i apologize in advance for the extremely lengthy entry...
guess
there's lots on my mind or something. maybe even some of
it is a bit
interesting...
i have to admit that i was tremendously amused by
Iain 's
desire to be stalked by a normal
and
attractive
person. :)
dave winer describes
his recent
emancipation from cable tv. man, do i ever agree that tv is
such an
appealing waste of time. i can't imagine how much more
productive i
would be if it weren't for cable... need to do something
about this!
no more veg-ing! no more veg-ing!
in other news, i finally got my (wonderful) christmas
present from my
(wonderful) sister in the mail today. double cd of famous
jazz
performances and its pretty darned sweet. i forgot how much
i enjoyed
listening charles mingus. also included are miles davis,
herbie
hancock, t. monk... ahh, this is my soundtrack for the next
year.
now that i've been (obsessively) reading a lot of the
userland folk's
weblogs, i came to the point yesterday where i really
wanted
to try out dave winer's outliner, radio userland, that a
lot of em
appear to be in love with. but i didn't (and don't) want
to find
some windows box to run it on (darned win32 and mac
only sw!)... so i
decide to try wine
(again). wine
seems to run quite a lot more (and more stably) than a year
ago. but
i was unable to get radio userland to work. :( so then i
want to run
yet another win32-only app, groove, and so i thought
i'd roll up
my sleeves and try to fix the relavent parts of wine. and
that's what
i've been trying to do this morning (and now afternoon, man
time goes
fast). well that and attend a short wedding. oh yeah, and
listening
to a bit of our new president, gwb. but i don't think i'm
progressing
that quickly at 'getting' the architecture of wine. if this
works, i
can promise that i'll have a dorky smile on my face all
weekend. :)
oh yeah, and this is why open source works if you already
didn't know.
my wrists are starting to feel a little better as i've not
had too
much computer time lately, just a lot more design and
reading stuff
away from the wicked keyboard. which is fine. last sunday,
while
doing quite a bit of drumming i felt a little too much
numbness for my
liking. if it persists, i'll probably go see some doctor.
or try
acupuncture(sp?) or something.
i haven't forgotten my open payment protocol
project (in the
flavor of set), but i
sure haven't
posted much here about it. not much new to report really
except that
i think i've gotten a pretty good design with about 90% of
it done.
if you want to take a gander at it, give me an email or
something.
that should get me off my rump.
Matt's Musings... weird thoughts below
in tech related thoughts, i've been thinking about the
(original)
design of the web and pondering, "what might have i done
differently?"
i think the web has achieved such a level of acceptance as a
network platform that many limitations present in its
design and
use are (often) unchallenged and ignored. let's challenge
the
assumptions, people! because it's fun and maybe something
can come of
it... oh yeah, and i apologize for my inarticulate ways.
:)
my chief objection to the web's design (at present) is that
it imposes
an extremely one-way communications model. what i'm
complaining about
is that there exists NO mechanism by which a server can
initiate
data tranfer to a client. i still wish to maintain the
traditional client/server model in which the browser
initiates
a request for a resource, but i do want the server to
have the
ability to send new data to the client to update
the
document. notice that this isn't push technology,
as the
client would only receive this new updating data from the
server
during the lifetime of the document being viewed. so
instead of
closing the connection when the document has been completely
transfered, the client would leave the connection open,
listening for
any updates. the server could then send snippets of js
specifying
changes using the DOM. i think this would be really
helpful, but it
does muddy the waters of simplicity and elegance found in
the
traditional model of simply tranfering a 'document'
. in
particular, it places a quite heavy burden upon the server,
maintaining state and all.
argh! man, when rereading the above in my diary preview
that sure sounded crappy. pictures are needed, imo. gosh
darnit, why can't standard web tools have a whiteboard! ...
back to my rant.
if we look at the context/history of the development of the
web, back
in the day we weren't thinking in terms of web applications,
or at
least i don't think that we were. we were thinking in terms
of simply
transfering documents . so once the document was
finished
being transfered to the client, the connection and web
transaction
was done. at least until the client initiated another
connection.
and there's no ability for the server to send data any more
data to
the client. in order to make 'the network the computer',
we'd have to
rely on clumsy polling techniques. there's no way that the
server can
send an 'interrupt' to the client in other words.
these ideas, which have been floating around my head for
some time,
came to a point the other day when i was going to implement
a
web-based (because it's the universal network platform,
remember! :)
game of scrabble, my wife's fav. game of all time. sure, we
could just
do it (even easily) in java, but that is way too heavy for
my liking.
i think that web applications, really lightweight, using
insanely
familiar constructs are the way to go, or at least try.
there was
(and is) no way to let the server inform the players (using
their handy
web browsers) that it's their turn to try and figure out
some words.
argghh... i thought it might be fun to create an rpc server
in moz
that the web server could contact, but that is one ugly
kludge if i've
ever seen one. the above described mechanism of updating
documents
seemed to be the prettiest solution i could come up with.
i read a term on dave winer's blogs that i thought
exceptional at describing the above functionality. "the two way web"
but alas, his great meme candidate has another meaning. oh
well.
of course, there is great value in 'just being a document
viewer', and
maybe these web apps should be called net apps and we should
just use
a network aware interface other than the ever-present web
browser.
next topic...
another unrelated objection to the present day web is its
completely
primitive user interface machinery (widgets). sure, i love
the
simplicity and the elegance that is the widget set found in
html 1
(textbox, button, drop-down box, etc etc), but another set
of standard
widgets needs to exist. jon udell (sp?) mentioned this
void a
while back in his column at byte.com although some of the
stuff he
says about xul isn't
accurate,
imo. is anybody 'fixing' this? where's the w3?
i guess the above is more like an article draft (that's
poor!) and not a diary. but oh well. please forgive! :)
anyways, i've rambled long enough. i find this
refactoring of the
web very interesting and invite any reader's comments.
please
let me know if i'm insane. thanks! off to the the
dishes...