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New user? Saturday, June 9, 2007
Irony is AppleScript presented on a PC
I was just looking around noticing all the Apple laptops at HOPL, when I look up and see William Cook's AppleScript slides are being demoed using... PowerPoint... on Windows.
What what what???
Update: PowerPoint started causing him problems by the second slide. "You'll notice I'm not using a Mac," he said.
Best Keynote Ever
The keynote for HOPL-III by Guy Steele and Richard P. Gabriel was the best keynote, best presentation, best talk... I have ever had the privilege of attending in person or not.
I hope it was video recorded by someone so that I can relive that experience some day.
The keynote ended with a touching memoriam for computing / programming language icons who are no longer with us. It's quite something to end such an amazingly entertaining talk with something so somber, and to realize that so many people in the room were actually in tears.
Before the end of the conference I hope to get to thank them for the talk, but first I'll have to compose myself.
Friday, June 8, 2007
AppleScript talk at HOPL-III
I'll be at HOPL tomorrow morning. The first talk is about AppleScript.
William R. Cook: AppleScript
There are some interesting details about the relationship between AppleScript and Frontier that I didn't know before. According to Cook, at one time Apple considered purchasing Frontier from UserLand rather than create its own language, but the deal fell through. Also, OSA was created because Dave Winer convinced Apple that having only one language would be bad for the Mac.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
I'm willing to fail
On March 19th, I had an epiphany reading a quote by the late John W. Backus.
It has led to a change in my attitude and how I see my future. In early April, I wrote an essay (which I haven't pointed to until now) to clean the slate, at least in my mind.
I was ready to get started, but I struggled to find my first project. I have been toying around with a new templating system, but I think that's going to be a long-term project, so I'm putting it on the back-burner for a while. I needed something I could sink my teeth into right away, and now I've found it.
I am working on a rule engine in Ruby to use with Ruby on Rails. I want to popularize rule-based development on the platform that is popularizing declarative web development.
Now that I'm excited about it and am working on it, I've decided to finally officially launch the web site I set up in April, Willing to Fail. You can read about my project on that site. Please check it out right now! To be honest, there's little if anything there, but I'd love your feedback.
Funny story: I didn't realize what the acronym for the site was until I created the site for it in Frontier. But now I love it, it's perfect. Every time I say it to myself there's an exclamation point and it reminds me what's important.
If you see my ideas and say "WTF?" I'll say I'm willing to fail, so let me know what you think and eventually I'll create something for you that works. :-)
Note: I haven't tested the new site on IE, and don't plan to. If you're using IE and the site doesn't work, please just use something else that works properly.
