Off On A Tangent

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How do we define “the web”? Is it http, the protocol? Is it html, the markup language? Is it the url? Is the browser? The web-server? Some combination? Personally, I think the “web” is pretty well defined by the browser. By the client-side app. It is what displays html, it is what runs the javascript, vbscript, flash, needs the plugins installed in order to work. It’s nice that we have html that all browsers know how to read, but really the browser has grown past just displaying html, and that means, for all intents and purposes, the web has grown past just passing html around.

URL’s are important, and there would be no web without the routers and DNS machines that resolve hostnames and define resources - but then again, DNS is used for much more than just the web, and URL’s are but one way to locate resources - browsers are even now finding new ways. Right now, my browser has a location text box and a google text box. I can type urls into the location box, and I can type nearly anything I want into the google box. I use both equally, but Google is really bringing into question the dominance of a URL view of things. When I can paste an email header into that box and see a visual representation of where that email travelled, or type a phone number into it and get back a name and address of a real person, it seems to me the concept of what is the web is expanding. And it all centers around the user interface of the web browser. The web is whatever firefox says it is.

Which, in a way, is unfortunate, because web-browsers seem limited by their history. Whereas the early web was a page-centric, document-centric, read-only medium, we now want the web to be one remote application after another. That’s what “web 2.0″ is all about - the ascendence of javascrikpt that finally mostly works. And what a piece of crap that is. It’s horrible that the web is being driven by javascript when there are so much better options available.

The problem is more cultural than technical. The browser has gotten itself loaded on all machines - every has one, and finally now everyone has one that mostly runs a fairly standard javascript implementation. But what if the browser was instead a sandbox for real distributable application code (not just static text to be interpreted by a browser) - compiled, full of security measures to prevent abuse, but also enabling automatic discovery of new distributed apps “out there”? Imagine that instead of passing around web pages with embedded javascript, we were passing around java objects, or python code. And instead of a browser displaying a markup language, the distributed code controlled its own GUI fully.

We’d still want browsers - they’re excellent for displaying actual documents for reading and other relatively non-interactive webapps. But foisting javascript onto developers and users for the purpose of making real desktop-like apps that nevertheless use a remote server to supply the database and backend processing is just cruel. It seems unnecessary too - why can’t there be two different kinds of browsers? One that displays the contents of the url network, and another to display the contents of a java jini network? Or another for a ruby-XXX network? Ruby on Rockets anyone?

Jaime has started eating real food, and he’s absolutely adorable doing it. So far he has tried sweet potato (not yam) and banana. Kind of indifferent to the sweet potato, but he’s nuts for banana. He concentrates so hard on the spoon when you hold it in front of him, but he doesn’t open his mouth until he grabs the spoon and your arms with his hands and then shoves it towards his face with reckless abandon. More than anything else, these feedings make me wish I had a digital video recorder. The boy loves to eat.

Work’s been a bit of a bummer lately as my laptop is misbehaving. Last friday, I lost the boot sector on the hard-drive, and I had to use a ubuntu live cd to access the contents and save them to an external hard disk (couldn’t get the network working). Then I re-installed Mandrake and managed to recover everything (my /home dir is a separate partition and wow did that make things a snap). I wish the /var dir had likewise been a separate partition for the database I had - I had to spend most of Friday and Monday recovering Firebird and the databases.

And then, starting yesterday, the laptop was back to its old tricks of freezing up several times a day. With the hard-drive superblock failure and these continuing problems even after reinstalling the OS, we’re fairly confident there are hardware problems, so I am sending it back to our IT guy to get a more thorough checkout and maybe send it back to Dell for service. Which means I’ll be without the laptop for a fairly long time. I’ve decided to bring my home computer in and use that since it’s very fast and not being used - I haven’t turned it on in well over a month.

I’m reading the book Lost Mountain currently, an incredibly despressing account of the process of mountaintop removal in the Appalachian mountains and the damage it causes. It is things like this that just make me shake my head when people talk about how much coal there is in the US as a possible substitute for oil in the future. How much environmental degredation is acceptable to maintain our lifestyles? I’m afraid there is no limit. I think it is the first book I’ve read whose real-world assertions I can actually go and verify.

Life is good these days. I am done working and the extra free time is great. I once again have time to clean and organize the house, play tons with Jaime and eve enjoy some quiet time when the little one is asleep.

Tomorrow I should receive my started kit and book on how to silk paint. It seems so much fun and I can barely wait to start. I am looking for a craft I can dedicate myself to and become an expert in. There are just so many ways to express myself I am having a hard time choosing one. I will also start taking some pottery classes and see how I like it. I even convinced Michael to come along and try it.Jaime is now licking his toes and is always grabbing his feet. The posture on this picture is how you will find him most of the time - grabbing legs, feet, or bum.

This little one is learning stuff so fast, everyday there is something new. Two days ago ge tried his first solid food - sweet potato, and I think he liked it. I will post pictures of his first meal soon.

I’ve taken up painting. Y’know, artistic painting. Yeah, like Rembrandt. Sort of. Well, ok, I don’t really think of it as art. More craft or hobby. After work, I go home, play with my son till he falls asleep, and then I get ou my easel and canvas and acrylic paints and start painting - very therapeutic and fun. And, I happen to be liking the results, which is very surprising for me - I’m usually my worst critic. But, it seems with painting, my attitude is “I can’t draw, I can’t paint, I have a terrible sense of color and aesthetics and visual design, so therefore anything I paint is going to suck in most people’s opinion, right?” Right, so I don’t care that it’s terrible - I like it the same way a tone deaf person likes his own singing and to hell with the rest of you.

I get to turn my inner critic off because he’s no more qualified to judge than my inner artist.

The paints are great fun to play with, though I wish I could use oil because I’ve noticed my oil pen just covers completely whatever I draw over with it, whereas the acrylics let some of whatever’s underneath show through - sometimes requiring 3-4 coats to be completely opaque. But, oil would interfere with the nice easy relaxing nature of the activity - what with the turpentine and smell and all. Fortunately, I’ve found not all acrylics are equal - some are thicker and more opaque (and more expensive) than others. I’m hopeful that just buying better quality paints will improve the experience.

I made a couple of quick “paintings” for Jaime when he was born. Actually, they are just made with sketch paper and permanent marker, but it gives an idea of my “art” :-)