Jonathan Grimes
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I’ve got the bug.
My wife and I recently bought a new MINI Cooper S Countryman (her previous car, Bella, was totaled, thanks to some kid rear-ending us — people, stop texting!) The MINI (my wife dutifully named Penelope — I will never understand her need to name and assign gender) is a really slick piece of machinery. We chose to custom order it, which took several weeks to arrive on U.S. soil, almost two months actually. During this time, we made many visits to the dealership, sometimes for my car for maintenance, Sasha as my wife calls “her,” others to pester, annoy and prod our sales rep over the MINI–erm, Penelope’s, status, etc. However, we never made a visit without me drooling over my dream car:
The M3 Coupe. Or according to my wife: Diana. This has got to stop.
I digress…
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Its been bugging me… I’ve had this kick-butt system in the living room for years, but for some strange reason with Windows Vista (now 7) I lost my ability to pass pre-encoded digital audio out my SP/DIF port for anything other than DVDs and Recorded TV… which is a really annoying little hole in the setup. My wife can attest, that every few months, I’ll interrupt our evenings with a little experiment to try to fix this “problem”… though, its only really a problem to those (like for instance: me) who care/notice the surround sound when its missing/down-mixed to stereo… so, no support for this little quirk. :) Any ways… today, I FINALLY solved my problem. :D
So, what is the solution?
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There’s nothing quite like getting a new gadget that makes me want to take full advantage of it… and by that I mean write applications for it, or with it. :) The Google notebook, CR-48, is a very nice machine. It has my imagination spinning with possibilities… for those that don’t know what this is, the Google notebook is a demo unit running Google’s beta ChromeOS. Which, is basically a very thin Linux system running ONLY the Chrome web browser…a very modern browser with early implementations of new technologies for the web… The idea is that almost everything you do on your computer is through the browser, so the browser IS the operating system, not an application that runs in it… pushing all the “hard work” to The Cloud…giving you only the user interface and the end-result/byproduct of “your” applications.
With a notebook like CR-48, I think it would be awesome to have a project that lived entirely on The Cloud… run in modern standards-compliant browsers (WebKit-derived, Mozilla/Firefox 3.6+, IE9+) as well as DEVELOPED in The Cloud…I’m talking about something like Bespin and putting it into something that offers an Eclipse-like environment, but accessible from anywhere. :)
This new notebook has me even more excited about the web and its future… I’ve been reading about the wonders of the new world of HTML5 and its vast improvements on what it will bring to the table. ECMAScript v5 (JavaScript) has some really awesome additions… and then there’s WebSockets with event-driven bidirectional data between the web browser and server…combine this with NodeJS…and holy cow! So fun…. the future looks so bright. :) I’m so excited about the future of the Web.
Something just hit me. Back in 2002/2003 I was developing a content management system much like WordPress and Drupal. One of the first things I wanted to cover was a common form feel. So I developed a form description language that I could use to describe a form with a small block of what elements and fields I wanted, and the interpreter did the rest.
Fast forward to the present and at work I’m working with the Sencha (aka ExtJS) user interface framework/library and they have a JSON config that will render the entire UI!
These deja vu moments are starting to hit too frequently… Its about time I take my ideas and pushed them forward.
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