I was caught off guard by an interesting compare/contrast over at snarkmarket. Two quotes from recent books, both disparaging looks at pre-internet life. The author, Tim Carmody, asks if these kinds of feelings are what are driving us to use our cognitive surplus towards creation.

Maybe slightly, orthogonal to his original idea, was a thought that pop’ed into my head. Not just why are people leaving TV, but how. I have tried to get my parents to use “newer” things, like linux, bad idea I know, but here they are using the internet in interesting ways, in creative ways all without “my help”. Where did they learn to do that.

When I think about this I am reminded of my first concert going experience. I was 14, or 15, and I came upon a mosh pit, literally kids banging up against one another. My first thought being, why the hell not, and I joined in. At some point I fell. Now, I had never met any one in this pile, but 4 people reached to pick me up, and a couple others communicated to watch out. Quickly, I was set right, and re-joined the mosh.

What I have always found remark able, was how quickly a community coalesced around an organizing principal. There was no rule book, but the rules were clearly being communicated, in a viral method. Maybe that is why it’s easy to leave the TV. The rules of using our cognitive surplus aren’t explicit, but implicit, and easy to under stand, and spreading in a viral method.

A couple years ago I read an article in the New Yorker about a brewery called Dogfish Head. In the article they talked about an interesting beer, Palo Santo Marron. Besides the beer they gave a rough history of the company including the fact that when Dogfish Head started brewing it was illegal in Delaware, the owner single handedly wrote the bill legalizing it, and got it passed. Now, after reading this article I was informed about this one food stuff, and I hadn’t ever had the chance to try it.

I like to know about my food, but few food items have full-length New Yorker articles written about them. Maybe if more food like onions, and carrots were treated with as much breadth I would know more, but as much as I know about food items, like carrots, and onions in general, its very hard to find information that is specific. You need to actually talk to people, which is something I find difficult.

A year or so when by, and by chance went to a friends beer bar in San Francisco, the Church Key, and he was showing off some awesome beers. If you are in the North Beach area you should check it out. It came up in conversation they had the beer in question from Dogfish head. I had my chance to taste it.

I don’t think I have ever been so excited to try something like that. Though, I once had a chance to eat at Chez Panisse that was pretty awesome to. I knew about what I was about to imbibe. It was an awesome experience. I had a knowledgeable Bar Tender, supplementing what I already knew. The kicker was that it tasted good as well. It doesn’t taste like any other beer I have had, well except maybe like a barley wine, which I know is tangential to beer, maybe like Chimay.

That was that though, I was sure the only place you could get that beer was in bars, and I don’t go to bar’s all that often. Also if you want to know how hard it is for a beer to get into the hands of a consumer check out Beer Wars. Then one day, the Berkeley Bowl opened a new edition two blocks from my apartment. To my surprise, they sold the four-packs of Palo Santo. Now I can buy it whenever I want and enjoy it.

There are very few foods that when I walk into the store I can almost visualize the trip that it made. I can envision the from the brewery in Delaware to my store. To my tummy, and it’s a satisfying feeling. I wonder what it would be like if I could visualize the entire trip, of all my food from where it came from to my table.

Salt & Fat: a nicely done, and consistent food blog

One blog I have been really enjoying lately is Salt & Fat. I can’t say exactly why I enjoy there blog more then the thousands of other cooking blogs, but I think it has something to do with their consistency, and well doneness of their content.

Each post revolves around one idea. Usually a recipe, but it could also be a kitchen instrument, or a news article that they have some commentary on. The first article that really hit home with was one about burgers. Burgers have been done to death, I think Rachel Ray said once that about a third of her 30 minute meals are a burger of some kind, but Salt & Fat’s treatment of the subject was spot-on. It was a modern, if I may, interpretation and explanation of backyard, and on the grill burgers.

So, if you were looking for a well-written insightful cooking blog take a lot at Salt & Fat.

In the last week I have heard two co-workers exclaim lack of energy when they get home, and therefore can’t find the time to work on extracurricular activities. When I hear this, I go-off a little, I know its unfair, and I shouldn’t care what other people do, but I have two kids at home, and I still find the time to make things.

I am slowly forgetting what my life was like before I had kids, not so much the things I did, but more like what my daily routine was, but I am pretty sure I felt the same way. When I got home I wanted to relax, I knew that I had time later to do what I wanted. Later never came though.

I fixed the energy/time problem though, I had two kids in two years. Sounds like a paradox, I know, but I realized that I don’t need to work harder, well maybe a little, but I should be working smarter. You are going to have a lot of time taken from you. For a long time, this was incredibly frustrating, but it prepared me for working. Whenever I could I spent time thinking and making notes. Then when I could sit down and do some work, I had plan. Another aspect that always helped, is that I was never able to get the list done. Which meant always knew what I was going to start on next.

Now, its fair to say that I may not be making great things, but I feel better about what I am making, and I am happy with my throughput, I know that I can get better slowly overtime.

Maybe you don’t need to have kids, but you do need to find some kind of full filling activity, outside of start ups. It will help you focus when you aren’t doing that activity.

Prism is a great little single site browser. It’s not as feature complete as something like Fluid, or NativeHost, but it wins on cross-platform compatibility, and the ability to create packages. That are distributable. Also for Macs, you can create self contained .app’s that you can just hand to someone and they can install it.

I was faced with a problem though, I am all about HTML5 Apps. In HTML5 App space, I want people to be able to write server-less apps. For Prism to work for this you need to be able to bundle your code with your app. For the life of me, I could not find the docs on this.

