More WidgeTips

One other interesting tip... The maximum number of links is 56. If you construct your widget with 7 tabs of 8 links each or 8 tabs of 7 links you get maximum linkage.

Steal This Widget Reloaded!

I let it sit over the weekend, but now I need to talk about the excitement brewing over the "Steal This Widget" blog gutter widget.

This little guy has been getting some traction. Sarah has a history of its development and the history of its travels are just beginning. You can now easily Steal This Widget by simply clicking on its lovely name (or go here)I've written about some of the notable sightings here before, but none of those have twiddled the advanced settings (oops I'm wrong, it looks like cogworks has set the gradient opacity to 100% for the overstated shadow look).

Here are a couple of advanced color schemes I call "Shark", "Twilight", and "Sunset":

	Shark	Twilight	Sunset
Settings	Shark	Twilight	Sunset
BG Color	0x000000	0x773399	0xeeee88
Text Color	0xffffff	0xffffff	0x000000
Gradient Opacity	100	100	75
Gradient Color	0x00aadd	0x003399	0xfd6a20

Poll: White House Leak Serious

ABCNEWS.com is running a poll White House Leak Serious. So it looks as if most people actually think thi sleak is important enough to appoint a special council.

Why does this matter more than fabricating reasons to send the US into a war that has cost billions of dollars and thousands of dollars?

Frightning...

The Register has pointed out what many of us have believed for some time. It would seem that the US-Patriot act is being used to curcumvent 1st amendment protections.

Well... now that I have reported on Adrian Lamo, I should expect a subpoena.

More on this:
Google Search: Adrian Lamo
Help Net Security - Adrian Lamo speaks out
Slashdot | Adrian Lamo Surrenders
Help Net Security - Adrian Lamo speaks with leo before arrest
The Register | FBI reportedly hunting Adrian Lamo

Aw... too bad for them...

CRN : Daily Archives : Microsoft Holdout Massachusetts Opts For Open Source : 10:26 AM EST Fri., Sept. 26, 2003

My bet would have been for New Hampshire to take this stand first with the state motto "Live free or die"

But Massachusetts is right there with "By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty."

Corp Law Blog: Is Corporate Law Ever This Funny?

Corp Law Blog: Is Corporate Law Ever This Funny? I guess litigators have all the fun.

Miss WGASA?

The Miss America pgeant had the smalles audience since they first televised the contest. So what?

The "Globe And Mail" and MSNBC think it's news, and many stoies on Google are looking at it.

So what? Who gives a shit anyway? Obviously the american television audience doesn't care. Is it really news?

Widget Thieves!!

Sarah McAuley is the latest in a short line of lucky folx who have stolen the "Steal This Widget" blog widget.

Well placed Sarah :)

Another new development... looks like this can be stolen quite easily, look at her embedding code:
<div class="box">
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://www.mylaszlo.com/cgi-bin/blogbox?f=display&bid=4032f92961d90f65b740c6b27357ccb0"></script>
</div>
Results in:

YARIA

I finally got a look at the Gorillaz site. There is some very fun stuff in here but it is disappointing that they chose to use Quicktime and HTML to lay out the DVD trailer page. Especially since the front door only tells me I need Flash 6.

Coincidence or clairvoyance?

Last night my wife and I were watching Demolition Man and she heard the name
Scott Peterson during the rundown of parole hearings for the morning.

If you're not familiar with Scott, he's the guy that left his 8 month preganant wife at home on christmas eve last year to go fishing. When he came home his wife was gone.

Since then, the bodies of his wife Laci and unborn son Connor have been found near popular fishing grounds.

Looks like Geragos loses this one :)

I only cropped the image, a full size screenshot with only minor color correction can be found here

Beautiful!

According to washingtonpost.com: Worm Wears A 'Patch' For Disguise

Two year old exploits should not be explotable, but I'm guessing that there are more than a few dupes out there that willl launch this worm into the wild.

If microsoft could make patches that didn't break the system or introduce new bugs people would be more likely to install them.

They also have that nasty EULA that violates HIPAA to ensure "Auto update" doesn't get turned on...

UPDATE:
Joe Wilcox posted some insightful comments on the worm situation in his article titled Microsoft Security: It's All About Dry Ice.

What's in a name...

