MediaFresh News:

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.

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.

I love this page:

http://www.jibbering.com/2002/4/httprequest.html

This is “Web 2.0″ from a developer’s perspective.  I remember when the xml http request object was just introduced.  Unfortunately, the lack of support kept me from leveraging its power (although I didn’t hesistate to use it in the back end technologies I developed).  Today, it’s THE fundamental building block.

Integrated the calendar feature from ArtistData.com for Sparks Music.  I’m really impressed.  ArtistData will likely be a defacto choice for us.  Their technology allows us to update several social networking sites from one central location.  Linking the ArtistData ID with Fresher has allowed us to leverage these features for our artists.  Fantastic. 

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10274729-92.html?tag=inside

Sugar Labs is an OLPC non-profit spin off that has managed to put the OLPC OS on a USB stick.   Built on Fedora, the OS is actually pretty sweet with the social networking functionality intrinsically part of it.

http://developer.yahoo.com/events/hadoopsummit09/

Been hearing lots of talk about Hadoop these days.  Hadoop is a Apache based platform for processing vast amounts of data (in the petabytes) across many machines.  There’s been lots of talk about Hadoop in Amazon S3 and I find the topic very interesting.  It’s been a while since I’ve had to worry about scalability but I know it will rear its ugly head around soon enough.  I wish this stuff was around a decade ago…

When I code, I still feel like a monkey leaping around trying to live in a jungle full of strange plants.  The web is still a big mess.

It turns out that IE lets me call click() on a file input but when I call submit on the form, it says “Access is denied”.  So I’m stuck.  Again.  With every browser.  Argh!!!

I’m a perfectionist with Fresher and this problem drives me crazy because the alternatives are fugly.  I really don’t want to revert to my previous solution which was a popup window with a Flash based uploader.  I hate forms.  I try to avoid it like the plague with Fresher.  I think the submit button is evil.  But I’m stuck hacking away at a decent solution and have wasted way too much time on this.  Some may feel that my running around in circles is a waste of time but tell that to some of my clients that need to upload dozens of files at a time.  Just one extra click introduces extra time and effort.  And the entire point of Fresher is ease of use and speed. 

Any suggestions greatly appreciated at this point….

I really can’t stand the fact that WordPress has browsehappy.com at the bottom of the admin interface.  Shame on them.  Most of these people switched to FireFox…  Read my previous post.

“[HLP][FILE]calling click() on file upload control should bring up file picker”
reported: 2000-04-20

9 years and counting.  Some claim this bug is a security vulnerability.  It isn’t.  This is an example of the lacking features in FF that keep us from providing a full fledged rich app in Moz.  In my case, I have an upload command in a custom context menu.  I’m not going to hide a file input browse button behind an image on a context menu – although I tried it and you can’t even style the button so it wasn’t wide enough and looks like a bug.

So what will Fresher do if the user chooses Firefox?  They’ll right click upload in the context menu, a browse button will show up on the left panel with a warning explaining that in FF, they have to click twice to get the file upload dialog open.  Too bad, so sad.

So Google Wave is Google i/o taken to the extreme.  It looks really cool.  Socket type (real time) interaction in a browser on docs/im/tweets etc.  The more I look at Google’s dev path, the more I like it.  I especially like the idea of using it to create multiplayer games.  Need to look into that more…