Dave Winer pointed to this list of billionaires.
“Have I met any billionaires?” I wondered. “Yes”, I thought, “some of those guys at the Web 2.0 conference probably were billionaires.” But I was curious, and it was a long list, so I wrote a little tool to check. Now you too can check a web page for billionaires. Quick and dirty, regular expressions, etc.
Does using HTTP GET to two different web servers count as a web services mash-up?
I came across this today (via Planet Gnome): the Virtual Bugzilla Server. It’s a packaged version of Bugzilla, which isn’t anything too exciting in itself. But what’s interesting it the method of distribution: a VMware image, playable in the free VMware Player, that includes not only the Bugzilla application but an entire Linux operating system.
There several advantages to this distribution method:
Of course, there’s an existing way to accomplish the same thing: Install your software on a server and sell it as an “appliance”. That’s what we do at JotSpot with the Jot Box, as do many other companies including Google. Appliances are cool because you can match the software to appropriately powered hardware, and all the IT department has to do is plug in the power and network cables. But for a lot of cases it’s overkill, and it limits your customer base to people who can afford to buy the hardware.
From my perspective, that makes the VMware image distribution model very attractive. In fact, I think in the future companies are going to expect to get their enterprise software as images instead of appliances (or maybe even instead of installable software). I can imagine the day when every company will have a machine or two running the free VMware server, and all they’ll have to do is download and install a new image file to have a new virtual server up and running on their network. And everybody wins. The software company doesn’t have to mess around with hardware, and they can still charge big bucks for their product. The customer can easily install and manage applications and combine servers as needed. VMware gets to have their image file format become a standard means of distributing enterprise software. And Linux gets installed more places, even on top of Windows.
Of the many cool little independent stores here in Portland, my favorite is the ferdinand home store. We shop at ferdinand, we give gifts from ferdinand, we hope to get gifts from ferdinand. Check out their selection of weird and wonderful t-shirts, cards, soft heads, handmade underwear, and various items screenprinted with their iconic drumming squirrel. You won’t be disappointed.
We’ve just started rolling out a new improved version of the JotSpot Wiki. Instead of looking like this…
…JotSpot Wikis now look like this:
Aside from looking a lot better (JotSpot css hacker Diane Soini affectionately labeled our old design “the Blue Tabs of Death”) the new interface is a lot easier to navigate. The sidebar in particular is a big upgrade: instead of static content, you’ve got your own list of favorite pages, plus recent changes. It’s really easy to add a page to your Favorites:
Screencast geeks: that’s an animated gif made with Byzanz on Linux.
We’ve also added some dojo-powered ajax goodness around the UI. For example, you can add comments and upload attachments without leaving the page (click the link for another mini screencast).
We’re currently serving up the redesign to new accounts. Existing customers will be updated soon (we’re doing additional testing to make sure we don’t step on the toes of people who have customized the old interface). It’s been fun to work on making our wiki better, and I can tell you that there we have lots more cool features in the the pipeline. Watch for more in the coming weeks.
I just read John Gruber’s typically well-thought-out summary of the the MacWorld Expo. One thing he said struck me as a little strange, though. Talking about the differences between what iWeb can publish to .Mac vs. to a static folder, he writes:
The slideshow feature for sets of photos uses an entirely different implementation when you publish to a folder, because the fancier .Mac version relies on Ajax, which in turn relies on server software that only runs on .Mac. This isn’t a complaint — it wouldn’t be possible for Apple to create an Ajax-powered slideshow that could run on any arbitrary server.
Hmm, is that so? Does Ajax really require a specialized server backend? Not according to my understanding. Ajax describes the way a browser communicates with a web server, without saying anything about the way the web server is handling requests. You can even play with Ajax on your local hard drive, loading pages from file:// URLs.
So I was curious what Apple was doing with Ajax that made their slideshow only work on .Mac. I took a look at the source of Gruber’s example slideshow (click the “Start Slideshow” link to get the actual slideshow window, which I’m not linking to directly because it resizes your browser). Doesn’t look too complicated – a couple of javascript files, and initilization code with the full URLs of every single image. Nothing you need a specialized server for so far.
Next, I copied the code of his slideshow onto this page on fettig.net, and edited the initialization code to load some images from my flickr account. The result was a slideshow that works – mostly. The images load, the slideshow plays back fine, and the navigation controls work as expected. But instead of having a reflected version underneath each image, you get a squished version of the image iteself. And the thumbnails at the top of the page aren’t scaled as nicely. The .Mac javascript appends special arguments to the end of image URLs – (transform=reflect and transform=mini) expecting the server to serve up altered versions of those images. But since it’s just a normal static server, it doesn’t, so you don’t get the reflection/thumbnail images in the page.
So there is a special web application running at .Mac to facilitate these slideshows. It is not, however, doing anything special related to Ajax. The .Mac servers are doing two things: serving static files, and serving transformed versions of images. But those transformations could have just as easily been done in advance by iWeb itself while it was generating the slideshow. Or they could have done client-side reflection effects in the latest browsers, while degrading gracefully in older browsers. So there’s no technical reason why Apple couldn’t have made the fancier Ajax slideshow work from a static directory.
The logical conclusion is that Apple wants to encourage people to sign up for .Mac, so they make the content on .Mac look better. I don’t have a problem with that, and there are likely other reasons why iWeb is going to be at its best when matched with a .Mac account. But it doesn’t have anything to do with Ajax.
