Burningbird

Over at Technology at Burningbird, Reponse to a Recent Posting in Google+, responding to Ian Hickson's assertions that 'design by consensus' is a failure.

The real problem isn't design by consensus. The real problem is Ian doesn't understand teamwork.

Over at Tech at Burningbird, Look out: Android in the Kitchen:

I have an old red binder filled with pages of recipes I've collected, modified, or created over the years. Recently, I purchased the Living Cookbook software to manage my collection, as well as being able to back it up to DropBox for safekeeping. What I didn't want to do with the new software, though, was continue to use paper recipes. With paper, I'll inevitably spill something on the page, and the large letter size paper actually takes up a lot of counter space.

What I needed was to transfer my recipes from the software to my Android tablet. Luckily, there really is an Android app for that.

Just finished the final tech review of my Learning Node book. At 400 pages, it's a big book. I must admit to being more than a little tired. Right now, I feel I could sleep for a week.

The big announcement in Node land is that unstable 0.7.x is being moved to stable 0.8.x next week. As a final act for my book, I put all the examples through a 0.7.10 tests. The results were better than I expected, not as good as I hoped.

I hit a couple of minor deprecation issues. For instance, path.exists has been deprecated in favor of fs.exists. I used the exit event with one child process application, and I needed to convert it to the new close event. This new event not only waits for the process to end, but all stdio pipes are closed.

Learning Node will be my last book for O'Reilly, at least for the foreseeable future.

Learning Node was a particularly exhausting book. Not only is there much to cover in one book, Node is a very dynamic technology. I like to think my coverage is both comprehensive and solid, but I guess we'll see how the book does when it hits the streets.

In the next year, I'm going to enter the ranks of the self-published. I'm also focusing less on technology, and more on other areas of interest. What these areas are will become evident over the next several months.

At Tech at Burningbird:

During my explorations of Node.js, I came across many excellent resources, references, tutorials, and various other online publications related to the technology. I had planned on incorporating this material into an appendix for Learning Node but decided it would make a better online resource than a book chapter.

Evidently, O'Reilly is going to publish my Learning Node book as a Rough Cuts/Early Release.

What people should know is that the material has not gone through a final edit, a copy edit, or a tech review. So yes, there will be typos, gotchas, and oopsies. Probably lots and lots of oopsies. But the advantage to getting a Rough Cut is you get the work early, but still get the finished product when it's complete.

I decided not to have an Appendix with all the links. This kind of material doesn't really suit a book; it's more appropriate for a web page. I'm in the process of converting this rich material into an online source page, which I'll post at Tech at Burningbird when finished.

homogeneity: noun

composition from like parts, elements, or characteristics

Not long ago, Molly Holzschlag tweeted an innocuous comment:

I'd love to see a woman or group of women edit the HTML5 spec. It'd make for an interesting social experiment. Certainly would be a first.

I re-tweeted her without additional comment, and that started a sequence of responses that surprised me in their vehement rejection of "positive discrimination"—as if the only way that women could possibly be involved in editing the HTML5 spec is because of the result of some kind of reverse discrimination.

I'm finally leaving my cave and buying a real, live smart phone.

I left the Apple world over a year ago, so I'm looking at buying an Android phone. I want one that comes with Ice Cream Sandwich. Hopefully a phone that doesn't get stuck with one version of an OS for years and years.

Any suggestions for a phone? Any suggestions for a carrier/plan, here in the US? Anything I should be wary of?

In Technology at Burningbird:

Google has only its self to blame if (when) WebM follows Betamax and HDD into tech oblivion.

The powers that be at Mozilla are now discussing plans for incorporating native support for H.264.

In "Technology at Burningbird:

After denouncing the use of Ruby and Rails terms to describe Node and Node modules, I must now confess that I did use a Rails resource in the section on MVC in Chapter 6.