MediaFresh News:

Quick fix in Fresher* for Internet Explorer downloads. When attempting to download a file in IE, the link would lag out and IE complains. Fix in ASP: Response.CacheControl = “private”

I’ve been digging deep these days getting up to speed on technology and I found two things that I find extremely exciting. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been looking for a scalable back end in SSJS (server side Javascript) trying to avoid the allure of RoR. I think I might have found my killer combo: CouchDB and Node.js.

CouchDB is written in Erlan (telco grade language), uses a document based model that’s so close to Fresher I could literally port our client’s data to it (we’re using an SQL Server), AND switched from XML to JSON earlier this year as native output through a RESTful HTTP API. !!!

Node.js is an SSJS server but built around the Javascript event model (addListener for sockets) and uses V8 (The Chrome Javascript engine).

So I’m drooling at the possibilities here. What’s more is I can test run a CouchDB instance at cloudant.com (if they accept my application for a beta account).

I still might want some SQL for things like logs, orders, and CRM – but then again, we’ll see once I get my hands dirty…

Nice little trick I just found out about the getJSON function in jQuery. If you add an extra “?” to the end of the url, it’ll read it as JSONP.  JSONP simply wraps the server’s response (JSON object) in a function. It’s a way to work around cross domain issues. We can finally use the widget creator anywhere, no just on the artist’s own site.

One feature I hadn’t discovered about HTML5 is the ability to cache files like Gears and run in offline mode. It in fact has local store with SQL… Huge. A colleague recently explained that Google was dropping Gears in favor of these new features in HTML5. See:

http://digitizor.com/2009/02/22/google-prefers-html5-over-its-own-homegrown-google-gears/

Gotta say that I’m really digging Google Wave. I love the technology behind it and I think it’ll change the way we build apps for the web. It looks like real time but all done in micro requests web style. Very very cool.

Was going to activate my Wave account today (which is turning out to be a pain) and had the wrong browser open.

Hilarious. So much for the open web.

a.

I haven’t done an eLearning project in a while and having done so much Web 2.0 stuff recently, I’d forgotten how horrible XML and SCORM are. Blows my mind how much time is wasted writing manifest files and breaking things up into “reusable learning objects” when no one ever reuses them. It’s a glorious make work program. I think they need a major revamp and need to move towards AJAX/JSON.

Updated my WordPress and was surprised to see how much the back end of WordPress looks like Fresher.  Not only that but WP also got an award recently for best OS CMS… I still don’t think WP is a CMS.  Sorry folks.  Too many things still missing.

“Notable Gotchas”

http://asquare.net/javascript/tests/KeyCode.html

Could someone tell me why keyCode is different for onKeyPress vs onKeyDown?  Argh!

Just launched the Inword pre-sale for the highly anticipated album:

http://www.myspace.com/inword

They’re using the starter package.