More Links That Are Not del.icio.us
Poser Creator Interview
“Interview with Poser Creator Larry Weinberg” should remind you of the days when software was a creative idea for creative people. A guy and his pals write software for themselves and maybe a few associates—but then it becomes a worldwide phenomenon. None of this Silicon-Valley, VC stuff… This tradition is not dead, I’m optimistic about http://bauhaussoftware.com/.
del.icio.us Audio and Open Source Flash Audio
There are two audio players out there being written about in this sentence: the one for the del.icio.us tag system:media:audio and the one that is closer to Songhay System plans for audio at http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/ (which depends on the XSPF format at http://www.xspf.org/). Both of these mufukkas do not have progress bars—and the del.icio.us player does not have volume control—which reminds me of some kind of birth defect. But I’m just miffed because I can’t figure out how the folks at del.icio.us are implementing it.
Flash 8 Video
In “Flash 8 Delivers Powerful Video Capabilities” Macromedia/Adobe details issues under subtitles like “Embedded Versus Linked Video” and “Making Transparent Media.” Under “Macromedia Flash Video Encoder” we have the following non-undocumented secret:
One important item to note about the new encoder is that it supports only 1-pass constant bit rate (CBR) encoding and does not offer 2-pass variable bit rate (VBR) encoding. With 1-pass CBR encoding, the encoder processes the video on one pass through, allocating the same number of bits to each second of video. With 2-pass VBR, the encoder can scan the video before encoding, to improve quality optimization and to boost the bit rate in certain portions of the video that require more data (for instance, fast-moving scenes such as a race). Video encoded with 2-pass VBR is almost always higher quality than video encoded with 1-pass CBR. Still, because of the quality of the VP6 codec, 1-pass CBR will likely provide more than sufficient quality for many implementations. If you find that you do need 2-pass VBR, then you must purchase one of the third-party FLV encoding tools, Squeeze or Flix.
AJAX History and Teachings
“Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications” by Jesse James Garrett is the veritable Lutheran scroll, hammered into the cathedral of proprietary desktop applications.
“Ajax Tutorial: Ajax What Is It Good For?” at dhtmlnirvana.com makes a notable reference about having too many script elements:
That is why doing this sort of thing in Web pages is notoriously poor:
<script src="blah1.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="blah2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="blah3.js" type="text/javascript"></script>Each of those script tags will use one connection and considerably delay the loading of a page. Same thing goes for CSS and also links tags. You should take a long hard think about that when developing web pages.
To circumvent this we can be clever and push JavaScript files through the
xmlhttprequestobject and consequently have them load asynchronously. We aren’t going to get around using at least one script tag, but if the originating script is kept minimal then our load times are going to be reduced significantly.
Of course, you will have to click and click—and click—to see this quote on AJAX page 24. I look forward to devoting myself more to the study of user interface design.
Dave’s OPML Validator
The validator is in “beta” at http://validator.opml.org/. It does not complain about my use of namespaces with OPML, but it does not like my unknown type names for the type attribute of the outline element. The “gentleman’s agreement” so far I assume is "rss" and "link".
OPMLManager.com
Hey! It’s new and it’s del.icio.us for OPML lists.
Microsoft-Bashing Skit
Remember Phil Hartman doing Bill Clinton saying, “We share your pain”? You may need this information to get a hearty laugh from the snot-slick production “Microsoft’s WeSYP Project—Leveraging customer feedback for software reliability.”