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Jack Slocum and team are nearing release of Ext 2.0. There is a preview up on the Ext blog. I've been bouncing back and forth between MooTools and Ext 1.1 for a few projects I'm building. MooTools is small and a little easier for me to wrap my head around if I'm just trying to drop in a specific widget. Ext is much larger, and at least to my mind is a more all or nothing proposition. So you probably wouldn't want to get involved if you just need one little effect. But I'm strangely excited about Ext 2.0 and I have one project that has been waiting for it's release. The previews confirm what I expected - it looks amazing. For building a full blown web application with just HTML, javascript, and CSS (i.e., no Flash) there doesn't seem to be anything else that can touch it.
Big iPod Apple event today. So far Wall St. didn't like it, sending the stock down about 4%. Not sure what they are smoking down there in the financial district. To my mind Apple couldn't be executing better.
This was Palm CEO Ed Colligan in early November 2006:
Responding to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff at a Churchill Club breakfast gathering Thursday morning, Colligan laughed off the idea that any company - including the wildly popular Apple Computer - could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone sector.Now flash forward to July 2007 and behold, the IPhone outsells all other smartphones. In the meantime Palm announced the much ridiculed Foleo which they have just canceled before it ever hit the shelves.
"We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone," he said. "PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in."
I have a Palm Treo and really like it. And Palm previously dominated the handheld organizer space. But they have lost just about everything at this point. Supposedly they are working on an all new linux powered software platform, and that sounds good to me, but at the same time it sounds like something you might try as a last ditch effort. I'm guessing it will be too little too late for Palm.
Pretty good Paul Graham coding essay: Holding a Program in One's Head. Nothing earth shattering, but it seems right to me.
A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on. Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will.
Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 2 introduces H.264 video playback. I'm not a huge Flash fan, but in general this should be a very good thing. Also, it should now play .m4a audio, and the bug with mp3 playback at certain sampling rates has been eliminated. These last two are good news for the music project. Now if only I could find someone to build my dream AIR audio player.
Finally I convinced someone to buy an iPhone. W00t! Going this afternoon to pick it up. Overly detailed report to follow.
Detailed retracing of a linux server crack.
I saw the play Frost Nixon last night. Frank Langella won a Tony for his portrayal of Nixon and it's not hard to believe after seeing him. Of course Nixon gives an actor a lot to work with. The play was one act with no intermission which, to me at least, seems like the right way to do it. Of course it's hard to watch and not think of parallels to our own political times. But the thing that stood out to me the most is just how stupid Bush seems compared to Nixon. They both did (and in Bush's case continue to do) some bad things, but it's just not conceivable to me that someone in the future will write a play about Bush. Or that someone will win a Tony for playing his character. There just isn't anything of substance there. A screwball comedy maybe, but not drama. I'm no fan of Nixon, of course, but at least there was some substance there.
Apparently they are going to make it into a movie. I think it might translate well.
My digitalmediatree email is not working at the moment. Trying to sort it out. Please use my datamantic or gmail addresses if you want to reach me.
Walt Mossberg (Wall St. Journal) and David Pogue (NYTimes) both like the iPhone. They and a few other journalists have had test units for some time. They were freed tonight to publish their thoughts. It's going to be interesting to see how the virtual touch screen keyboard plays out. This is the area that "real" smartphone users (blackberry, treo, etc...) have expressed a lot of skepticism about. Both Mossberg and Pogue say you need about a week to adjust to the iPhone's keyboard, with Pogue still not being very happy even then, while Mossberg seems to have had the "I get it" conversion moment. Anyway, expect a lot of press this week.