muse

In the world of software engineering there is an underlying assumption that people can, and do, talk to each other. Mostly, we do.

The world of complex software requires that many individuals from many groups have fully functional N-way communication processes in place. These processes can utilize many tools, email is frequently at the top of the list, but why?

After a nice vacation and an awesome wedding (now hitched folks!) I am back.

It is kind of amusing when you discover that a technique that you were using in 2003/04 now has a name and is "buzz capable". It is even more amusing to consider the fact that I thought I was using something else entirely.

What is this about? Well, AHAH a newly named subset of AJAX. When I was at Epic Data (see the resume for more info) I was happily playing with AJAX (there weren't so many solid libraries back then and I was fairly new to all this stuff) and the page I linked to above looks almost word for word like the code I was using to pull information from our server to the browser front-end.
Here I thought I was using AJAX, which in essence I was, but it turns out that I was actually using the as then unnamed subset of AJAX - AHAH. I loved pulling down information into the innerHTML. It made the experience a little more "magic" and required *much* fewer full page refreshes. As I was totally new to the concepts at the time it also involved a lot of hair pulling.

One could easily argue that the need for AHAH is a bit of an exercise in splitting hairs - AHAH is a complete subset of AJAX...

So, what about collaborating? Well, maybe perhaps if I had gone to more developer meet-ups and participated more frequently in online communities I could have been more aware of what I was actually doing and shortened the gap between the unnamed thing I was doing and AHAH. Sometimes it is hard to get your head out of the work mindset and find time to go talk with fellow imagineers about what "the next big thing" looks like...
Over a beer....

I was reading through Arstechnica just now and saw hints of Google Maps integration in iPhoto. But what really peaked my interest was the comment, by Luis Alejandro Masanti, about having a slideshow following your path.

Now, take that idea a step further and integrate with Google Earth. If you rememeber last Xmas Google had Santa flying all over the world in "real time". It was fun to watch. Imagine if you could see "what Santa was looking at" as he landed.
With Picasa, Google has access to a lot of photos. When GPS tagging in the EXIF data starts up in full force Google will have the ability to show you the world in pictures at street level - in somewhat real time for more popular locations. You would even get cool information like direction and altitude so you wouldn't only see the south-east side of buildings as current mapping tools display.

I recently, well pre-vacation anyways, recieved some emails from some folks asking for more information on WiMAX setup and how to create an ISP based around this concept.

As I previously stated there are a few requirements to getting your own little wireless broadband provider up and running.

The joy of the current wireless revolution is that the big players (Rogers, Bell, Telus in Canada) have not truly established themselves so there is still room for rural players and smaller city based operations.

First off you need to move quickly the big telcos/cablecos are not sitting still. They are planning massive country wide rollouts but they are focussing on the big metropolitan areas (rightly so) as they have the most penatration and ability to cover large numbers of people with equivalent tower counts. For instance, two towers in Vancouver would cover much more potential subscribers than two towers here in Whitehorse.