What I want for christmas

clicking through to the mozilla store I stumbled upon a cool t-shirt and decided it should go on my wishlist.

web 3.0

So web 2.0 is all the buzz, but what about web 3.0. As I have said many times I dont like the term web 2.0, and so I can not say that I am particularly enthused by web 3.0. But I atleast like the sentiment behind it, that is, that web 2.0 is just a passing fad and web 3.0 is where the real serious stuff will get solved. Here what Google's Eric Smidt had to say about it.

The problem of context

In reference to this article "What Orkut really needs", I have only one thing to say, and that in somes ways it reminds of the problem of context. Earlier in the year while mucking around the university of waterloo's website most notedly the Soshin Research group site, where my friend does research for his Masters degree I stumbled upon the idea of pervasive or ubiquitous computing. If you have never heard those terms before, they simply refer to the ability to embed more software into our environment and thus allowing our mobile devices to talk to the environment more effectively. To give an example this, it would be like stepping into a meeting and your phone knowing to change its status to silent or when listening to music answering your phone triggers the stereo system or TV to automatically lower it's volume.

How does this all relate to orkut? Well the problem outlined by the article is that orkut doesn't seem to be catching so well in the US but does much better in countries with other languages, most notably Brazil, which makes sense since allegedly orkut is a portuguese word that means "land of happiness". Should orkut be rebranded? Well in America, yes, but in other countries the name is just fine. Which presents another problem in context that is applications that are country aware or internationalization. You would imagine that your mobile phone should know that when you are in england you use pounds, and certain slang words mean different things and can talk to environment applications in england just as easily as it can talk them in whatever country you are coming from. The same would apply if you traveled to China or Israel. Interesting problem I think!

Gears, Zend and checkout!

So Its another weekend and I find myself battling it out with the Zend PHP framework. This has got to be the worse experience I have had using it, maybe I have been a bit too zealous seeking its wide adoption at my workplace. The fit is not yet over however. I still think I will pull off what I am trying to build with it. I need to, so I can present it to my group at work.

I did some more reading on google gears today and also am thinking that I might have been too anxious and giddy about seeing its wide adoption as well. It seems we might be a ways off from seeing a fully adopted standard towards offline browsing. I can cross my fingers and hope though. What was discouraging was that most of the nifty features in google gears like worker pools and local server caching were not available in the beta download. I had to get the development version from the project repository to get those working. Not very encouraging, but after I got that I still managed to like what I saw.

Google checkout was among the things I did some research on. I had in my mind started thinking about mobile applications that scanned RFID tagged goods that could suggest you purchase them online at cheaper costs. Such applications would then ask you to pay. I thought it would be cool if you didnt have to fill out any payment information but could just click a button to purchase and then I remembered that the google checkout project is aiming at doing just that. It seems someone is a step ahead of me.

Browser based apps that run offline!

People are really taking web applications a lot more seriously. Enter connectionless browser apps! So far there are a few frameworks and tools out their to give your browser the ability to run specially enables applications offline. This means we could see a lot of applications moving to the web. It makes sense though. Who really wants to download every application, especially those that are tied to the internet. I have to try out any of these frameworks for myself. I am thinking of giving google gears a whirl. So far it seems to be leading the back and they are pushing for an open framework for writing such applications that would be cross browser and cross platform. That would be nice!

Google Web Toolkit

Last night I had a date with google web toolkit. I have played with it before I was out to do a refresher course. So I got the latest version, now at 1.4 and I said I am going to figure this thing out and figure it out I did, well almost. I was able to use it to get a simple javascript application up and was trying to do some remote request stuff, which I was having problems with all the way up until I decided to quit and call it a night.

so what is GWT? Its a java framework for building javascript applications. Not everybody wants to take the time to learn how to write javascript, but just about everybody wants to get in on the new Rich Internet Application buzz. The solution is to create a compiler that takes Java (the most ubiquitous computer language) and converts it to an application that you can run in your browser with Ajax and All. I thought it was pretty neat. The interface for creating buttons and panels and labels and texboxes reminds of me of programming Java Swing. So if you are a great Java UI programmer you will have little trouble getting up and running with google web toolkit.

Google Tech Talks

One of my fondest discoveries on google code is Google Tech Talks. I just subscribed to the rss feed in my google reader. I have however noticed that some of the talks are really above my head or maybe just not relevant enough to me. I was just watching a snippet from "The Theoretical Limits of Statistical High Dimensional Nearest Neighbor Algorithms". I was suprised that I actually could make out some of the sentences in his opening statements, but then I remembered that I do have a B.Sc. in Computer Science. Thank God for that!

Google Code

At the beginning of 2006 I declared that I had 2 goals for the year and they were to work for google and become financially free. Financially free? ha! Work for google? ha! ha! I am always the dreamer. I did manage to post my resume on their website and it took them maybe 3 weeks to tell me that I wasnt suited for any of the positions they had open. I take this to mean one of two things. Either my resume actually made it past their filters and was reviewed by a pair of real human eyes or the backlog on submitted resumes was so much that it took their software that long to kick me back a response. I imagine it must have been the former since the computing power at google can handle millions of page views per day. It must mean that my resume was reviewed by a pair of eyes. As for financially free, well I did atleast became the richest I have ever been in my life at the time which means that my expenses were less than my income and my networth kept climbing upwards a trend which for the most part continues, but investing, I did too little.

All of this to say that the google code website is cool! Now, I really sound like I work for google. But I found code.google.com long before it got popular and have been tracking the development of all kinds of open source frameworks for google services. They even started a repository for open source development using google technology. Infact I think I will head over there now to see what I can dig up.

Frameworks

Frameworks are great I think. I have been spending the weekend working on a tool for work using the Yahoo UI framework for javascript client applications and the Zend PHP framework. Both take alot of the burden of writing certain tools from scratch. I am particularly pleased withe the Front Controller implementation in the Zend Framework. I have probably re-invented that wheel a million times over in my development efforts.

Web 2.0 Banana Boy

To be honest I was once in love with the buzz word "Web 2.0" and jumped on the band wagon of web 2.0 evangelists at the beginning of 2006. I was telling my friends about it and even introducing some of the related concepts to my work place.

Today I have jumped on the bandwagon of people who are more reticent about the buzz word. In fact, I now belong to the group of people who do not like buzz words in general. They make great marketing tools in one sense by getting the word out that something innovative is happening, but they are horrible at really getting people to understand what the implications are and in many cases people know the buzz word and regurgitate it profusely without knowing what they are really talking about.

An old friend of mine, upon realising that I was a web developer, coined the phrasing "web 2.0 banana boy" to describe me. I had a good laugh at the word and thought to myself that it was pretty novel. I am the farthest thing from a banana boy, as I think she meant by the phrase. She probably meant it in reference to my Jamaican background. I have never really been keen on being Jamaican and thats not just because I wasnt born there, but maybe its something in the air there that doesnt agree with me. But I must say Jamaica is a cool place. I don't mind being associated with the island and as most Jamaicans I take pride in hearing about all the great things Jamaicans are doing around the world. So web 2.0 banana boy it is! Sounds catchy I think.

Since I am a "web 2.0" developer and have found a certain level of sustained interest in it, particularly in "business 2.0" another annoying buzzword which simply relates to business models created around this web 2.0 buzz, I have decided to write more often on the subject as I attempt to sharpen my skills in these nascent ideologies.