Valhalla Island

The term web 2.0 has become so cliche that people hating it because it’s cliche has become cliche. That’s why I’ve avoided talking about it. I was just so sick of seeing the phrase ‘web 2.0′ displayed on my screen, whether it was talking about it’s greatness, trying to tell me what it really means or just shooting it down as though it killed their own mother. It was the quickest rise and fall of a buzz word in the history of buzz words rising and falling.

What frustrates me the most isn’t the word, it’s what it might be referring to. It feels like I learnt PHP on the exact day that it was superseded by Ruby on Rails. That, and I ignored Javascript. I didn’t just ignore it either, I didn’t like it and for no good reason. It annoyed me that I had finally learnt something that made me feel like I was inline with internet technology and then the next day I was a complete two or three languages behind.

I want to know if the people at Flickr and 37 Signals feel like they are on the absolute bleeding edge of internet technology? Do they go to work each day with the peace of mind they don’t need to learn anything new to keep up. But really, how does anyone keep up at all? If I start learning Ruby today by the time I’m done there will be something new and my knowledge will be useless. I want to know if Ruby is the future. I just want things to settle down for a little while, let the server-side language boom plateau for a little while.

All the javascript effects aren’t even produced by new technology, it’s just plain old javascript used in a way that it never has been before.

When the E-Mail section of Saturday’s Weekend Shopper starts talking about ‘web 2.0′ you know that it’s old news.

If you make a website today that has refreshing pages you’re using old technology. You’re using the industry standard that’s used by the huge majority of internet programmers, but it’s still old. The trick is to be one step ahead the trends but that takes guess work.

So here’s my guess, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) are the future. Once browser’s start supporting the SVG standard the internet will be in it’s ideal place. Pages, including pages filled with large amounts of graphics will barely ever weigh more than 1 or 2kb. As internet connections get faster and page sizes get tiny, page refreshing will become irrelevant because it will be closer to instant than a page without refreshing using AJAX. Screen resolution, browser window width and operating system will also become irrelevant as everything will scale perfectly whether on dual 30″ LCDs, a 14″ laptop, 3.5″ PDA or 1.5″ Mobile phone screen. And because of pages only being text, everything will be more accessible than ever.

It will be SVG for the client-side anyway, it will sort of become the new javascript but it will be so much more important. Images will finally be dynamic. What’s used on the server side I don’t think will matter. Because all that will be getting parsed is text everything will be ligthning fast and the Rails framework won’t be required to perform effects and asynchronous calls. I’ve also read that PHP is faster than Ruby on Rails. I don’t think it will matter which one is used on the server as long as it’s not ASP.

My friend Anton Crace makes music. For a genre I generally don’t like I think he’s very good. He took time out of his busy music making schedule to suprise me with a banner for this site so I figure if I’m not going to put it up permanently I’ll at least put it in a post.

It’s linked to his Music MySpace so you can listen to some of his stuff there if you’d like.

I love Australia.

I’m currently working on a project that requires a “What You See Is What You Get” editor. I just needed something very simple as it was only going to be used once and dosen’t require much editing power. I like the editor used in 2.0 and found out it came from tinyMCE.

I imagined it to be a single javascript file, a few images and a style sheet. I thought you’d just attach it to a textarea and it’d do all the work and the actual output to be sent to the database would be plain code. I thought all it would do is put a mask over the content in the text area. I haven’t throughly checked it out yet so that still might be what it does. But what amazed me is that the zipped package you download unzips to a massive 6.38MB.

6.38MB for a simple WYSIWYG editor. So much for tinyMCE, it should be called hugeMCE.

I know I said I wasn’t going to upgrade. I’m just sick of waiting an eternity for posts to actually post even after everything had been done on the back end.

2.0 wasn’t always smooth sailing though. I decided that seeing as though I was upgrading I may as well throw it all in it’s own subdirectory with simple PHP redirect and this whole place would be just a little tidier. That was a big mistake. Upgrading took all day. I encountered a ridiculous amount of problems. I even ran a 1.5 database roll-back script and I think that just messed things up a little more. In the end it was a miracle I didn’t lose everything.

After the ordeal of upgrading was over, everything was fine. I’ve been using 2.0 for around two weeks now and it’s wonderful. I love it.

I think it’s a mixture of a thousand little things that add up to make the whole new experience more enjoyable. Little things like having a title box that is actually the size of a title. The WYSIWYG editor is very good, I hardly use it but I much prefer how it handles everything. I like that I can be confident it’s going to produce good code. I love the flash and fade of yellow on the post saved boxes.
Being able to add a category while you’re writing a post is really handy.

I know this post contradicts nearly everything I wrote previously about 2.0 but after using it for a few weeks I can’t get enough of it. Writing posts is so much fun now. I’m always looking for an excuse to write about something now.

The other day Courtney and I did some painting.

It’s pretty much the best painting ever. The plan is to put it on a wall in my house but we’re still considering offers over $10,000,000.

I came accross Full Bleed t-shirts a little while ago when I was obsessed with Rob Dobi’s Illustration. The shirts were never as good as his illustration but I think that this latest season of shirts is way better than any of his previous work. I’d like to buy them all.

I was dropping my sister at Cold Rock, just driving at a normal speed. There was barely a car around. Out of nowhere I saw a pink and grey Gallah flying around in my peripheral vision. It was coming straight for me. It wasn’t flying accross the street, it was about 50 metres ahead coming straight for me. At first I sped up a little because it looked like I’d be able to go straight past it if I did. I even veered to the right to make sure I’d miss it.

