Alex Barnett blog : silverlight

Social Clouds, XML 10 Years Old, and Honourable Mentions

alexbarnett — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 13:51:00 GMT

The Social Cloud

Kevin Marks is a software engineer at Google, was principal engineer for Technorati and one of the founders of Microformats. In this video Kevin talks about the big picture re: the phenomenon of online social networks in a presentation called The Social Cloud. Great backgrounder to the topic. More Lift videos here.

My Open ID?

Chris Brogen asked Question about OpenID:

"I’ve chosen to use the Wordpress.com installation of OpenID. I tied it to my Wordpress.com account and have so far used it in only two places. I’m thinking that every time I offer up an OpenID, I’ll point to that one. So far so good, right? ( To get up to speed on OpenID, go here).

What happens if Wordpress.com folds? What happens if they change their mind and start charging me, or I leave them for someone else, or whatever?"

Good question, to which you'll find multiple useful answers provided in the post's comments.

Semantic web enablement

The XML spec first public draft was November '96, the final release as a 1.0 was Feb 1998. XML was ten years old Feb 10, 2008. Tim Bray provides a history of the people involved and the events leading up to the birth of XML in his XML People.

Semantic news discovery

Silobreaker "provides relevance by looking at the data it finds like a person does. It recognises people, companies, topics, places and keywords; understands how they relate to each other in the news flow, and puts them in context for the user."

I need to play more to find out how useable / useful this service is, but I like the idea.

Honourable mention

RIA Weekly #06 - What’s Behind Code-Behind, JavaFX with Adobe tools, Microsoft/Yahoo!, and other acquisitions. The Redmonk podcast with Michael Coté and Ryan Stewart (Adobe). Topics include Kevin Lynch as new Adobe CTO, JavaFX vs. Silverlight vs. Air, code-behind annoyance, Google's Android, and the Oracle / BEA deal. I get an honourable mention on the show.

Random but good

Visual Music Instruments - via Kevin Kelly. No manual required, but it would probably help.

The Web Standards Fluster Cuck

alexbarnett — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:58:00 GMT

Clucking bell, Molly Holzshlag really has kicked the web standards beehive with a blog post expressing her great discontent with the W3C and WaSP.

Ridiculously Inadequate Backgrounder

Now, before you head off and read the post and the 60+ comments, here's a bit of background on why I find this post of interest (and rather depressing):

I've been following Molly's work for a while now. She first came on to my radar when after providing an update on the progress made between the Microsoft IE, VS and .NET teams and the Web Standards Project (WaSP). That was in 2005. Then in January 2007, I noted Molly's announcement that she had left WASP to join the IE team on a contract basis to work on standards and interoperability issues. I was pleased to see the IE team was making a real effort.

Entirely seperately, but not entirely, in October of 2006 Tim Berners-Lee called for the reinvention of HTML. His call to action caused a bit of a hoo-ha at the time. What's that got to do with Molly? Well, as noted, some of the reactions to TBL's post varied from skepticism, to 'About time!' - and here's the connection with Molly's latest post - to what role the WHATWG will play in what presumably could be a competing effort to the HTML 5 (or XHTML5) spec in progress at the time. However, I was pleased to hear TBL's public calling for progress and hoped we might see some of this progrss after HTML's 8-year stagnation. Then in July 2007, we had the news that HTML5 was being considered by the W3C.

Confused? You should be.

So after my ridiculously inadequate backgrounder, you can now go ahead and read Molly's post, along with the contributions be the cast of characters (the commenters), some of whom are affiliated with various competing factions wrestling with the future of web standards and HTML, who somehow manage to converge the various threads (now including a Fear of Air, the Semantic Web, microformats, Silverlight, XML, community, accessibility, transparency and who-knows-what-else) into what looks like a complete political mess (read: fluster cuck).

Yes, it is depressing,, but such is the business of web standards agreement. A messy business indeed...There's even a YouTube video covering the drama - HTML5 trailer - Find your Hero.

Thanks to Thomas Vander Wal for the link to Molly's post.

