This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Photos of Mash Pit

Photos of Flash Pit are up on Flickr now:










Offline Access in AJAX Applications

Update: Julien reports that he's not actually using AMASS in his offline work, but was inspired by it. He rolled his own access to Flash's storage capabilities using ExternalInterface, but he should be aware of the reliability and performance issues with ExternalInterface (I tried to paste 250K of text into the Wiki and the browser locked up for a long period of time as it tried to pass the data over the ExternalInterface boundry when saved).

Holy shit; looks like Julien Couvreur has come up with a solution to the offline problem for AJAX applications. Need to study it some more. Uses AMASS as its storage, along with some clever page caching semantics. I've run into some issues playing around with his demo, but it might pan out.

Mash Pit Synopses

Man, what an amazing event! We had a post-Mash Pit dinner and party at Lonely Palm.

Here's some more info about the three projects that were produced at the end of the day.

The first one was called Whuffie Tracker; the idea there was to produce a single site that could take your list of blogs and online sites, query other remote sites like Technorati and Flickr, and tell you who is talking about you.

The second project was a unique blend of a Wiki and internationalization. What they produced was a prototype that allows users to interact with a web-based user interface, click on it, and edit the text values in that UI for a specific language. Then, a community manager could go through the list of possible internationalized edits and approve or disapprove of them, filtering out porn, spam, etc. The idea here is that the community of people could help to internationalize software and open source much easier and cheaper in a decentralized way, bringing software to languages that might be hard to achieve without community involvement.

The final project was called Event in a Box. This was generated by the fact that we want to provide an easy way for someone to specify an event, what their needs are for that event, and for the site to automatically contact all the appropriate sites to help promote and inform others on the event, such as Backpack, Craigslist, etc. In addition, the page would generate a machine readable description of the event using HCalendar (using code from Ryan King that was refactored). I put up a demo and a download of the package (note that the prototype currently says that it is contacting lots of third party services, like BackBase and Craigslist, when in fact it's not; we only had about 2 1/2 hours to do all of this, and put that UI handwaving in :)

All in all it was an amazing event! Thanks to everyone who came; thanks to Chris Messina for organizing everyone and getting them together; thanks to Ning for sponsoring our lunch; and thanks to Spiral Muse for hosting the Coworking space!

We're trying to make a permanent space that is larger than coworking to support even more of these events; email me if you have ideas on how to support such a mission.

Mash Pit 4

It's demo time at Mash Pit. Everyone is furiously coding, but the clock is almost over. We'll have three demos. I'll try to blog them as people give them.

Mash Pit 3

We're hacking away, very intensely! No time to post! Just 30 more minutes till we have to be done, at 5:15 PM. Nothing like a hard deadline to force you to make hard decisions.

Mash Pit 2

People are doing intros, saying what their skills are and what they are interested in.

We had a big brainstorming session in the morning. The goal was to focus on ideas independent of technology, to force us to focus on whether something is relevant rather than just technologically interesting.

We broke for lunch, sponsored by Ning.

We've formed three groups that are working independently now. One group is working on localization, doing better ways of doing localization so it's cheaper, easier, etc.; another team is working on better event coordination and communication, bringing together alot of disparate tools to make this easier so far; and the final group is working on ego tracking across the blogosphere and web.

Mash Pit Starts

Mash Pit is starting now, Chris is talking. We've got a full house of hackers, programmers, thinkers, and open source folks.

The goal today is to somehow make the work people have been doing with Web 2.0 relevant for normal folks.

We're doing introductions and introducing people to the coworking space. Thanks to Chris for setting up Mash Pit.

We should be lazy today, try to reuse as much existing work as possible, mash things together.

I'll keep on blogging as things progress.

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