Javascript Toolkits; Web Programming

So I've started working with the Dojo Toolkit -- mostly because I ran the demo for it, and I was impressed by what it could do out of the box. It does have a very nicely featured demonstration set.

I've mentioned this to some friends and colleagues, and instead of thoughts or experiences with this toolkit, I got back a whole bunch of comments about why I chose to work with Dojo and not "my favorite toolkit, x," where X is either a larger distribution that includes Dojo, or a smaller, more specialized distribution that I've never heard of. The other suggestion I keep hearing is "Prototype".

That I've never heard of 'x', shouldn't be surprising. While I've been doing web pages and light web programming for some years, I've only done very lightweight JavaScript. I've never done anything with Ajax, for example. I've done pre-load and post-load things, but none of this requires a toolkit.

Anyway -- it's not that I don't want to hear about toolkits, but there is a certain undeniable power to a decent demonstration set -- not just a verbose description. And THAT is what got me to actually give Dojo a serious look.

http://dojocampus.org/explorer/

Once I get what I'm trying to do fully functional, I'll be sure to post it here. So, far, I've only played around on my home computer.

For My Floridian Friends

http://xkcd.net/453/

Upcoming Hurricanes


The XKCD web comic is one of my favorites.

Me and My Enneagram [Updated]

This is a bit of a meme that's been going around one of my circles of friends. It's this Enneagram test. So, after putting it off for a week, I finally decided to take the first (and longer) of the two tests presented at the link above.

I will not pretend that I've actually read through what this means or what it might mean, but - generally - I have a tendency of being very central on most personality tests, so -- I've linked the whole result set, with all of the scores, so that you can see the whole picture. Maybe one day, I'll try to figure out what it means myself. ;-)

[Update: Enneagram Info from Vahl over at the Daily Skew - - read the comments there -- Damian has declared that I'm not a 9, not sure what that's based on though. ]

Here are my results:

---

You are most likely a type 9.

Taking wings into account, you seem to be a 9w1.
 

No personality test is completely accurate. Although several measures were taken to make this test as accurate as possible, there's always a chance that you are not typed correctly by it. Therefore, when deciding which Enneagram type and wing you are, you might also want to consider the types with the highest test scores on the lists below.

(Note that your lowest scores may be omitted.)

Type 9 - 8.7
Type 3 - 6.3
Type 7 - 5.7
Type 2 - 5
Type 1 - 4
Type 8 - 3

Wing 9w1 - 10.7
Wing 9w8 - 10.2
Wing 3w2 - 8.8
Wing 1w9 - 8.4
Wing 2w3 - 8.2
Wing 3w4 - 8
Wing 8w9 - 7.4
Wing 7w8 - 7.2
Wing 2w1 - 7
Wing 7w6 - 6.6
Wing 1w2 - 6.5
Wing 8w7 - 5.9
 

First Life

So, you've heard of "Second Life"...

Clark Boyd over at "The World" (BBC / WGBH) posted a blog entry with a link to a REALLY funny site, so without further introduction

Get a First Life

Opinion: VMWare Server 2.0 Beta [Updated]

I've used VMWare Server 2.0 Beta for about three solid hours now...

Things I like.

• Virtual Hardware v. 7 with USB 2.0 support.
• Tomcat based VM monitoring, is pretty responsive.
• Does NOT request or attempt to "require" IIS.
• The Server interface, while different, remains similar.

Technical -- I've loaded VMWare-Server beta on two separate Windows XP host systems (I have an Ubuntu as well, but I've had problems in the past loading both "player" and "server" under Linux (as in - they try to delete each-other's drivers)... So, I'm not likely to try that.

What I do not like:

There is not a way to launch a Virtual Machine without using an Apache-Tomcat servlet through a web browser. This seems terribly inefficient when I am simply trying to load a local VM on a local machine. Inside the web based VMWare management tool, there is a button to create a link to this virtual machine on your desktop. This shortcut, once created, will attach to (and, if necessary, start) the virtual machine without needing to start a web browser. This is still slower to load than the old VMWare server interface was.

The "fat client" , player style interface that used to be available for VMWare Server 1.x has been replaced with a browser plug-in loaded console screen that is very painfully slow to load, it feels like bad java back in the day...

If launching a virtual machine console viewer from inside the browser interface, it takes a painfully long time to load and launch. The operating system will be having no problem starting up as I'm waiting for this thing to finally display. By the time the console opens for me, the login prompt is already waiting ... EVEN with a Windows XP guest OS. This is much better when launching from the desktop link.

Where I gave VMWare-server 1 (****) four out of five stars, I give the VMWare-server 2 (beta) (***^) three and a half out of five.

To be fair, I have little doubt that this console will be improved before the final version releases. I just wanted to let my early opinion be known.

Twitter by Proxy

So, I'm done with twitview.

Twitview uses the web server (vollink.com) to pull my twitter data feed. Once pulled, I turn links into links.

The twittering view at the right side of this blog now uses twitview, as does the open-social app that I wrote for my iGoogle. I also added twitview to my main homepage.

Another advantage of this, is that my twitter feed is now also proxied, so will be visible in places where twitter may become blocked or banned.

Google Apps, iGoogle and Facebook

I've added Google Apps to my domain. I had already started handing pieces of my domain to Google when I started letting them host my blog. At the same time, I'm starting to take pieces back. More on that later...

I started playing with the Open Social API today. Really simple thing -- I realized that I wanted to put some basic, static HTML in a box on both my Facebook page and to my iGoogle page. So, it took me about an hour to create an XML container application that would work within Google's open-social specification.

Facebook's developer framework is far more complex, but - thankfully - there's an application for Facebook called "Open Gadget" that allows me to wrap my Open Social xml format into an application format for facebook. It's not perfect (it makes the user click to "activate the gadget"), but it does what I want it to do.

TAKING IT BACK

Second -- I have decided to "proxy" my own blog, locally. I'm doing this because my friends in China are not able to see my blog. So, if you are not already reading this through my proxy page, try it out...
http://vollink.com/cgi-bin/blogview/.

Web Ads

A few times in the last few months, I've thought to actually go out of my way and click on a Web Ad. In every case, the web ad was non-traditional and insisted on doing something which got it blocked. Seems that web ads would be much more successful if they didn't demand dumb user behavior...

Middle Click

In all latest version graphical web browsers, a middle button mouse click is available to open the link in a new tab. On the ads I've been interested in, Middle-click is either unresponsive or gets the "flash engine" to attempt to open a pop-up. If I'm interested in clicking an ad, then it should behave like any other link. If it doesn't I'm likely to give up just that quickly.

Goodbye to Revenue

In at least one of these cases, I was interested enough in what the ad was telling me, that I used a search engine to find the site, and loaded it into a separate tab. This means that the site I was using did not get the revenue for a click-through. Too bad for the web site... free advertising for the political candidate that I looked up anyway.