There are a few questions I see repeatedly on the GWT developers list, and one of the most common seems to be why in the world we were so clueless as to forget to support synchronous XMLHttpRequest. Ok, most of the people asking don't call us clueless; they simply ask why the feature is excluded. But the question has been asked so often that I feel inclined to answer it somewhere easily linkable, namely here.
Another month, another release candidate for GWT. We've been a pretty fast moving team; I've already worked on two releases and I started Google in September. This release is a little different though. There are no new features. In fact, we actually tried really hard not to make changes. Yet, we edited almost every file in the source tree. Oh good, a riddle, could it be … open source.
I'm still decompressing after last week; I had forgotten how much I love the mad scramble to put the finishing touches on a release. The successive waves of frustration and triumph have always played to one of my strengths, stubbornness. And trust me when I say, it took much stubbornness to mark this issue “fixed but not released”. Now it's time to blow off some steam …
For those who last heard from us when I was extolling the virtues of puckless homes who are wondering if we are currently living either on the streets of Atlanta or perhaps with Ludacris, I can assure you that we are under our own, very new, and very non-leaky roof. In fact we've been here for a month already, unpacking, arguing with Comcast, flying to the West Coast … you know, the usual.
We're two weeks out from our grand farewell to the Northeast, and still Steph and I don't have a place to live in Atlanta. This might come as a shock to many of you with whom we have exchanged emails describing a picture perfect little classic Atlanta home in the heart of emerging East Atlanta Village, but sadly we had to pass on that one when it became known that it was being held up by a hockey puck …
About a year ago, I was interested in mining RSS content. At the same time, I was taking a mathematical modeling class and opted to spend my final project playing with Spectral Clustering. Which is just a colorful name for taking some data and breaking it up into groups. With summer raging outdoors, I took the opportunity last night to revisit that concept in a more flippant way.
I will be playing the part of a Googler. Today, I officially accepted a position at Google working with the Web Toolkit team. As you can imagine, I'm extremely excited to be working for a company with a reputation for doing cool things in an elegant and ethical manner. The other good news in this deal is we're headed back to Atlanta (no, not Mountain View).
My friend Brent posted a solution to the most recent ruby quiz today. When I saw it, I tried to put it out of my mind. But curiosity, coupled with the fact that I seldom get to write any ruby these days, finally proved too much. As an act of rebellion against the overwhelming curiosity, I committed to do it in the most hideously unreadable form imaginable, a single expression…
Today marked the end of my second week down at IBM. So far things are going very well. The work is interesting, the people are intelligent and friendly and the coffee is offered in the cafeteria for a reasonable price (free). But while I settle into my little work community in the Advanced Technology Group, I can't help but think about the rest of the 330,000 IBM badge holders around the world.
Now that the thesis is finished, “how is the thesis going?” has given way to a new question: “what next?” Personally, I wasn't planning anything except a little Guinness and maybe some trips to the local skatepark with Trey. But alas, I guess it is true what they say. I am almost a grown man, so I have to start thinking responsibly. I guess I should try something I haven't tried before. Maybe I'll get a real job.
The thesis is done. I would say more about how satisfying it is to have a lump of 90 pages sitting in front of you all bearing your mark of authorship. Or, how shocking it seems to have just fulfilled the final requirement for an MIT degree. But alas, I am far to tired of the thing to give it another thought for at least two weeks. For those who are curious what my thesis would look like from above …
My appraisal of the thesis effort with two weeks remaining.
Lately, my fondness for Pierre Levy's Collective Intelligence ideas have kicked in again. This is partly due to some writing we did a few weeks ago about OPENSTUDIO and partly because a lot of goings on seem to be constantly reflecting those ideas. The most recent reflection comes by way of yesterday's Digg corruption scandal, which left me wondering about the trustworthiness of a collective trust.
Over a long weekend a few weeks back, I rearranged some things in the site and converted (almost) everything over to Ruby on Rails. I was tired of the complexities of the MoveableType/PHP setup that I've used (reluctantly) for several years. It's a welcome change. In fact, for reasons described within, I'm doing a lot more of my work in Ruby these days.
I'm sizing up 2006; it looks like it has all the making of a memorable year. Unlike last year when I was pretty certain I was staying in Boston, I truly have no idea where I'll be or what I'll be doing a year from now. So before I charge off the end of that cliff, let me take this time to jettison some end-of-year thoughts and imagine a future of all-you-can-drink free coffee.
The thesis proposal is still awaiting the final signatory blessing of readers, but the final project for my user interface class is, as the little woman at the bakery in Metz says, complet. Our little group, put considerably behind after we all went to Japan for the better part of a week, were able to pull it together at the end by registering some incredibly long coding sessions.
Without too much hoopla, OPENSTUDIO alpha opened last week. While we initially promised an October opening, classes and myriad other obligations got in the way of finishing those final details that just can't be ignored, like the ability to steal Buraks (our virtual currency). I'm not complaining, though, fixing that bug was lucrative. I think I made several hundred Buraks just isolating the issue.
As is common for me these days, I’m a little late to post. I really need to get back into the habit of writing regularly as my masters thesis is on the horizon and the ability to hammer away comfortably at the keyboard could certainly prove valuable. A few weeks back the PLW made the most of a speaking opportunity at the AIGA Design Conference to introduce a new project called OPENSTUDIO.
Really, I’m not so obsessed with OS X as it seems. But I did run into some issues recently and had trouble finding any relevant information through Google. I thought I might as well wrap that up with some senseless opinions about whether a Tiger upgrade is worth the time and call an end to this series of ramblings on anything Apple.