Salesforce - Marc Benioff keynote

alexbarnett — Mon, 21 May 2007 17:43:00 GMT

I'm here at the Salesforce Dev Conference in Santa Clara this morning and listening to Marc Benioff keynote who started his session 30 mins ago.

First he opened up with acknowledgement that there is a the Google / Salesforce rumour flying around this morning but explained that he wouldn't comment on it today - not confirming nor denying...So no 'official' news there.

I'm interested to hear how he explains the Salesforce SOA announcement this morning. Will post thoughts here later...

Update - 11:00 PDT

Adobe's Kevin Lynch is showing off an Apollo app running on a Mac, one as local front-end UI to Salesforce.com API, another app as a UI to ebay webservices and using local Mac resouces as an occasionally connected app, built using Flex. Video, music, etc. Pretty slick. Seems more and more to me that Silverlight / Flash / Apollo are on for huge developer mindshare battles over the next few months/years.

Update - 11:20 PDT

blah, blah.

Update - 11:35 PDT

Salesforce SOA...here we go...

My understanding of what he just said ~~(I didn't catch his name)~~ Adam Gross (VP, Developer Marketing): So you will be able to connect external, 3rd party webservices (FedEx, Google, Oracle, Hoovers, etc) and wire these up on the Apex platform, coded in Apex code. This then creates a new Apex code layer...exposed as a new API you can program against. "SOA as a service".

The scenario they are showing: Salesforce app connects to an Oracle DB to query customer data and invoice details through a WS layer, then importing that data in the Salesforce DB. Then use this new customer record and use some of this customer record data to query against a Dunn and Bradstreet service and a Zip code service, which again it imports into the SF DB. Then Apex code is generated that can be executed on Apex platform. The wiring experience is not a dev UX environment, but an html form based with some Ajax interaction - more of a business user interface to wire stuff up. Nice.

Update - 11:53 PDT

Salesforce SOA expected to be ready for developer preview in August.

Benioff is back on stage. Is reminding everyone he started as a dev, talking about his ealry days in the games industry, telling some story about 2 dev machines as Macs - wired together by cables, one acting as a compiler, another acting as...oh whatever...the point is that is how he met Guy Kawaski...he's on next.

Update - 11:56 PDT

Guy Kawaski is on stage. In response to Benioff's story - "You are so full of crap, Marc".

Update - 12:40pm PDT

Guy Kawasaki's talk was advice to entrepreneurs. Entertaining. Partially random notes I took...

1. Make meaning
- Curve 1: Ice Harvesting
- Curve 2: Ice Factory
- Curve 3: Refrigerator
"measurements are only statistics, and statistics lie"

2. Rolle the DICEE
- Deep: Fanning (Reef) - sneaker soles that open bottles
Intelligent: BF-104 Flashlight (Panasonic) - batteries
Complete: Lexus - more than...
Elegant: Nano (Apple)
Emotive: Harley Davidson

3. Make Mantra (piss-take of mission statement creation excercise. Wendy's as example - "the mission of Wnedy is to deliver suprior quality products that blah, blah, blah"

Should be:

Wendys: Healthy fast food
FedEx Peace of mind
Nike: Authentic athletic perf
Target: Democratizes desgin

4. Get going
- Think different
- Polarize people (don't be afraid to)
- Find a few sole mates (Steve and Woz, Bill had Steve)

5. Define a business model
- Be very specific (your customer's money is actually your money, they are just temporarily holding for you)
- Keep it simple
- Ask women (men want to kill things, women do'nt have this flaw)

6 Niche thyself
2 axis:
X - Value to customer
Y - Ability to provide unique product service

Get it high, and to right. Smart Car, Trek Lime, LG Kimchi refrigerator
low, left - dotcom
high, left - stupid
low, right -

7. Follow the 10/20/30 rule
"drowning is a growth industry"
10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font

8. Hire infected people
- Ignore the irrelevant (I loved Macs)
- Hire better than youself (bozo explosion)
- Apply the shopping center test

9. Lower the barriers to adoption
- Let a hundred flowers blossom (postscript save Apple)
- Find the true infuencers (the air is thin at the top)
- Ebrace your evanglists

10. Don't let the bozos grind you down

Blog - http://blog.guykawasaki.com

Keynote over....