Posted: March 24th, 2006 | Author: edward | Filed under: out of doughnuts ramblings | 2 Comments »
A quick update about the 2nd Hack Day at Yahoo! I’m really tired from building my hack so this will be short, it sure was an exciting run.
Today is one of those days that makes me proud to be a Yahoo. The sheer number of hacks was overwhelming (again) and the quality of each improved as well. What I saw today was nothing more or less than I knew was possible when I joined Yahoo!. Yahoo! has an incredible number of smart programmers, and they are full of ideas and energy. The spirit had even captured our offices around the world and we had multiple hackers in other countries who had stayed late into the night (past midnight their time) just to have the chance to demo their developments to the rest of the Yahoo world. It was magnificent.
It was clear this time around that people had been thinking long and hard about their ideas and they were ready to execute. It’s personally satisfying to see programmers execute on such innovative ideas without PRD’s, MRD’s, Functional Specs and those obsolete remnants of waterfall development cycles. Powerful wizardry was going on at Yahoo today and I’m happy.
Posted: March 13th, 2006 | Author: edward | Filed under: out of doughnuts ramblings | 1 Comment »
- I’m playing with last.fm now. Love their badges, will probably write more about that later.
- Eating lots and lots of thinmints and samoas. Trying to fatten up for winter.
- Lots of people come to this site searching for “doughnuts”. I’m not sure I can satisfy your stomach’s craving for doughtnuts. I can only recommend that you head to the nearest Krispy Kreme and pick up 2 dozen original glazed and a Chugg of chocolate milk and have yourself a nice celebration of all things both baked and fried.
- World of Warcraft is still fun, but it would be more fun if I played on a server where I actually knew some more people.
Posted: March 10th, 2006 | Author: edward | Filed under: Reviews, Yahoo | No Comments »
Simon has graciously posted his notes that he used to give his 3 hour tutorial on Javascript @ ETech. The notes cover exactly what a programmer who is working heavily with Javascript today needs to know. It’s the most concise and fluff-free coverage of the language that I’ve read. All the stuff you really should know like closures, === operator, and common ways to leak memory.
http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2006/03/07/etech
Technorati Tags: ajax, etech, etech06, javascript, yahoo
Posted: March 8th, 2006 | Author: edward | Filed under: out of doughnuts ramblings | No Comments »
Alex Russell gave an excellent talk today at ETech on how to do server push in Ajax applications. The most widespread example of this in a product is GTalk inside of GMail. If you’ve used it you know how fast this can be for pushing data.
Alex recommends what he calls the Forever Frame approach. You basically use existing browser behaviors in order to keep pushing events to the client. His slides are available at his slight and there are some excellent diagrams to explain what he’s talking about, which we can now all refer to as “Comet”
He also runs through what we need to do on the server side in order to handle this type of interaction. As usual Alex is ahead of the curve.
Technorati Tags: etech, etech06, ajax
Posted: March 7th, 2006 | Author: edward | Filed under: Yahoo | 11 Comments »
Today at O’reilly Emerging Technology Conference we are quietly releasing Checkmates. It’s a mobile + social + mapping app that I’ve been tooling around with at Yahoo! with my friends. The idea was to be able to find your friends and tell your friends where you are by using a map. I always think about the Las Vegas trips where my friends split up to go to different clubs and I’m left alone at the roulette table. This happens because I’m a compulsive gambler, and when I run out of money I always have to try to track everyone down. If I could just bring up a map, I could see where everyone has migrated to.
The first thing we hacked together was maps on the phone. After we got this bit working, we kept going and added the ability to drill down into arbitrary venues. Venue maps could be anything from a camera phone picture to a detailed map In the current version, you can drill into the relevant floors of the Manchester Grand Hyatt, where the ETech conference is happening and mark your current location and status.
Behind the social portion of the app is your Flickr social network. When you update your location, your current location tile gets uploaded to Flickr and is geotagged so your friends and family can see where you are. This is also who you are connected to inside the app.
Another cool thing is that it pulls in ATOM Geo feeds and will overlay data onto maps. This can be any type of geocoded data and we bring up little smart windows to tell you what’s there.
If you have a Java enabled phone that’s recent, I encourage you to check it out (. I know that it works on recent Nokia phones, both Symbian powered and the standard Nokia phones. Also, Sony Ericcsson phones should be fine as well as blackberries. I am running it right now on my Motorola SLVR so recent Moto phones should be ok. The app is built for MIDP 2.0/CLDC1.1 phones and we’ve signed it as well, so if you have a Motorola phone it won’t prompt you for every network call. We did that last part just cause we like you 
Check out Chad’s post for more info on the creation process
Technorati Tags: etech, etech06, mobile, yahoo