In the next half a second it flew left too, only enough to fly directly into my windshield with a huge bang.

I hate hitting animals, it makes me feel terrible. I quickly looked back hoping that I had killed it and it wasn’t alive with broken wings and a ribcage or something. I couldn’t see it anywhere though.

Why would a bird do this? We hit enough animals in cars without having them commit suicide. I still feel terrible about it. But it flew into my car, I would have missed it but it flew right at me.

Everyone is always bitching about how terrible IE is, how broken their layout is in IE and how everyone should switch from browser created by the devil to the browser sent from the heavens, Firefox.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like Firefox, even though, like IE, it has it’s own bugs and is not 100% standards compliant. I can live with that though, and that’s why I don’t have a problem with IE. The point is that it supports a massive majority of standards, just like Firefox.

Everyone should stop complaining about the small amount of things IE does wrong and rejoice over the fact it’s come a long way since the 4.0 browser wars days, a very long way. Sure, 5 got the box model wrong (and a lot of other things) but the 5 days are behind us now and the truth is that 6 has good standards support. Better yet, they know how important standards compliance is and it’s a huge priority for them with IE 7.

It can’t serve XML pages, doesn’t support RSS in a good way and there’s no tabbed browsing but I see these this as lacking features rather than doing things wrong. I’m sure these features will be added in the latest release anyway.

Maybe it’s just me but 95% of the time pages I code from scratch will look identical in IE and Firefox without any hacks. I think that’s pretty good.

When I first visited Ionfish through 9 rules I was very impressed with the minimalistic design, especially the cool fish header.

Then Benedict wrote a post to tell the story of the fish being a real life mobile and not just a photoshop creation. With the post came a PDF template to make the fish yourself. At first, I saw it and thought what a great idea but nothing more. I went back a few days later and looked at the PDF and it occured to me to make it. So I did.

Benedict asked if I could upload the photos. So here they are:

I like the one in front of my curtain, it makes it look like they’re swimming in the ocean. It would have been nice to use some thick graphite paper like the originals but I just used what I had.

Now I have the problem of deciding where to put them. I wanted them in my room but then I remembered having anything to do with water in the bedroom is bad Feng Shui, so I haven’t decided yet.

I have a great time at Dad’s for the weekend and I can’t believe how far behind I am on all the internet’s happenings. Two and a half days on the internet seems to be the equivalent of a century in exo-internet life. But here’s a bit of a round-up:

• For the day’s before I left I was reading Podz venture into Linux (via Ubuntu) from XP. It’s been really interesting. The last three days he’s decided he’s hated it 3 times and liked it once. Definately worth reading the last 5 days worth of posts.
• There’s a massive abundance of quality links on Daringfireball.
• New writing from university students Kyle and Joey.
• Ionfish gets a pretty re-align and is now available in a physical form.
• I’ve barely read it but it seems Tapestry is IBM’s answer to Ruby on Rails. While also being very much open source.
• Lots of new Vista News. The jokes have already started. I don’t like the transparency and if there’s no way to turn it off then I will be mad.

Well that’s about it. Heaps of new and interesting stuff.

When I made the first version (0.3) of this little program I always had plans to make it web-based. After starting from scratch in PHP I’m finished and there are even a few extra features, like the ability to add a class if you want.

Future plans are to make it able to upload a zip file of all the photos you’d like a thumbnailed gallery of. Then use some PHP modules to actually create the enitre gallery, HTML, CSS, images, directory structure and all.

So anyway you can go to it’s little home page. Or you can go straight to the program.

If you find it helpful, can suggest improvments or even want to help me work on future versions then email me.

Although it’s been out for almost a week, Wordpress 2.0 is finally, officially announced. I’ve already read and commented so much about why I’m not upgrading (at least not for a while) that I can’t really be bothered explaining the reasons again. There has been a lot of major WP community people not upgrading and it’s caused a little bit of an uproar.

For a few days now I have had it installed on a subdomain because I just had to check it out. For over an hour I played and played and just found absolutely nothing that made me think that I just have to upgrade. For starters I don’t like the colour scheme. When creating something for everyone the colours should be kept as neutral as possible. It’s not worth the few people that will really like it when there’s going to be others that dislike it. With neutral colours no one thinks “wow! this is great” but at the same time nobody dislikes it either.

The whole AJAX writing interface doesn’t do anything for me. I really like the 1.5.2 interface and I like the simple and advanced option. Two things that I do like about the updated writing interface is the ability to add categories on the fly, this makes it feel a lot more like tagging. Being able to resize the text box while you’re writing is nice too.

What disapointed me the most was there is no upgrade to the front end at all. No extra features built in for what everyone else sees. Just the same old Kubrick. Not that there’s anything wrong with Kubrick, I was just really expecting something new.

While I wouldn’t upgrade, if I was starting a new blog I would definately use 2.0. And that’s exactly what might be happening. I thought I’d be with this theme for a while but the inspiration of shadows, squible, K2 and binary bonsai is too much to ignore.

The redesign is going to be a complete overhaul of everything. It’s all going to be done behind the scenes, not live like my last few redesigns. I’m going to work on it until it’s 100% complete with everything working perfectly before I release it. It will be a hybrid of k2, squible and invader. But will be so different from them all that you’ll never be able to tell. I have big plans.

Happy New Year.