Ultranormal

Category: development

  • Searching For The AOL Blogfather

    For a while, I thought that I might have been the first AOL employee to have a blog. I know that can’t be true, but I’m curious as to who the AOL Blogfather is (term stolen gracelessly from Reid, who is one of my blogfathers).\
    If you’re an AOL or Netscape current or former employee and you have a blog whose first post is older than 7/20/2000, please let me know (you know, post a comment). It would be nice if the blog was still active.\
    Why do this today? Well, another great AOLer has started a blog, Jacob Rosenberg. Jacob’s a great guy and one of my favorite operations folks. His second post is a short history of the many web servers that have come out of AOL. I’ve used all of them at some point, and remember them (mostly) fondly.\
    Only nine days until this blog’s sixth birthday. I still haven’t decided what to get it yet.

  • Mash It Up

    Hello from sunny and sleepy Northern California. I’m here for Mashup Camp, and presenting tomorrow on AIM Pages and ModuleT. My presentation’s done, I’m wearing a screaming pink shirt and I got four hours of sleep (thanks, United – delayed flights are awesome). I’m ready to mash it up!\
    I rented a car, and was expecting to get to drive another G6. What did Avis have available? I ultra-awesome. Chevy HHR! It looks like an almost-butch PT Cruiser and drives like a brick. It feels like I’m sitting in a submarine. The pillars on either side of the windshield are so wide that it looks like a small porthole, not a windshield, and it’s almost at 90 degrees (as is everything on the dash), so it’s a very strange driving experience. I don’t recommend it.\
    But, whatever. I’m here for the mashups, not driving, right?

  • Transcending CSS

    If you can wait until October, you should get Transcending CSS . Andy showed me some of it at WWW2006, and it’s really cool. There are only a few designery standardsy books I own, including the orange bible and Dan’s second book and The Zen of CSS Design. This one will join ’em on the shelf.

  • I Left My Bowels In San Francisco

    I’ve been good, I swear. Maybe it was the carpaccio last night. Maybe it was the chocolate mousse. Maybe it was something else, like the amorphous blob we had for lunch yesterday. Anyway, I skipped the end of Supernova today to spent some quality time with the hotel bathroom.\
    But, yesterday was good. Rohit Khare gave name to a game I’ve played before, and we had a great time playing at lunch: Acronomious. Given a word, you have to come up with the most implausible acronym for it, extra credit for recursion (using the acronym in the acronym, for exmaple: Bases Around Strategic Emplacements). I met the guys from Netvibes, and we had a lovely conversation about building modules, and we talked about how similar our approaches to development are. It was fun, and they’re the friendliest Frenchmen I’ve ever met. The day before, I met the guys from ATTAP and we had a lovely talk about their new open source javascript framework: Jitsu. It’s definitely something worth keeping up with.\
    Last night, I went out to dinner with Kristin and Jessica and we had a lovely time at The Steps of Rome (where we had the carpaccio, the best bruschetta ever, and some lovely prosciutto and mozzarella). The food was amazing, and surprisingly cheap for the quality and quantity. After dinner, we walked around Little Italy for a little while, and got dessert at Stella’s Pastery. Yummy yummy chocolate mousse!\
    This week has been pretty good. Mashpit was a great experience, and will help me in a couple weeks. We’re running an internal Mashpit at AOL to work on module, and it was nice to get a “real” Mashpit experience under my belt before I try to replicate it at work.\
    The Supernova workshops on Wednesday were very interesting, and I think our Decentralized Data panel went really well, and so did my short talk on Modular Web Development that I hope to expand into a real proposal or set of best practices. I get to work on refining it a little bit more before Mashup Camp. The panels yesterday were a disappointment. It was mostly “my company believes in these buzzword and I’ll say them over and over again and ignore what anyone else is saying.” The best stuff was happening in IRC, where the snark overflowed.\
    That’s what I’ve been up to this week. Tomorrow, it’s back home for a little while before Mashup Camp, and then I’m really taking the rest of the summer off from traveling.

  • Got Shwag?

    Shwag

    Shwag\
    They’ve actually given me shwag this time! Since I’m the shy retiring type and don’t like going up to people and shoving crap into their hands, I’m going to make you come to me. I’ve got cool little AIM Running Man pins. If you want one, find me at the conference and I’ll give you one (or two if you’re nice). I’m the fat guy…

  • Supernova: Decentralized Data Presentation

    If you want it, in all its brief glory, it’s over on the presentations site.

