Other than a useless showoff of my Tibetan flag, the purpose of this photo was to test how images are rendered in Blogspot. I am tinkering with the Flickr API these days and was curious to see if I can do some distributed work between the Google domain (is it namespace?) and the Flickr one. Which reminds me of a few ideas that I read about the Internet as a programming platform. I really need to digest this a bit. The whole mashup concept, when the hype dies down, may have some actual value to it. Although the issue of trust seems paramount if it is to succeed; I do like the idea of throwing a request into a black hole and getting a response back, if I trust the black hole. Just getting started on a web services project and I do like the idea more and more. The difference being that in my case, we control the black hole – we being a B2B chain. I won’t talk much about it since it is a very new concept somewhat patented by my employer, but expect sometime in the near future to be able to shop for medical services the same way you currently shop for travel and books online.
Back to Internet apps, Web 2.0, et. al.: the Blogspot word processor is s-l-o-w on my laptop. And now we have online spreadsheets. That's cool, but do we really need it? And, has anyone thought of an online compiler - type your code in a www window and have it compiled behind the scenes? Let's web 2.0-enable web 2.0 development.
Not really related… I have been thinking about the concept of informatics quite a bit lately. I already mentioned that design (information design, motion design… basically, any kind of computerized visual design, for lack of a better term) is a major interest of mine (as a consumer/hobby-ist); and professionally too, since it is, after all, the visible end of the software development stack and the one that is the most removed from the ld hl, 0x0000 level. When I was growing up, informatics meant a heavily math-based science of algorithms and it was truly intimidating. Today it seems to take almost New Age-y overtones. Great. We have artists, we have ‘communists’ (open source movement), who says the world of software is boring?
