Meet Dennis Madalone. He loves America. Really, *really* loves America.

Holy cow, and I thought Hunter S. Thompson was gone for good - (from sfgate.com -
Meet Dennis Madalone. He loves America. Really, *really* loves America.)

America, after all, is about guns. And money. And Wal-Mart and fast food and Christmas and expensive coffee drinks and good porn and long walks in nature and power-mad governments and wacky gluttony and scoring cheap DVDs on eBay and rampant obesity and cats and oil and SUVs and cube-farm hell and God and iPods and candy.

Or, more specifically, America is all about the delicious unchecked freedom to use your paltry sums of money to score cheap porn DVDs and expensive coffee drinks and buy an obese SUV and load it up with Wal-Mart Christmas candy so as to escape your cube-farm hell and go on long nature walks with your iPod in order to shoot cats.

Messaging with Ajax and ActiveMQ

From the Ajaxian Blog:
Messaging with Ajax and ActiveMQ
This is just so very cool. Very much like the Destiny servlet I built from several years ago - only this has a browser based client and bundled with ActiveMQ.

One step closer to the righteous day when all Web Services are REST Services...

I love the sound of people jumping on a bandwagon in the morning.

From
Darth Obasanjo deep within the Death Star

The complexity of the technologies that form the foundations of SOA is now pretty much acknowledged across the industry. At the same time more and more people are taking the idea of building web services using REST very seriously.

Quote from me almost exactly one year ago: One step closer to the righteous day when all Web Services are REST Services...

A link is not a widget

Mark Nottingham has a good set of background links on why being able to GET web resources is a good thing - prefetching as a means to performance - mnot’s Web log: Prefetching (again)

His article is partially in response to recently publicized problems that a Web application had when Google's "Web Accelerator" retrieved pages from links within a page - the application had used those links to perform a 'method=delete' operation. This causes peoples data to disappear silently, because it was pre-fetched.

This issue has been raised time and again, and unfortunately web designers continue to learn the hard way. I think the biggest idea that a Web designer should take away from this is that "a link is not a widget". Within a Web page (or music playlist, or RSS feed, or SVG drawing, etc), links to be clicked on are simply not to be dressed up as if they were buttons - a link is not a widget.

Port Grimaud hyperlinked 3D tourism

Now this is way cool. QTVR with hyperlinks to stroll through the town.
Grimaud and Port Grimaud. You need to click the red ball on the bottom right. There isn't a good way to get the actual URLs, but this is still fun.

(And if anyone knows of a good place to stay in the South of France in late July, let me know...)

High time for hyperlinked media

I think it's Hy Time people got serious about hyperlinking and media - see the weblog of Lucas Gonze for more background.

DNA Hack

This is the worst thing I've heard of in a long time. What's going to happen when ten thousand haxxors read DNA Hack and actually do it? A little virus here and there and life gets a lot less interesting. The worlds ecosystem is just as susceptible to disruption as a computer - except there is no backup and no possibility of a reboot.

RealID Act of 2005

Take a look at the RealID act of 2005 and
visit the UnRealID.com site to fax your comments to your Senators.
Here is my input:

Dear Senators Murray and Cantwell ,

I am writing to you regarding the Real ID act of 2005. I have recently read much of this legislation and am so concerned about the results of its use and potential misuse that I had to speak up immediately.


Title I allows waiving any and all federal laws at the sole discretion of the Secretary of Homeland Security for the stated purpose of building barriers and roads. This is hole you could drive a truck through - and I cannot conceive of any improvement to barriers and roads that would improve the security of our citizens in any meaningful way. But I can imagine many creative uses of this provision.


Title II paves the way for a national ID card - which is the opposite of individual liberty and freedom that a federation of independent states is supposed to represent. What security for a citizen of the U.S. means is that our choices as individuals are secure - secure from observers checking up on us, secure from being told what to do or where to travel, secure from central committees planning our future, secure from invasions of our privacy as well as invasions of our property.


Please help keep the people of our states and our countries free.

Google Web Accelerator

Heh, heh... Web app 'designers' are learning about the Web the hard way. Client apps that pre-fetch pages will trigger poorly design apps that 'delete' via a GET. And Google release a Web 'accelerator' that pre-fetches pages. And pages from those apps are mysteriously disappearing. Convenience over correctness will bite you every time.

Google Web Accelerator: Hey, not so fast - an alert for web app designers - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)