We finally have a heavily-Firebug-inspired tool inside Internet Explorer. To quote Joe Hewitt (creator of Firebug): “I couldn’t be happier that Microsoft completely copied Firebug for IE8.” I have to agree - a tool like this has been a long time coming and it’s greatly appreciated. Only the Internet Explorer team would’ve ever been the ones to build this tool - there’s simply too much information here that’s unavailable to typical IE extensions.
Yay! Go read Javascript in Internet Explorer 8 for more info.
March 13th, 2008 | Posted in AJAX, Internet Explorer | No Comments
I have dorky friends… sometimes too dorky…
Wes says: jodi and I are going to bend, or this weekend.
Matt says: i’m going to bend, xor
Matt says: it’s much more exclusive.
March 11th, 2008 | Posted in Super Dork, Wes's Boring Life | No Comments
Dr Nic comments on Friends for Sale Architecture - A 300 Million Page View/Month Facebook Ruby on Rails App with this gem:
Um you guys probably weren’t at the meeting when it was decided that “Rails doesn’t scale”. I’ll forgive you this once, but don’t let me catch you scaling Rails again.
February 25th, 2008 | Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Scalability | No Comments
More pictures are available on flickr via the WADOT
A snow cat sits on a 40 foot tall wall of snow covering US 2 at Stevens Pass, WA
February 11th, 2008 | Posted in Snow, Washington State | No Comments
I written about creating an API for any website before, but those methods were fraught with danger if the underlying site changed its structure. I’ve known about dapper for quite some time but I didn’t realize that dapps are resilient against underlying site changes until now.
The “Dapp Factory,” a Rhino-based server application and a web front-end that deals with just about any site by proxying your requests and modeling the DOM on the proxy, then recording your actions for later replay. But, their secret sauce is a super-cool algorithm that figures out the structure of pages in such a way that your API can withstand changes to the target site, making your feed resilient to all but massive site overhauls. You then simply consume an XML or JSON feed, or use a simple API to dynamically construct paramaterized feeds.
Pivotal Blabs: Screen Scrape no more…Seriously! by Parker Thompson emphasis mine
Go find an existing dapp or create a dapp for any site now!.
In the spirit of mocking my friend Parker… I mean full disclosure, I’m employed by Pivotal Labs and am friends with Jon of Dapper.
February 10th, 2008 | Posted in Dapper, Mashup, RSS/Atom/Syndication, Web Service | 2 Comments