The hole in the web title has been with me for 7 or 8 years now. I always fancied the oxymoronic nature of the title. Today I look at it and I wonder when I'll change that title.

ah later... I'm rambling yet again. I've got *real* work to do.

Mainstream Press!!

InfoWorld: Laszlo builds flashy Web apps: September 19, 2003: By James R. Borck: Application Development

I originally said "Wahoo", but it looks like tere are some points that need to be addressed in this review.

The author understands the choice of plug-ins: "With a reported market penetration topping 90 percent of desktop users, Flash makes for a readily available client component"

but later slams that technology decision: "Laszlo’s dependence upon the availability of the free, third-party, nonstandardized Flash client, rather than a Laszlo-supported rendering engine, may also be of concern to the wary IT manager."
Now wait a second... One would assume that it is in the best interest of Macromedia to maintain backward compatibility with ALL flash content. Even the stuff they don't like. Anyone care to relive Office 97?

But in the enterprise space with a closed installation, IT controls what gets installed where. So I can see his point. But if I were in the middle of a large scale deployment, I would tend to choose a product that has had millions of man hours of testing rather than hundreds.

One nit: "I also confronted shortcomings in its development environment"
This is almost silly because there is no development environment. This is not a bad thing, you can use any xml-aware editor to develop LZX. I like Xemacs, my boss likes vi somehow we still get things done.

"Upon receiving a client request, Laszlo’s compiler combines the LZX tags, scripts, media files, and Flash resources into executable bytecode, compresses it, and streams the Flash executable."
Right, this process is only done once per application and only during development. When you deploy your server, you set it to cache the compiled swf which is served up much faster.

"So migrating existing code may require a good deal of tweaking."
uhhh... yeah?

"The solution’s data-binding mechanisms are limited to XML, lacking support for JDBC and direct JMS integration, for example."
This is not true nor was at the time of the review.

"I found it easy to compile and deploy my smaller sample applications, whereas managing and maintaining larger LZX applications proved taxing."
This is very odd because LZX is specifically designed for large applications. Large applications belong in source code control systems, with all of the good and bad that comes with it. Compare LZX to php, python, perl or java, and you see many simmilarities. Compare it to VB or MS Access VBA and you will find many differences.

It seemed to me that this reviewer was looking for MSAccess and found WebLogic

I need to refine my thoughts as the blog rolls...

Here's a funny update:
James touts Altio, and I looked into the article he linked and found this gem:In our testing, we ran into a problem: Deployment of two or more applets simultaneously within a browser demanded that client-side polling -- rather than server streaming -- be used, limiting the server push capabilities. Altio is aware of the difficulty and anticipates having the issue resolved by the next release.

Thank you Chuq!

Chuq found a very funny series of farks Here

The well timed one is:

Which should help if you didn't get yesterday's joke.

In the Beginning...

Sarah has posted a wonderful account of our "Loosly Connected Collaboration".

Just for giggles and patent purposes I thought I'd pull up the first public notice of the nav toy from the Laszlo forums.

Funny how things have changed... The well mannered tabs need to come back. But soon after this post I created the fully parameterized version and left it alone for 6 1/2 months. Only after Oliver noticed that I had integrated weather into my blog did I think to dust it off.

It took 5 months for anyone to notice that little trick :)

Steal This Widget

Sarah Allen's Weblog has a new version of her/my nav toy. Thanks to the wonder of hosting Marc's Voice has the new widget also. As you can see it is getting some nice attention with some new art and other goodeness. Sarah provides some detail about the updates. It even now has a name.



As an homage to Abby Someone.

How many heads that joke will go over is none of my concern :)

it is in two parts:
part 1 part 2
Not one Sorry guys.

Goof on Hockey players...

EOLAS v Microsoft

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report discusses the possibility that Microsoft lost the EOLAS pluggin patent on purpose. I have been speculating on this for quite some time, because MS has never lost a fight like this before. They could have made this problem go away more cheaply years ago.

Microsoft will do what they will with this. The question is what will EOLAS do?

If EOLAS does a GIF like license moving forward then we can go about our business.

The only affect then will be the MS FUD of any "potentially infringing" technolology that they may be bidding against.

More thoughts as the day develops...

The future..

Marc's Voice now has a version of the nav toy. Marc's is based off Sara's code which has the OPML viewer capabilities spoken of here.

