Alex Iskold – the giant brain behind AdaptiveBlue – has a great post up today titled How JavaScript is Slowing Down the Web (And What To Do About It). While I’m sure no one has ever noticed how slow my blog (or Fred Wilson’s) loads (cough, cough, choke, choke – that would be sarcasm), there’s no easy solution.
In addition to describing the problem clearly, Alex suggests several approaches that make things better.
I was in a meeting last week with Alex and a handful of other widget developers who are aggressively working on some interesting approaches and solutions to improve this. Look for new and improved stuff coming soon to a blog near you.
Time for a Sunday morning nerd out. If you are a programmer or entrepreneur in a company that develops in PHP watch in horror as the main Facebook source code is released into the wild. Of course, this could be a hoax, as several commenters assert, but it also sounds like it’s a possibility due to a misconfigured server. Nik Cubrilovic – who wrote a good detailed post on TechCrunch titled Facebook Source Code Leaked – wrote a followup post on his own blog titled Learning from Facebook: Preventing PHP Leakage. Ah – the joys of scripting languages. I miss the Microsoft Basic Compiler.
I was delighted to wake up this morning. I’m delighted to wake up every morning, but this is a particular beautiful sunny Saturday in Boulder, Colorado which means I can cuddle up to my computer and catch up a little (ok – and go for a long run.)
My inner feeling of delight was improved even more when I was scanning headlines online and saw the NY Times article Judge Says Unix Copyrights Rightfully Belong to Novell. This has been a long time in coming and finally puts a stake in the ground around (or in the heart of) SCO’s ridiculous copyright suit against IBM around Unix.
Unlike patents, I’m a big supporter of copyright (and trade secrets, GPL, and copyleft) as a mechanism for addressing and protecting software innovation. However, SCO’s behavior around Unix has cast a pallor over the legitimacy of copyright and open source since 2003. Once again, a Federal judge stepped up (this time it was Judge Dale Kimball – Federal District Court – Utah) with another important decision around intellectual property rights and software.
I predict that 2008 will be the year that the software patent situation finally goes critical and the nuclear meltdown in the reactor begins. Two things happened today that are notable: the gigantically stupid $1.52 billion judgment for Alcatel-Lucent against Microsoft was overturned and a hard to find company named Aloft Media sued Microsoft and Adobe for “user interfaces in a network browsing window that display the content at a specific URL as well as the URL itself somewhere on or around the window.”
The backstory behind the original Alcatel-Lucent judgment boarders on the insane. It’s extremely complicated and kafkaesque – the only conclusion a rational person can draw is that it’s further evidence of a completely broken software patent system. Just mention the name Fraunhofer and watch people’s heads start spinning around (with the audio track presumably encoded in some non-MP3 format.)
Today’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Rudi Brewster of San Diego that the damage award was not valid because it appears Microsoft never infringed one of the two patents is another brave and thoughtful move by a federal judge following Judge William Schwarzer’s (San Francisco – Federal) dismissal of a lawsuit from Friskit Inc. against RealNetworks citing the Supreme Court’s April ruling in KSR v. Teleflex.
Of course, a good deed never goes unpunished. Aloft Media’s lawyers apparently found their way to the Texas East District Court and managed to file a lawsuit against Microsoft and Adobe for – well – it looks like “URLs near a browser window.” Maybe someone should suggest that browsers exist because of URLs in the first place and it would be perfectly natural to assume that someone would put URLs near the browser window. Or – more specifically – that it would an obvious thing to do to put URL’s near a browser window.
Are there windmills in East Texas?
I’ve been a fan of Ambient Devices for a while – I’ve got an Ambient Orb on my desk that turns different colors based on the temperature outside. This morning – after a smelly run on Sunset in LA to the parallel universe that is Beverly Hills and back to the hotel – I noticed that Ambient had just released the Ambient Umbrella.
I love it. I know of a bunch of different companies that are working on integrating the Internet with a wide variety of every day products. Some of the applications are simple while some are complex – many of them will radically change the way we interact with our “computers.” And the really smart ones will make the underlying platforms available to anyone. Remember – It’s the API, Stupid.
I am so pleased that American Airlines and Lufthansa are launching broadband internet (via WiFi) on their airplanes starting in 2008. I’ve been so bummed to have to sit quietly on planes and read a book while not being connected to the Internet. Soon, in addition to being able to surf the web, I’ll be able to crank up Skype and chatter away with my loved ones to my heart’s content. I know my seat mate will appreciate this. The poor folks at the FAA must be so confused about what they can and can’t allow to be on during flight.
Now, if I could just find a power supply in an airport. Or on an airplane.
In my never ending – often Don Quixote like – quest against absurd software patents, I must pause in the midst of my day and give a standing ovation to Judge William Schwarzer (San Francisco – Federal) for dismissing a lawsuit from Friskit Inc. against RealNetworks citing the Supreme Court’s April ruling in KSR v. Teleflex.
I hope this is the first of tens of thousands of dismissals as a result of KSR v. Teleflex. For those of you studying along at home, the WSJ summary of the KSR ruling is: “In KSR, the Supreme Court rejected a “rigid” application of existing tests for obviousness in favor of a more “expansive and flexible approach” that would give judges more discretion. If a person of ordinary skill in the relevant subject area would “be able to fit the teaching of multiple patents together like pieces of a puzzle” then the patent is obvious, the Supreme Court ruled.”
I love this description. I’ve always felt obviousness with regard to software (and software patents) was easy to define, but many lawyers, courtrooms, and owners of obvious patents disagree with me. Maybe we should simply adopt Supreme Court Justice Stewart’s definition of pornography for non-obvious software patents – “I know it when I see it.”
I’m an email junkie going back as far as I can remember. It’s by far my favorite way to communicate.
I’m utterly and completely baffled that Facebook email (ok – “Inbox”) is so poor. No forward a message. Can’t add people to a thread. No way to sort or manage the messages. And now Facebook apps are customizing the email form with message bling. Gack.
Now, before you tell me “that’s not how Facebook works” I know that. However, more and more of my new Facebook friends (those of the between 30 and 45 age group, mostly tech nerds but some others) seem to be enjoying sending me emails on Facebook. I’ve started cutting the page with the Microsoft Snipping Tool and forwarding it back them via email to continue the conversation.
At least my friend Jared Polis and the gang at Confluence Commons are trying to build a solution to this. Hurry up guys – this is silly.
Last Thursday when I was in New York I swung by Steve Rubel’s office and hung out with him for an hour. We caught up on a bunch of stuff but managed to squeeze in a short riff about our first computers (yes – we were talking about how old we were – which is not that old, but it feels like it now that we have Facebook accounts.)
That’s me – as a 40 year old – with my first computer – an Apple ][. The actual one – with some software that I wrote running on it (yes – those are five menu options, numbered “1. “ to “5. “) It cost about $3,000 total, which included two floppy drives, an Integer Card, memory (it had 64k), Pascal, Visicalc, and a couple of games.) I eventually got a copy of Beer Run to go with Choplifter.
My second computer was an original IBM PC.
I can’t remember how much memory it has (not much) but it came with two floppy disks. Again, $3,000 or so. One day I got a Tandon 10MB hard disk (ST506 compatible – anyone remember that?) and thought for about 24 hours that my life was complete.
My first laptop (er – portable) was a Compaq.
I also had a Mac 128k and a Lisa. Reflecting on the whole thing is a little scary to me. Especially since each of them seemed to cost about $3,000 (except the Lisa which was closer to $10,000.)