?

Posted on by John

The panel I most wish I had been at the Web 2.0 Summit to see is the one on Open Data (see “Web 2.0 Confab Takes Aim at Closed Platforms” and “Google CEO Eric Schmidt: We Would Never Trap User Data“). In Marc Hedlund’s summary:

Whenever people talk about the new wave of web applications like Flickr and del.icio.us, the idea of users contributing their data to a pool of information on a site — photos on Flickr, bookmarks on del.icio.us, and so on — always comes up. Open data is about the next step — what then? What happens to my information once I share it on a web site, and what can I do to control it?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since OSCON ’06 earlier this summer, where the issue was raised most clearly by Tim O’Reilly in one of the opening keynotes.

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