Archive for December, 2006

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setTimeout(WAY_LATE,WakeyWakeyDave)

Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

Via Simon Willison, I see that Dave Winer demonstrates how remarkably far out of touch he is with the state of internet programming.

JSON has been promoted for a couple of years now, and has been visibly gaining traction among the net programming community for at least 18 months. It’s quite telling that it has only recently filtered through Dave’s navel-focused gaze.

And before any analysis, he’s quick to dismiss and belittle it:

God bless the re-inventers

Gotta love em, because there’s no way they’re going to stop breaking what works, and fixing what don’t need no fixing.

…and to show us the particular shade of his sunglasses:

I figured, sheez it can’t be that hard to parse, so let’s see what it looks like, and damn, IT’S NOT EVEN XML!

As Dr Phil asks — What were they thinking?

Sheez, Dave, maybe they were thinking “I don’t care to use XML” – those presumptuous philistines. Let the XML infidels be slaughtered:

Who did this travesty? Let’s find a tree and string them up. Now.

Chief infidel Douglas Crockford’s comment is worth framing:

I liked the part where Dr Phil said “What were they thinking?” I asked the same question when I first saw XML being proposed as a data format. There were obviously better alternatives.

The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one.

Dave leaves the best line for last:

Silicon Valley is made up of little boys pulling their puds, constantly making love to each other, pretending the world revolves around them.

…the all-too-easy inference of course being that it actually revolves around Dave Winer, chief pud-puller, making love only to himself.

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GMail on Path to Perfection

Wednesday, December 13th, 2006

Michael Arrington thinks that Gmail Just Got Perfect with its new Mail Fetcher feature. Jackson West demurs to that notion, citing almost-there and missing features that make Gmail fall somewhat shy of perfection.

Either way, GMail continues to impress me. I’ve been using it extensively over the past couple of weeks since I turned my main domain mail over to Google Apps for Your Domain.

I’ve used Outlook Express (OE) as my mail client for a long time. I’ve avoided the full Outlook client because it doesn’t give me access to raw messages for debugging, and well, OE gives me almost everything I need without any of the bloat and dreck.

One of the (very few) drawbacks to avoiding Outlook is that OE doesn’t support the meeting invitations that people who use Outlook and Exchange send around. I get a badly formatted text version of the invitation and have to manually respond.

I got just such an invitation yesterday in my GMail inbox. I responded manually, but later in the day I noticed that my Google Calendar had been populated with the meeting and upon opening the calendar slot, I was given a form to respond to the invitation.

So, maybe GMail’s not yet perfect, but it’s really coming along.