brentashley

I think weather.com needs to rethink their popup ad campaign strategy this week.

Robert Scoble tells a story about running into Aaron Boodman:

Then Nick introduced us and said “he wrote Greasemonkey.” I answered “I’m not worthy.”

This reminded me of the time I first met Aaron, at the dinner thrown by Adaptive Path and O’Reilly at the end of the first day of their Ajax Summit back in May. I saw him across the room and went over to say hello, since we had had some online interaction in Remote Scripting circles some years ago.

Later, after having dinner seated beside Brendan Eich, creator of the Javascript language and Chief Architect at Mozilla, I saw Aaron coming our way and took the opportunity to introduce the two of them. “Aaron, this is Brendan Eich; Brendan, this is Aaron Boodman”. They reach across me to shake hands, and Brendan says “Wow, Hi Aaron, I love your work!”.

Humble as they come, Aaron was dumbstruck. He managed to stammer “…I think you have that the wrong way around!”, and then they fell into a rich conversation and I slipped away to mingle.

Tim Aiello has built a network monitoring app using Google Maps and JSRS to make Ajax calls.

Much of the stuff I do day-to-day lately has to do with network monitoring and configuration management for a Canada-wide network of 802.11x wireless sites. This type of map integration could be very useful.

I’m not usually too keen on stealth startups, but with Adam Michela being involved in this SixtySpots project, I’m expecting some really nice development work. Having done some extensive travel-related web development with VFM Interactive‘s rich media offerings, I’m interested in seeing how SixtySpots uses web collaboration and community technology to make the travel planning game more fun and fulfilling.

I finally got the Ajax soccer team cap I ordered on April 20th.

I had hoped to wear it to the Ajax Summit for a bit of fun, but it took 6 weeks to arrive, so now I just have a nice sturdy well-made hat without any abstruse referential attachment unless I start hanging around at web development meetups.

Brett Stimmerman is kicking some major Ajax butt with his Lace chat app.

The real magic in this particular implementation is that it degrades right down as far as browsers that don’t even run Javascript – you’re left having to manually refresh with the Say button, but it still works like a charm. Here’s a screenshot from the Lynx text browser:

Clare and I went to the Michael Buble concert tonight at the Hummingbird Centre in Toronto.

Michael is a terriffic showman – fabulous voice, charismatic presence. He gave a great performance. Highly recommended.

His band was great too, in every respect except the drums (caveat: I’m a drummer of sorts). I’ve seen his band on DVD with another drummer and it was fantastically tight and crisp – working with the brass accents on the big band showcase tunes and swinging to set your foot tapping. I was really looking forward to hearing a really tight Jazz groove.

Unfortunately, they brought a blues shuffle drummer to a Jazz gig. That’s not to say he was bad. He shone brilliantly on shuffle hits “How Sweet It Is” and “This Thing Called Love” as well as any straight time stuff, but he swung like a sack of concrete – I never once felt the urge to tap my foot and that’s rare for me – and hardly a rimshot to be heard in support of the brass accents. Yes there were some good fills and standalone accents, but not a lot of accents coincidental to a running groove. Also, the kit was tuned and miked for rock/blues – you can’t play jazz standards how I expect to hear them without a recognisable crisp ride cymbal. I couldn’t hear the bell of the ride cymbal on the latin tunes either, even though he was using it. It’s too bad because it distracted me from the rest of the show.

I still recommend that you see the show. Unless you’re a pedantic wannabe Jazz drummer you’ll never notice, and Michael Buble’s remarkable talent is worth the price of entry.

I have to say that Greasemonkey is absolutely the coolest thing I’ve seen in years.

Today I used Platypus to build a Greasemonkey user script to remove the “Delete Blog” button from Movable Type‘s admin screen. It’s wayyyy too dangerous sitting right next to the configuration link, even with a confirmation.