April 27, 2007
Thanks to the good auspices of Kevin Smokler (who I met at South By Southwest), I get a press pass to the San Francisco International Film Festival as part of the Citizen Media Press Corps. I love the movies with a passion, and the film festival circuit is a great place to catch movies that aren’t out in popular release yet. There are also some movies that you can probably only see on the festival circuit. For the next week, expect a lot of posts about the movies, which I’ll file under Society | At My Leisure. Here’s what I’ll be up to with my press pass audaciously hanging from my neck.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in At My Leisure..., Society 
2 Comments »
March 17, 2007
“I don’t know what you’re so highly strung about,” Charles said to me, a few minutes before our panel was about to begin. I was anxiously asking him to wolf his breakfast down and rush to the Green Room, which is the panel ante room at SxSW. “It will be ok — trust me.” I often wish I was as calm as Charles about things.
He was right, of course. The panel I moderated on Web browsers at SxSW even got scooped by PC Magazine — yay! The article mentions the empty seats, which certainly caused a brief sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Nobody likes to throw a party and have scant attendance. But the panel itself went swimmingly, and towards the end I’d say we had over 150 people in there. Thank you, Brendan, Chris, and Charles.
There was also some small measure of controversy, which I suppose is the mark of a good discussion. Dan Appelquist (who chairs the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, which I am also a part of) asked a good question about WICD, and Brendan’s answer spawned much discussion. Soon, our panel will be podcast, and everyone can see the exact quote in question. Regurgitating what Brendan said in second and third hand accounts may not lead to the most accurate discourse 
Posted in Extrapolations, Standards, Technology 1 Comment »
March 17, 2007
I turned older sometime this weekend, in China Town, at the EZ5, surrounded by people I love. It was a great birthday. The bar even sprung a surprise on me — a very eccentric surprise — the kind you have to grin and bear. Celebrations are always so awkward and beautiful.
Posted in At My Leisure..., Society 1 Comment »
March 7, 2007
South By Southwest is a phenomenon. After my first visit last year, I’ve stopped thinking of it as just a big music thing in Austin, Texas (silly me). This year, I’m speaking on two panels as part of the Interactive Festival part of SxSW. I’m chairing one of these panels.
On Sunday at 5PM, I’m speaking on a panel called “How To Get your Company to Embrace Mashup Culture.” Kevin Lawver’s got Alla Gringaus (from Time Inc.), Steve Chipman (of WIM fame and SlayerOffice fame), Greg Cypes (Mr. OpenAIM) and myself talking about some of the things we did at AOL to usher in a wave of cool zeitgeisty stuff. I’m excited to talk about the cool things AOL’s engineers did with OpenID, amongst other things.
Then on Tuesday at 10AM I chair a panel I’m really excited about called Browser Wars Retrospective: Past, Present, and Future Battlefields. My panelists are Brendan Eich (who invented JavaScript and is CTO of Mozilla), Charles McCathieNevile (Standards maven at Opera Software and W3C titan), and Chris Wilson (who’s worked on every version of Internet Explorer that I can remember at Microsoft, and on Microsoft’s Avalon stuff). I want to use this panel to discuss some of the same battlefronts that seem to have occurred in the past. One such clash is that of proprietary formats versus open standards of various flavors. The panel description says it well enough — where’s the Web content model really going? The speakers lived the browser wars of the past. I’m going to goad them to talk about their visions for the future of the Web.
(Cross-posted from dev.aol.com)
Posted in Extrapolations, Standards, Technology No Comments »
February 14, 2007
(Cross posted from dev.aol.com)
Aside from us hapless Web developers, few people really think about HTML when they surf the Web. The average user’s Web site of choice is likely to work with their browser of choice. The fact that this is the case can largely be seen as a testament to the W3C standardization process — HTML just about works, tag soup notwithstanding.
Not many people know about the often acrimonious debates between Microsoft and Netscape that induced this kind of interoperability in the past, or about a certain HTML working group meeting in Colorado a few years ago where everyone worked all night on HTML so that they could go skiing all day. The point is, HTML is out there — the mavens have spoken. So what’s all the fuss about?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Standards No Comments »
February 5, 2007
Jim Ley invited me in Boston to check out Joost as an alpha-tester. Joost is the startup formerly referred to as The Venice Project (and also known affectionately as The Covenant in W3C circles). The guys who started Skype and Kazaa are behind it. They’ve hired some really smart SVG brains, among others.
While playing with it, I think I had a vague “aha!” moment about social media as television. Sure, there are bandwidth issues (insert net neutrality snide remark), but the Joost guys figure they’ve solved affiliated compression problems.
