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Apr
2
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As I mentioned in my etech notes - APP (Atom Publishing Protocol) needs something to overcome the Chicken and Egg problem; well Tim Bray just announced the something - Google are hosting an APP interoperability event on April 16th and 17th.
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Apr
1
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This is Part 2 (of 3) of my notes from O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, 2007 in San Diego. (see Part 1)
Day two (Tuesday) was supposed to start with Kathy Sierra - but she was forced to cancel due to her online death-threat incident. That was a shame in many ways and means I still haven't had the pleasure of listening to Kathy Sierra talk. Instead of Kathy, Jeff Jonas was back talking about data and how to get the most out of it. A bit of a repeat but he did go into a little more detail.
Next up was Werner Vogels who talked about Amazon Web Services. This was really interesting - Amazon seem to be really leading the way in delivering a web platform vision. It's taken them a decade and $2 billion - if you were thinking of trying this at home. Their goals are to turn huge, fixed costs into lower variable costs, provide unlimited scalability all with datacenter reliability.
Rightscaling is the term Werner used to describe the cost-efective scaling - I heard an example of a startup laying down just $85 for their first 3 months of IT operations; yet could easily dip into the (virtually unlimited) pool to scale up as demand required.
Werner really only talked about the infrastructure layers, which (if you're not familiar with AWS) consists of EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud), Messaging (Simple Queuing Service) and Storage (S3 - Simple Storage Service) - they use metered pricing for everything - eg. $0.15/Gb/Month for storage or $0.10/Instance/Hour for EC2).
The way they do provisioning for EC2 was pretty neat - you basically assign an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) to the physical units you want to provision; the AMI defines the OS and software you want installed (ie. you might choose Fedora, Apache and PHP or Fedora and Ruby on Rails). The AMIs are stored on S3 and you can either define your own or use pre-configured images.
The deployments can be tiered (for security) in the same way you might in your own DC - ie. only the Web or Proxy tier would be exposed to the public internet; whereas the database tier would be completely inaccessible.
I had to skip the rest of the morning due to a couple of meetings but Phil Windley has some great coverage of Jane McGonigal's talk on Creating Alternate Realities.
In the afternoon there was a pretty good demo from Apple showing how easy it is manipulate pictures and video. All you need is a moderately powered super-computer - ie. like the one you're reading this text on.
Jeff Hawkins (inventor of the Palm Pilot and Treo) talked about Hierarchical Temporal Memory - the idea of HTM is to replicate some of the human brains congnitive functions - they learn from exposure to sensory data, discover cause and make predictions based on the sensory data and inferences. Some of this seemed a bit far-fetched - but hey, this is Jeff Hawkins (the inventor of the Palm Pilot and Treo).
Note to self - I must give "On Intelligence" another try - I wasn't sufficiently motivated to get past the first hour.
Much later in the day I attended a couple of (related) BoFs. The first was lead by Joe Gregorio covering APP (Atom Publishing Protocol) - I was interested in knowing where APP was in terms of adoption - it seems there's a bit of a chicken and egg situation - there won't be many clients supporting APP until there are some services and the services won't support APP without clients. Apparently APP (even before the RFC is final). There was some interesting side-chat about APP / Atom / RSS over Jabber / XMPI - apparently IM services aren't censored any where near as much as HTTP and VOIP - so it may well be the only truly universal transport.
Matt Mullenweg of WordPress claimed that WordPress would be supporting APP real soon - so hopefuly the cycle will be broken and the Web will get it's universal publish button. Anyone know when Roller will support APP ?
Next (in the same room) was the Microformats BoF run by Kevin Marks; who, significantly, works at Google. Most of the people in the room (me included) were merely there to learn a bit more but there was one guy (sorry I'm lousy with names) who was using rel-tag extensively. There was some discussion about how well microformats fit with APP; how microformats could deliver some of the power that Metaweb promises. This is another area I need to investigate a little more.
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Nov
6
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Finally - b.s.c now has support for tags. It even does delicious style completion in the built-in editors! I've been waiting for tags for a loooong time. At the weekend I mucked about with the macros for displaying tags - when I get time - I'm going to see if I can produce some tag eye-candy. I also think I'm going to remove the categories - I think they're a bit redundant. That of course means the Dojo fisheye category chooser has to go 
One problem I now have is that I can't post from Performancing as it doesn't support Roller's tags. Wouldn't it be nice if there we're one universal publishing protocol for the web. Wouldn't it be nice if I could choose any tool for publishing to any repository - too much to ask ? Oh wait.
