There have been a number of posts recently in the iOS (née iPhone) development community about the shocking fact that app-store purchases follow a Pareto distribution. I assume this is shocking because developers don’t study economics, but I guess I had assumed that everyone in the internets had at least read shirky’s analysis of the [...]
Author Archive
jquery.poll – a periodic polling plugin for jquery.
January 10th, 2010
4 Comments
I needed to poll the server for another project we’re working on (to be announced soon). I started off using the PeriodicalUpdater from enfranchised mind, but I ran into some limitations that were problematic enough that I implemented a new version from scratch. The problem that made me re-implement was that I was polling for [...]
who can has i be?
November 10th, 2009
1 Comment
Every multi-user piece of software has an obligation to represent its users in some fashion; to provide for them a digital identity. Furthermore, as the de facto global communication system, the internet ultimately is the system that must represent everyone. The present internet does not provide an identity system that can represent everyone’s identity. To [...]
Version control in offline mode.
October 27th, 2009
No Comments
Having successfully built a pyxpcom xulrunner, I am in doubt whether it’s the way to proceed. it’s heavy – like 50mb! writing for it is not like writing a web app, though it has similarities. Basically I think it won’t help us much with the “degraded” scenario – where someone has “only” a browser to [...]
what’s the difference?
October 22nd, 2009
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One of the problems with using a real VCS for normal-human-being content management is that nobody understands diffs. Even if they do, the standard line-based differencing algorithms are useless or problematic, even for diff-comprehending folk, for most of the valuable use cases. Here I do a brief survey of the options for these use cases. [...]
Gittish stuff
October 20th, 2009
1 Comment
This is a brief run-down of projects using git for something other than code management. Gitit – wiki using git/darcs as backend. Written in haskell, and super not for mortals (still have to use CLI) Theoretical discussion of using git for cms versioning Is git more than a version control system? – doing exactly kind [...]
No can has internets (offline use)
October 20th, 2009
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One of the issues with a distributed application is that you invariably need offline usage capability. There are many use cases for this, but I’ll enumerate them, starting from ‘mostly connected’ to ‘mostly disconnected’: Server/peer availability – in a distributed system, many computers will be participating in server roles. They won’t all have high availability, [...]
XulRunner – application target?
October 20th, 2009
No Comments
It is going to be very difficult to offer a “full” peer through ‘just’ a browser. There are bascic cryptography issues that need to be addressed. Additionally, the offline storage capabilities are fine for actual offline experience, but conflict resolution requires a more advanced approach that is unlikely to be performant within javascript. However, at [...]
In-browser encryption
October 20th, 2009
No Comments
Encrypting information is key to the effective use of a distributed system. For a variety of reasons, stream-based encryption is rarely helpful for ensuring the security of data in a distributed system. What is important is for the endpoints (consumers/producers) of data in a distributed system encrypt the data they care about. To achieve this [...]
Can has it together?
October 20th, 2009
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So another project we’re in the incubation stage on is Can Has It Together. We’re trying to make a distributed system that supports ad-hoc, on the fly collaboration as well as more persistent patterns of intentional activity. For the moment, I’ll mostly be writing about technologies and issues that are germane to our implementation; it [...]