One of the things I like is that each channel has its own chat room, and you get plugins like instant messaging in full screen mode. I wonder where all the content will come from, since this is not about user-generated content. Content is a bit limited (how much of the surf video can you watch?) but I got really engrossed in an independent movie and started watching it. Before I knew it, a whopping hour had passed. Just like vegging out in front of the (regular) TV! I haven’t (yet) found a sufficient community to test out the plugins like chatting and ratings, but the left-over insight following my “aha!” moment suggests that there is, indeed, a “There there.”
I like the slick SVG menus that overlay the video when it is playing. I read somewhere that these guys use XUL Runner, apparently, and leverage a pretty diverse open source stack. I really like the fact that despite user-agent foibles, the Joost (Yoost?) folks make use of the most appropriate technology. That’s in keeping with my view that many of the most interesting things on the Web will likely be the sum of small parts, and not an immersive user agent experience. That is, Web technologies (protocols — HTTP — and formats — e.g. SVG) will be leveraged where they make the most sense, cobbled into application-driven user agents (not classic “Web browsers”). I think this is particularly true in the mobile world, and said so in my Mobile 2.0 presentation.
I was informed by the playfuls.com write-up on Joost.
Posted in Extrapolations, Gadgetry, Standards, Technology No Comments »
February 4, 2007
This post is about (really, really) bad television, senatorial gaffes, and melanin. Mainly about melanin. For whatever reason, this Superbowl weekend (yes, yes, go Colts) a lot of people wanted to talk about race with me.
Ordinarily, that’s not really a topic I am likely to broach of my own accord. Mind you, I’m not reluctant to talk about race. If I was tongue-tied when put on the spot, it was mainly because my mental machinery takes time to warm up to the subject. This weekend, I distinctly felt that people were asking me my opinion because of my own melanin content — that is, because I’m Indian, the intrepid conversationalists assumed that (rightly or wrongly) I must have something interesting to say about the subject of race. And maybe that’s not a far-fetched assumption.
Something must be going on in the collective zeitgeist (and note that it’s also Black History Month). I got roped into two discussions on the subject, not to mention the fact that race issues featured at the Superbowl as well (e.g. see the numerous stories about the respective coaches). But here’s what happened this weekend, and here’s what motivates my current musings.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Populism, Society No Comments »
February 3, 2007
So ‘07 began with a bang, not a whimper (contrary to TS’s post-apocalyptic ruminations — global warming, nuclear proliferation, and all that jazz notwithstanding), and the first month has been very busy, full of promise and change. Then there’s a hectic February.
We said bye to my kid sister on MW’s boat, docked somewhere in the Emeryville Marina. She’s off to do field work and research for a year, and everyone’s going to miss her. So there’s some change already — she won’t be just across the bridge for most of this year.
I’ve also been traveling a lot; most recently, I was in Boston for the mini technical plenary, attending a meeting of the WebAPI WG and dialing into a meeting of the Mobile Web Best Practices WG. I’ve become an utter whimp from living out on the West Coast for so long; I found it REALLY cold there. I was also in Vegas earlier this year. And in a few days, I’ve got to get things together for my SxSW panel. I’m speaking on two panels at SxSW in March. Kev asked me to speak on one as well, just so he could hand out a blue card with “rambling” marked on it.
Posted in At My Leisure... 1 Comment »
January 29, 2007
Taboca (aka Marcio Galli aka Syncope) e-mailed a bunch of us with characteristic gusto about his Pink Paula Theme, “just in time for Valentine’s Day.” Hah! In an act of romance and impromptu bravado, our favorite Brazilian gifted his girlfriend Paula a pink theme for Firefox, all her own. When Firefox 2.0 shipped, she obliged him to tweak the skin to work with the latest release, and then he decided to release his work to the masses. Roses are red …
Honestly, this made my day. Taboca’s also behind CCPhotos, part of his master plan of digitizing the known (Cartesian) world. Ah, life, life, life.
Posted in Extrapolations, Technology 2 Comments »
January 11, 2007
I guess the key to really experience the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is to get a pass to a bling-bling after party, thrown by a well-known company in some hard-to-get-into sort of place (ropes, bouncers, and the like). Me, I was just lowly convention hall scum, intrepidly seeking tchotchkes while asking questions of the knowledgeable exhibitors.
This year’s CES was just about the biggest massing of humans and electromagnetic radiation that I’ve ever been privy to. Taking the shuttle bus between the various exhibits was a maddening experience; I’d frequently find myself on a shuttle bus between two venues with a semi-hostile driver and confused patrons of technology in Vegas traffic jams.
But, whining and self-deprecation aside, I found a few things in Vegas to write home about.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in At My Leisure..., Gadgetry, Technology 1 Comment »
