If you search the phrase prize ribbons on Google, Jessica Grindstaff's prize ribbons page is #9 — on the first page of results!
This probably has more to do with the excellence of the ribbons themselves than my coding, but hopefully with some more attention it can go even higher on the page!
Wow—really inspiring and in-depth beta demo from Google about their upcoming product Google Wave. I had seen headlines of the announcement last week, but it was Andy Ihnatko's thoughtful Sun-Times article that got me to sit down and watch the 80-minute presentation. Some good quotes from the article:
Wave is an ambitious, brand-new infrastructure for communication in general ... Wave is hugely ambitious. Which means that it’s bound to fail.
I have no idea whether it'll fail (I hope not) but it will depend on the implementation. I second Ihnatko's assertion that no other company could pull this off. He rightly points out that Microsoft would be too concerned with monetizing it, and Apple would be too concerned with tightly controlling every aspect of it. That's probably true, but I think it's also because no other company can come with the level of web magic that Google can.
As a developer, it's really a joy to behold them reinventing the web every year or so. Gmail, then Maps, Reader, Docs, then Maps again, and now Wave.
They basically sat down and were like "we're going to reinvent email. And while we're at it, all other forms of internet communication. But let's not try to own it, because then it won't work."
Who else does that? Part of their demo shows how a direct competitor can develop a skin for their implementation and not interact with Google at all. That's just amazing.
Via Sun Times via Daring Fireball
Just to follow up on my earlier debacle/discovery with PostCommitWebHooks, an Italian PHP coder seems to have picked up the script I posted to the Google thread and added to it considerably!
The script I wrote listens for updates from Google's server and maintains a record of those updates. This coder's script takes those updates and gets the actual changed files and maintains a local copy.
I can already think of a nice way to extend his update: write a script that presents that local cache of files as a single ZIP you can download. I suppose the reason they don't offer that is because they want you to connect over SVN. But I think a lot of people might want to use the code but don't want to bother checking it out, at least at first.
Anyway, moral of the story: open source is great.
Mac users: rejoice! Google Earth has been ported for Macintosh. It's really spectacular. Any ideas for a good data layer?
Oh, that's right. No comments. I'll fix that shortly.