If you get so far as to look at webapp.ini you will see something like this

   [Parameters]
   id=some.nice.videos.to.watch@prism.app
   name=Some Nice Videos To Watch
   uri=http://somenicevideostowatch.com
   icon=webapp
   status=false
   location=false
   sidebar=false
   navigation=false
   trayicon=false

the uri is the important part. Just for example I have a file system that looks like this.

   Resources
      webapp
         index.html
         webapp.ini
         base
            base.js

I want to boot up the index.html that is local I started by trying to point to something like just path

uri=index.html 

Nope

uri=file://index.html

Nope

uri=file:///Applications/Some\ Nice\ Videos\ To\ Watch.app/Contents/Resources/webapp/index.html

This works, but its not relative, this might work for every mac I install on, but what about environments? I started seeing things with a webapp:// protocol.

uri=webapp://index.html

Nope, finally I just was looking at some example code, and saw this thing resource:// being bandied about.

uri=resource://webapp/index.html

This worked. I can even in my index.html point to relative files

<script src="base/base.js" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>

Booyah, so now if you want you can load in jquery, or whatever, and you have a distributable webapp.

HTML5 Apps have been on my mind lately. Terminology is coming into play. I see two, or three big terms out there right now.

• HTML5 Apps: found on Quirksmode
• Web Stack Apps: found on Eric Meyer’s site
• WebApps: Not really anywhere, just found in conversations, mayby that is more important.

Not sure what is going to win, but its fun to document things like this. Oh, and I vote for HTML5 Apps.

I wrote this as a comment on a post over on Eric Meyers blog post App Shopping

I say lets build some things. I think your assessment of the web stack, HTML5 Apps, is dead on, but I would argue that people are thinking about web stacks, just not in a webby way, but an Obj-C way.

Checkout Neven Mrgan’s take on the fact that we need a good SDK for HTML5 Apps.

That is not the direction we should be headed. I think most web developers are comfortable doing large portions of there development in text editors. This is probably freaking out traditional app developers who are used to their UI layout editors. They probably wonder why you can’t just use Dreamweaver to export HTML5 Apps.

As far as frontend’s are concerned, I can’t seem to find many who understand that they can write HTML5 Apps for the iPhone. Very few are aware of the nice integration Apple has for HTML5 Apps. Even less know about things like the application cache.

If the web “pros” don’t know they can make nice, useful HTML5 Apps for phones, then I think its an information problem.

Lastly, I think there is to much focus on the iPhone/iPad. We need to bust out, and realize that a device with a HTML5 capable browser, is a place where a HTML5 App can live.

I am thinking about Chrome OS, Google TV, so fourth, these platform will more then likely have tight HTML5 integration.

Let’s keep making a ruckus, eventually we will beat enough web developers over the head, before the Obj-C guys ruin the party. Oh, and they are trying hard, check out the 280 North guys, with cappuccino, Objective-J, and Atlas, they are slowly building tools to make native app developers happy, but we web developers don’t need all these fancy tools. It all boils down the HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

I just published an article on the yuiblog.com. I have been working at Yahoo! for almost 3 years now. 1 year as an intern, more like an “intern”, after about 3 months I just started working like a normal person, but was still in school so I had to be classified as an “intern”.

I have enjoyed more of my time at Yahoo, then not, and I think that Yahoo has a lot of really cool things going on. I have met some of the smartest developers I have ever worked with inside of Yahoo, and there is a lot of technical brilliance here. Yahoo just needs to figure out how to unleash it upon the world. Fear not, I am working on it.

I am very proud, and excited to represent Yahoo on the YUI Blog, and by the way if you are looking for a job we are hiring.

From the article. Its about offline HTML5 apps.

I could say that HTML5 is building steam, but that time is passed: HTML5 is here. Mobile is already huge, WebKit is growing rapidly, and the number of people who will have an HTML5-capable browser on their phone and/or laptop over the next few years will create a “new normal” in which HTML5 capabilities are the standard.

One of the awesome features in HTML5 is the Application Cache, which gives websites the ability to tell the browser which files to cache and to use the cached files when the browser doesn’t have a network connection. You can use the Application Cache to ensure that a user will be able to access at least part of your app while he is offline. In the case of devices like phones or tablets (or even old-fashioned devices like laptops), this could mean that your users are able to use your app while on an airplane. Meanwhile, you get to continue building your app with web technologies rather than learning Objective-C.

I have made a number of websites, small and large. I would say that wacchen, is my fifth large project “launch”. I take that word “launch” with a grain of salt because this time I have done almost no fanfare. I just started by sharing things on my blog, and twitter.

People have started to show up, about 8 of them so far. That is fine by me, this is actually a great little rollout. Then the other day I realized that because there were so few, I could just ask them straight out, what do you want, what is broken? They have responded, and I got straight answers.

I have always wanted to do user driven design but for some reason asking the users never came to mind. I will probably do more publicity for the site at some point, but right now I feel like I have just enough users to polish something.

I would like to thank some of the people who have really helped me so far.

• Chris Klarmann - using chrome on linux, not something I do everyday.
• Mathew James - is actual an old friend. He has been giving me bug reports about inconsisitant behavior.
• Jack Mottram - Runs a website about simple sites, and products. My stuff was broken in the beginning on his setup, and he stuck with it till it was fixed. I hope that my site fits the requirement for being on his site.
• papyromancer - Is just an awesome feedback giver. He has helped give me feedback on my other site, http://staytuned.in, and he is continuing on this one too.

This morning I heard an awesome cover of the song by Ben Folds. That album is top of my all time top 5 list.

And it gets better, I just found a video of the cover.

The Postal Service, inspires a lot of people, and if you don’t believe me check out youtube, thousands of covers, over years.

From the not so good, kid in his room.

to the inventive.