November 2009
8 posts
Firefox Jetpack Nears Launch →
It could be said that for many developers, the only thing that stops them from developing Firefox add-ons is that XUL is just the ugliest language in the known universe.  Didn’t anybody learn the lesson of XSLT?  XML-based languages are just too ugly for human eyes. But with Firefox Jetpack, developers now have the option to script Firefox using Javascript - a language that, while it may...
Nov 10th
“Advice to students: Leap in and try things. If you succeed, you can have...”
– Brian Kernighan
Nov 10th
Fake Fake Allen Pike. →
Hey, neat - Fake Fake Allen Pike is just the sort of thing that I might write, if I had been beset by sudden brain damage.  I wonder if that’s how other people feel when they’re… uh… mocked online by … what appears to be some sort of chimpanzee.
Nov 7th
Friedisms →
So, it looks like Jason Fried now has a Fake Jason Fried. I bootstrap everything. New business? Bootstrap. New product? Bootstrap. New relationship? Bootstrap. The only thing I don’t bootstrap is my boots. Actual bootstraps aren’t very agile. I can only dream of one day being interesting enough to warrant a Fake Fake Allen Pike.
Nov 6th
Google Introduces Closure →
Yesterday, Google introduced Closure, the Javascript development tools behind some of their most popular applications - the behemoths that are GMail, Google Docs, and Google Maps.  This is not to be confused with Clojure, the Java-compatible Lisp dialect, or the functional programming concept of “Closures”, although the nomenclature is linked in all three - Lisp and JavaScript both...
Nov 6th
Nov 6th
Next Javascript Meetup
The second meetup of the Vancouver Javascript Development group will be on December 9th. The first meetup was great - I delivered a presentation on thick-client Javascript development frameworks, like Sproutcore, Cappucino, and the Google Web Toolkit, and Brian, Brock, and Rob from Nitobi delivered a presentation on XUI for mobile web development. The two presentations couldn’t have been...
Nov 5th
“At any given time, there are only about ten or twenty places where hackers want...”
– Paul Graham
Nov 1st