If you’re a Firefox user (or any browser user for that matter), run, don’t walk, to download the latest Firefox 3 Beta. Damn, this thing is lean and mean. I’ve got my usual 40-50 tabs open right now and it’s consuming about one third to one quarter of the memory FF2 did on WinXP. Plus tab and new window creation is instantaneous, even after many hours of use. There’s some subtle chrome improvements too, including little things like smooth-scrolling tabs that prevent me from getting lost when I’ve got more than about 10 tabs per window; very useful for Wiki-despamming or reading developer documentation.
Go!
My latest article is up on InfoQ. I hope it help demystifies the “Hypermedia as the engine of application state” constraint just a little bit.
I remember being a bit of a smart-ass nerd in high school, and taking pleasure in deriving novel insults my friends and I could deliver at the stoner-types, or anybody who else who crossed paths with us. The more difficult it was for them to understand why it was an insult, the better. So when I came up with “Your family tree has cycles”, I was one happy geek.
Little did I know at the time though, that my own family tree had a cycle. It turns out that my paternal Grandfather’s paternal great-Aunt, was my paternal Grandmother’s sister’s-in-law’s great Grandmother. My Dad’s cousin, who discovered the cycle this past weekend, doesn’t think the family knew about it. I believe the circumference of that cycle is seven.
Anybody else got any cycles they’d like to share? Note; if the circumference of your cycles are less than five, you might want to keep those to yourself 8-)
I’ve been thinking about writing this for some time now. In fact, it’s probably way overdue. But there’s no better time than the present, as they say.
I’ve had enough. I’m not participating in any more “REST vs. SOAP” discussions. When I started on this mission to educate those who didn’t understand how the Web could help them, I figured it would be pretty straightforward; I’d explain it, they’d understand, and then we’d all skip away hand-in-hand whistling show tunes. Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way. Instead, I ended up spending on the order of $100K of my own money on travel, as well as the opportunity cost of many hundreds of otherwise billable hours, for what is working out to be essentially nothing in return. If that weren’t enough, my health has suffered the past year or so, in ways I won’t get into here, but that I’m confident are in part attributable to the despair I’ve felt over this extended period of frustration.
The war really has been won, I realize that now. And I’m happy to pat myself on my back for a job well done, despite what it’s cost me. Would I do it over again? No bloody way. I should have just “pulled a Roy” and continued to work with and improve the Web, but restrict my Web services standards work to trying to minimize the harm Web services were doing to the Web (which I was doing, but I went way beyond that). I think Max Planck got it right when he said;
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Oh, and one last thing. I told you so. There, that felt good.