One of these days I will finish the other capabilities in my version.
- parameterized art assets (white or black)
- Tinting instead of transparency
- point to multiple blogrolls
- variable size
- procedural construction of tabs based on input parameters
- the return of sibling control.
- fonts? Maybe, I use verabd now.

Yahoo Laszlo BABY!

Yahoo! Media Relations - Press Release

Jury Duty

San Mateo County Superior Court has thankfully provided prospective jurors 802.11 access to the internet. Thankfully this means that my day will not be totally wasted. UPDATE: Jury duty killed my car!

Sparky blew out the oil on the way to the courthouse. Now it is confirmed that sparky will not be travelling far under his own power again with this engine.

Bummer, I'll miss sparky if he dies..

Redmond Hogwash

Resources for Competing with Linux
"It’s becoming ever clearer that the Windows platform offers better total cost of operation (TCO) than Linux. Use these resources to make the case that Windows will save your customers’ time, frustration, and money."

I was hoping to actually look at some of this data, but it requires a passport login to read most of the documents.

I was particularly interested in this article...
From the site:
On January 1, 2002, CIO Magazine ran an article entitled “How to Run A Microsoft-Free Shop.” Though the article is passionately pro-Linux, the writer provides few facts to support his claims that switching from Microsoft to Linux provides benefits. This document refutes the writer’s claims, point by point.

It is really too bad that M$ won't let me read the articles, but I won't get a passport password for obvious reasons.

One wonders why this info is all locked up?

I also wonder why they neglected to mention that when the chips are down Microsoft relies on Linux.

Help pay the $2000 RIAA Settlement

Datatype: The RIAA Are Dicks. We Apologize.
Datatype: The RIAA Are Dicks. We Apologize.

Excitement at Seybold

I never get as much from these conferences as I feel I should. This time my visit was trunkated but a bomb threat:

KTVU.com - News - Bomb Threat Forces Thousands From Moscone Center
Police evacuated a San Francisco conference center following a bomb scare.
Bomb scare brings show to a halt
OracleWorld bomb threat confirmed
Moscone Center evacuation ordered after bomb threat
Bomb Scare Halts OracleWorld, Sybold Shows
Evacuation Halts OracleWorld

Three stories about BigBiz INC wanting it both ways

RIAA Fights online sharing with lable support, Lables use online sharing as global focus group
SCO ships open source software (More), SCOrns Open source developers
Convicted Monopoli$t calls competition unfair

Next thing you know we'll have a government asking for tax cuts and more deficit spending...

Yet Another Rant (YAR)

I wondered about this when the tax cuts were bing bandied about. In a nutshell, our government has handed billions of dollars to the energy companies and called it a tax cut.

Yeah whoopie.

Santa Cruz gets to be Berkley for a day by asking congess to impeach Bush. I'm all for it but the odds of actually getting an impeachment started let alone completed are slim and none. Congress gave Bush everything he needed to do whatever he wanted with our military in Iraq.

RIP Edward Teller 1908 - 2003 There are a vew good stories out today on Dr. Teller try the NYTimes

Nav Toy Redux

So there is a new toy app in the gutter now. Thanks to the ease of Laszlo, Sarah and I can trade ideas and art via our implemantations. Do that with a fla file... Anyway I've updated my toy to use the mouseover niceness, her little arrow art, and I made the links a class to geive me some more flexibility. I'm down to 108 lines and I still have all of the parameterized coolness that I had before. My next pass will be a bit more compact and I might make it support either XML files or parameters...

Laszlo, |-||@X0rz and blogs... What have I done?

Sarah Allen hast pilfered my code! Thank you Sarah, I'll integrate some of your ideas into my toy. Her version uses an XML file that sits next to the LZX to create the linkage. Thus decoupling the app and data. This has the advantage of being a smaller code footprint (60 lines of code) but it has a couple of disadvantages also. I fully parameterize everything on a quey string to fill in the blanks, you are limited to the number of slots I give you.

I love this shit :P

Still, blogging reminds me of 1995 and geocities.... Watch this space for a new version coming later today...

Nav Toy now BlogWorthy

So I finally stuck my little fun links toy into my blog. This is one of the sillier things I have written while tinkering with LZX. The app is hiding over at myLaszlo for now. This app took very little time to write and is really quite small, weighing in at 120 lines of code. There is some very cool stuff going on over at Laszlo.