Daily Blague

Max is over thirty. By several years. Although you don't know him face-to-face, and he doesn't actually post too many blog entries (nor do I, these days, somehow -- it's the spring summer lull -- I'd rather grub around in the garden than sit inside depressing myself at the news. Although I have found an unsecured wireless network at the playground, so I can be the inattentive mom who doesn't spot her kid on the slide or intervene to sort out sandbox toy disputes. I hate the playground, it's like a middle school lunch room with all the high strung moms and their bugaboo strollers. But I digress. ..) Also, I'll be over thirty in a month or so. Time for the Botox! The New Yorker told me to.

Well, you learn what you need to learn to do what you want to do and not much more.

The classic analogy is that race car drivers do not need to be mechanics though some passing knowledge of the mechanic's craft is helpful to the driver in reaching the goal, finish first.

In much the same way that piano tuners are generally not accomplished players but many accomplished players can and do tune pianos fairly well authors have always managed to gain some skill in the technology of presenting their words.  The most mundane example would be the transition from an oral tradition with a few recording scribes to one in which writing, the scribes skill, becomes a general skill across the population.

Writing for quite some time has taken on a meaning much like drinking. No one expects a glass of water if you offer them a drink, and no one expects that a writer is someone merely capable of putting words down on paper or the screen.

RJ is much too modest when he claims to disdain any great interest in the mechanics of getting his words like he wants them to look. I recall that at one time he published a monthly program guide for KLEF in Houston and was very knowledgeable about all the details necessary to get the graphic presentation like he wanted it which is to say to get it right.

An excerpt of a somewhat more complete introduction to AJAX is presented below along with a link.

How Ajax is Different

An Ajax application eliminates the start-stop-start-stop nature of interaction on the Web by introducing an intermediary — an Ajax engine — between the user and the server. It seems like adding a layer to the application would make it less responsive, but the opposite is true.

Instead of loading a webpage, at the start of the session, the browser loads an Ajax engine — written in JavaScript and usually tucked away in a hidden frame. This engine is responsible for both rendering the interface the user sees and communicating with the server on the user’s behalf. The Ajax engine allows the user’s interaction with the application to happen asynchronously — independent of communication with the server. So the user is never staring at a blank browser window and an hourglass icon, waiting around for the server to do something.

For more see: Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications.

I have not yet mastered all the skills necessary to make a good graphic presentation in this medium, and RJ will either clean up my problems here or ditch the comment. Rarely will he let my bad HTML hang out to dry on his site.

I am unfortunately a dinosaur much like the new MicroSoft ad theme.  I have not acquired the basic contemporary skills so common with my daughter's twenty somethings crowd where knocking out a screen or two of presentable webpage is a normal thing to do.  Or, perhaps not so much a dinosaur as simply the average person who has learned enough to suit his needs. 

There is some class consciousness and distinction associated with writing and with blogging.  Will there be writers now who don't blog?  Are there blogger's who can't write?  What a silly question, but then I work in an environment where at least once a week a customer, an older customer, will present a check at the counter for a large lumber sale with only a signature and expect me to fill in all the rest.  I am not bold enough to treat this action as anything other than a courtesy commonly expected, certainly not as a throw back to a time when writing, the simple act of putting a pen to the paper and making intelligible marks, was not a common skill even among moneyed people. 

Life goes on in Tuckassee, perhaps we will start using more AJAX, the bathtub and my writing on the web could be a little cleaner.

I know nothing of this "Ajax", but my advice is not to worry about it. It appears to be some combination of javascript and XML, neither of which are new, and it's something that massive customer-service-oriented companies want to fiddle with, not us little bloggers.

first of all, anything involving javascript is not something you want to fool around with, imho. javascript is not a programming language -- it is voodoo invented to torment programmers. It looks sort of like a programming language, but behaves in entirely illogical ways. So I am immediately suspicious of any web app thing that claims to be written in javascript. Google can do it successfully because they have brillaint voodoo brains on staff there, and tons of them. the rest of us should not attempt such a thing.

People have been claiming for years that they will be getting rid of the concept of a web page, and maybe someday they'll manage it. But i would feel perfectly comfortable completely ignoring "Ajax" for the moment. All kinds of Next Big Things either disappear, or take twenty years to actually implement. But they make a great pitch for the web consulting agencies, who need to talk big to win accounts.

For years XML has been the thing that will revolutionize the web, and you can't find a programmer's job posting that doesn't specify XML expertise. (Usually more years of it than the word has been around). This is a joke, because, while XML is enormously important to your web experience, it's neither a technology nor a programming language, just about 5 million competing acronymed standards, all of which boil down to: put information in a structured format so that computers can talk to each other more easily. So, my blog generates XML headlines of a particular format (either RSS or Atom), and your newsreader knows, based on the RSS and Atom standards, how to present it. So "XML", as a thing in itself that you can know, is meaningless. It's not even like knowing grammar but no words. It's like knowing there is such a thing as grammar, and what in general it's for.

If you're sick of watching your hourglass spin, get a faster connection, clean out your cookies folder, or stop downloading porn. (not directed at anyone specifically, just a general comment on one of the major causes of web traffic jams). and unless you're actually into hysterical geek marketing news (remember Fast Company?), ignore all that revolutionizing the web crap. We have a decline and fall to pay attention to, after all.

Well said, Amy!

Geeks are necessary for the Web to work, writers are, as the mathematicians say, necessary and sufficient for the Web to have content that works. You have to be aware of the geeks and what they are doing or one day you will be left behind on a legacy platform that simply does not work.

Amy is right don't worry about it too much. A blogger worrying about AJAX is like a novelist worrying about the inner workings of an offset web press. There is a little more to speed than bps, housekeeping, and righteousnees. An asynchronous interface is always better than a synchronous interface. However, until blogs become highly interactive speed is really not a blog issue. And, we do have a decline and fall to pay attention to, very close attention indeed.

For an insight into many geek terms try Webopedia. Webopedia however does not yet have a reference for AJAX.

Truck stops with web connections, what will they think of next? Onward to Dallas.

allow me to clarify that my admonitions to quit downloading porn have nothing to do with its content. it is a bandwidth-sucker, though. Unless you go for the ascii version. (RJ may think it offensive, in which case he can delete the link, but everyone ought to see this at least once. It is a geek classic.)

ASCII porn, who would ever guess? Ah, Amy gone are the days when we would sit for hours combining symbols on printer layout sheets to produce life size printouts of centerfold babes. God only knows the trees we killed with this little entertainment. I had little trouble with your ASCII java link, perhaps it's my bifocals, but Background Poetry was interesting, along with the info on Crack. My, the things we have forgotten.