  • Notes from Supernova: Personal Infosphere

    This panel’s all about how we can keep up of all the information that comes in every day. We’re\
    h4. Dalton from imeem

    • We’re reaching some limit as to the amount of information we can handle.
    • imeem creates both an IM client and web client
    • Instant messaging is useful as a communications tool, but about presence. Presence is actually the most important part of IM clients.
    • They’ve got real-time notification of new blog posts, profile updates, etc.
    • They have groups to “aggregate people around particular topics”
    • Trying to manage all forms of digital information, can pull in data from other services
    • They have a unified tag space across media types (eeenteresting). I wonder how that plays out with users. People tag different content differently, do users of imeem use consistent tags across media?\
      h4. Yael from eSnips
    • They have mainstream users, not teens.
    • Social, but focused on content, not people
    • It’s for sharing interest and passions but lets you go one step further\
      h4. Ben from Plaxo
    • 5 year-old company
    • Synchronized address book
    • People have on average:
      • 3-4 phone numbers
      • 2-3 e-mail addresses
      • 2-3 physical addresses
    • And this information is always changing
    • 33% of mobile phone numbers and 24% of e-mail addresses change annually\
      h4. Tariq Krim from Netvibes
    • Create a single place for your entire digital life. Another personal portal.
    • They have an open API for module developers.
    • They have a public wiki for users to request features and report bugs
    • They have a really cool live translating tool
    • So they want to use “open standards”, but didn’t really say which ones\
      h4. Hans from Plum
    • Connect with each others “heads”, not with dates.
    • Collect data of all types and drop it into buckets
    • “Communities of Knowledge”
    • Tiny little application that runs and allows you to add anything you read into a collection.
    • Wow… this is really cool. Collect anything from your desktop and throw it up into a collection. Neato.
    • Everything is indexed and searchable.
    • Works great on the Mac too. Yay!!
    • Also allows you to connect to people with similar collections to yours.
    • They dig microformats as well.
    • They use Amazon’s S3 for the data.\
      h4. Discussion
    • Collaborative Filtering
      • imeem uses collaborative filtering to decide how popular or “good” something is. Compared to PageRank
      • Plum called on “big” companies like Yahoo and AOL to come up with a good scheme for licensing documents or declaring document license. Time to go read up on rel license, isn’t it?
    • Lot of talk of ownership while avoiding completely the topic of lock-in and open API’s. Oh well, we’ll talk about it in the next panel.

  • AOL Is Fun Again!

    Things at AOL are changing, and it feels great to be in the middle of it. Every day, it becomes more and more clear that a small number of people are driving gigantic changes all throughout the company, and I’m both honored and a little nervous to be considered part of that group. It makes me a little self-conscious, to be honest.\
    It just feels like everything is coming toether. Last week, I was asked to speak at a conference for the first time (thanks, Tantek), which is a huge honor for me, especially considering who asked and who is on the panel. This week, I did training on semantic markup and CSS to a handful of designers, with the goal being to get the rest of the designers through the course by the end of the summer. I also found out that I’ll be speaking at Mashup U in July. And just today, I was asked to join a small group doing something extremely cool that I don’t think I can talk about publicly yet (maybe never, I’m not sure yet). This is all on top of the privelage I have to work on AIM Pages.\
    I’m extremely lucky to be in the position I’m in. I’m not quite sure how it happened, or really where it will lead, but I love it. I work with the best people, get to play with and develop the coolest stuff (cool to me, and that’s really all the matters), get to share what I’m passionate, and feel like what I do affects and influences other people.\
    I’ve been at AOL for eleven years, and this is the most fun I’ve ever had. I can’t wait to see what happens next!

  • How I Write Presentations

    I do a lot of presentations now, and because I’m the “web standards guy” I can’t go around doing them in Powerpoint or Keynote (I’ve tried using both and yuck, they’re not made for writing). Over the past year or so, I’ve tried a couple different things, but here’s the system I’ve got down, and the technology pieces that make it happen:

    # Movable Type – I love MT’s template system. I don’t have to write code, and I can make them do pretty much whatever I want. And, if I run into something they can’t, there’s either a plugin to do it, or I can write a teeny bit of PHP glue to fill the gaps.

    # Textile – I love it. It’s the easiest of the pseudo-markup languages out there (Markdown is the other well-known one).

    # S5 – Eric Meyer is a genius. It’s got everything I need from Powerpoint or Keynote in an HTML page.

    # MarsEdit – Best blog editor ever, does what I need without getting in the way with things that I don’t. The preview is nice too.\
    I created a Movable Type archive template out of S5 (which you’re free to use if you want), a lot like I did for Instiki a while ago, and now all my presentations go up on my little presentations site. Now, I can get to them from anywhere, they’re publicly available and stored somewhere other than my laptop (the problem with doing them all in my locally hosted copy of Instiki).\
    I start with all the slide titles as an outline, move them around, tweak, etc, and then go back and add the bullet points, most of which end up being removed. Then I publish and run through it quickly to make sure it all makes sense. Then I’m done! With Textile, there’s no real markup to write except to go back and wrap things up in the slide divs. If I know exactly what I want to say, I can go from idea to completed presentation in about 10 minutes.\
    Here’s what a typical slide looks like:

    <code><div class="slide">
h1. My Slide Title
* This point is spectacular
* Can I get an "Ooooh" from the audience?
* Give yourselves a round of applause!
</div></code>

    And the best part is, they all come out as standards-compliant, semantic little presentations without me having to write all the markup (which as fun as it is, takes time to get right, time that I’d rather spend thinking about what I’m going to say).\
    You’re free to use the archive template and make your own little presentations site. If you do, send me a link!

  • Supernova 2006, AIM Pages and Microformats

    It looks like I’ll be presenting a short overview of AIM Pages and our use of microformats at Supernova. That means I’ll be in San Francisco from probably June 20th-24th. Who wants to do dinner?