plugawy blog

Level of awesomeness is over 9000.

The people don’t want “tablet computers” with Ubuntu and OpenID (worst name ever for a product attempting broad acceptance). They could honestly give a shit whether it’s a closed or open system. And, let’s be really honest, they probably care as much about DRM as they do about baseball players juicing; by which I mean not very much at all. They want things to work most of the time, and be easy to fix when they don’t. And if the process by which it happens is “magic” they are totally cool with that.

They want the thing in the movies.

It's nothing new: regular people don't care whether your app/device/whatever is using Ruby/Javascript/Butterflies. Stuff has to work and be easy to use.

Apple is not in the business of making monolithic OSes that they cram down your throat on as many widely-varying devices as possible. Apple is in the business of making complete products, for which they craft derivative OSes to fit each product. There is a shared core OS. There is not a shared core UI

That's why we'll never see OSX being released for non-Apple hardware.

NOTE: If you fail to utilize AJAX calls while debugging or previewing, you can try circumventing the same origin policy in Firefox with the following steps. This is done at your own risk + The call to Privilege manager cannot be executed in a real S60 device or the emulator.

• Add a netscape.security.PrivilegeManager.enablePrivilege("UniversalBrowserRead"); call to the function issuing your AJAX requests
• Type about:config in Firefox address bar and set signed.applets.codebase_principal_support value to true by double-clicking it.
• Initialize a debugging session and issue an AJAX call => You should now be prompted about giving the script access to whatever domain you are requesting from.

Aptana's WRT plugin doesn't work for me - JS stops executing and all that.
However - the hint on how to bypass Same Origin Policy is something that needs to be saved for later.

Go into any office today and you'll find people using Word to write documents. Some people still print them out and file them in big metal cabinets to be lost forever, but again this is simply an old habit, like a phantom itch on a severed limb. Instead of printing them, most people will email them to their boss or another coworker, who is then expected to download the email attachment and edit the document, then return it to them in the same manner. At some point the document is considered "finished", at which point it gets dropped off on a network share somewhere and is then summarily forgotten.

People keep doing this, but it is an astoundingly awful way to work. Here are just a few of the problems:

• People sometimes forget to attach the document to their email.
• The document can be too large—especially long documents with lots of images—and can clog up the email server.
• Nobody knows what edits were made and by whom. Sure, you can turn "Track Changes" on, but as it transforms your document into a horrible illegible mess, most people very quickly turn it off again.
• Nobody has any idea which is the most recent version of the document. This leads to amusing email flame wars where people insist that you adopt version control for your file names, which nobody ever does because they are too busy arguing about what the syntax should be. Even if you do manage to get version control, you are still never sure if you have the most recent version.
• People save the document in some directory on their hard drive and then forget where it is. The usual solution to this is to email the author again and ask them to resend it.
• People miss the email (usually because there are far too many emails in a day) and claim to have never received the document in the first place.

Even if you somehow manage to survive all these pitfalls and your document reaches the Holy Land of $some_random_network_share, your troubles are just beginning. Now nobody knows where your document is, so they have to pester you to tell them. Once you tell them, they'll usually find that they don't have access to that network share. If they do manage to get access, they'll typically open the document and leave it open for an extended period of time, and now you can't edit your own document because it is locked for "Read Only" access. So inevitably you'll save your own modified copy on your local hard drive, and the whole agonizing dance begins again.

Why do we do this? Because everyone uses Word, so we have to. And why does everyone use Word? Because everyone uses Word. It starts to make sense if you just hit your head on the wall enough times.