AdactioThe online journal of Jeremy Keith, an Irish web developer living and working in Brighton, England.Supernova 2008- June 22, 2008 San Francisco. A cathedral to geekdom. The aisle of Market Street divides the city in two. The spire of the Transamerica Pyramid soars through the fog. The city rests on the San Andreas fault, a bedrock as safe and secure as the new economy. Erstwhile home to the gold rush of 48, San Francisco is now the epicentre of a whole different land grab. I showed up on the weekend and spent a few days with Cindy checking out the street art in San Rafael, sampling some excellent sushi and making a fool..http://adactio.com/journal/1482 Nashville- June 18, 2008 I&8217;ve finished my little bout of timezone parkour to Nashville and San Francisco. I attended a conference in each place and enjoyed both in very different ways. Voices That Matter had an eclectic line-up of speakers. Whereas other conferences are organized around a theme or a set of technologies, the only commonality at this conference, organized by New Riders, is that the speakers have all published books through New Riders. While this means that the conference doesn&8217;t have a...http://adactio.com/journal/1480 City Hopping- June 9, 2008 Now that I&8217;m done travelling for pleasure, it&8217;s time for me to travel for business again. I&8217;m heading out to San Francisco for the Supernova conference. Tantek has roped me into moderating a panel called Bottom-Up Distributed Openness. I&8217;ll be showing up in SF next Friday. Until then, I&8217;ll be in Nashville for the somewhat embarrassingly-titled Voices That Matter conference where I&8217;ll be delivering a half-day workshop on Ajax and a presentation on...http://adactio.com/journal/1479 XEN- June 8, 2008 Ive published a transcript of the panel I moderated at South by Southwest this year. The subject was Building Portable Social Networks and I had a blast moderating, mostly due to my great co-panelists, Chris Messina, Leslie Chicoine, David Recordon and Joseph Smarr. During the panel, I made reference to an ongoing joke by Brian and myself to do a negative version of XFN an XHTML Enemies Network. I always thought of it as a frivolous idea but sometimes I wonder if there might be the...http://adactio.com/journal/1478 Colossal- June 7, 2008 Andy and his cohorts have been busy recovering an important televisual document of computer history: The Machine That Changed the World (originally titled The Dream Machine). The series comprises of five parts: Great Brains Inventing the Future The Paperback Computer The Thinking Machine The World at Your Fingertips The first episode is particularly fascinating, tracing the history of the idea of a universal machine, starting with Charles Babbage and his Analytical Engine. The documentary...http://adactio.com/journal/1476 Making contact- June 4, 2008 Today Yahoo announced the release of their Address Book API previously only available internally and to selected partners. It follows on from Googles Contacts Data API and I hope that this is one more nail in the coffin of the password anti-pattern. Chris has expressed disappointment with the proprietary nature of the response formats and Dave also wishes there were more consistent APIs. Its a fair point but the situation is still immeasurably better than logging in and scraping the...http://adactio.com/journal/1475 |