Life is grand

Test

jQuery is a fantastic piece of JavaScript and is fast replacing prototype in my projects. I’d like it to go beyond that though. I want it to be a library I can call on any website I am visiting, whether the site has it loaded or not.

GreaseMonkey seems the logical way to do this. I had a quick stab at loading jQuery as a user script but it didn’t seem to work.

Anybody got a clue how to do this?

Blimey! The Kaizer Chiefs beat Manchester United today 4-3 on penalties (0-0 full-time.) The Chiefs are a South African soccer team (not the band) from my home province. Well done lads!

[And, it is gone. If I get anymore I'll post again.]

I have one two one two one zero Vox invites to send out. Comment or email me if you want it.

In Amazon’s Data Socket Nicholas Carr writes on how Amazon’s S3 provides reliable, scalable storage to start-ups, lowering costs and barriers to entry. Om Malik is quoted as saying that the value of developers in these start-ups will move from the architectural side to user experience and “developer skillset.”

Now while I like S3 and think it will enable start-ups I must say you can still build an unscalable, unreliable service on it. S3 and co. don’t give you magic scalability, your application still has to be architected and developed with care and thought.

Ed Batista reported on Josh Porter’s Social Networks Are Killing Email to which I objected.

Obviously Josh was thinking further though as he came up with A Messaging Proxy and Domain as Identity. Interesting idea, I like it. Amazon’s SQS could potentially be a part of it and provide the reliability that is needed. I reckon it would need to be distributed too, having your messaging system go down due to a server fault or a company glitch would be a big problem. I also think we need to keep email in mind as we can learn a good deal from it as well as remember the vast amounts of archived messages many of us have and need to keep.

9 tag rugby games later and The Shellakybookys show how much fun they had. We beat the Wallace Warriors last night and claimed the Grade C Bowl cup for 2006.

We have all had a great few weeks in the ITRA league.

As you can see we took some beatings but began to start winning with 4 straight wins at the end. A pity the final two games were not league games (one was a semi-final and the last was the final) as we would have posted higher on the league had they counted.

All the same we had a blast and will be back next year to challenge for the top cup.

The team from the TSSG will have to figure out what to do next as we will miss our weekly practice and game.

Thanks to the ITRA and other organisers for a great event.

Nat on O’Reilly Radar does it again, this time explaining GData from Google in terms I get:

GData is just Atom/RSS for reading, Atom Publishing for writing, and A9 stored queries for searching.

Interestingly:

There’s a huge move within Google away from SOAP and even REST-style ad hoc APIs and towards GData instead.

and

They’re building APIs to your Google-stored data via GData

Lastely the architect of GData is the same chap who did Microsoft’s HailStorm.

Microsoft have released a screenshot of the third colour scheme for Office 2007; silver.

Anybody else feel angry looking at it? I nearly hurled my lunch.

While I happen to think Vista was designed by a jolt drinking, pizza munching geek I also happen to think that Office 2007 looks nice. In its default Blue colour scheme.

This silver scheme is wrong on so many levels but I will mention just one; look at the window title. The bit that reads “Fabrikam Journal - Microsoft Word”

Was a kid with crayons and an etch a sketch allowed to do that shading? Awful. Just awful.

Apologies to the hard working Office team who have done a great job with the new UI but have seemingly, in this latest colour scheme, been forced to use the Vista designer (and apologies to the Vista designer but you need to stop using MSPaint.)

Gill reminded me it was Nelson Mandela’s birthday yesterday.

Happy Birthday Madiba!