All of the cool kids are doing it these days, so you might as well check out this xmlHttpRequest tutorial.
Go read these slides from a presentation by Victor Lombardi. Good stuff.
Continuing in the theme of the post from a couple of days ago, Will R. posted a great story illustrating one of the persistent problems we have a work. This issue of "how do we get students and teachers to use the 'good stuff' on the web" is a reoccurring theme in many of our discussions. Just yesterday I met with a couple of reps from one of the large library database providers. We compared notes, and found that just giving folks access to stuff isn't good enough. We're offering schools a very nice combination of resources, but that doesn't always translate into success. Users--educators or students--need to have some level of information literacy in order to know how to get to the good stuff.
We tend to refer to this as the "Google problem" -- it is so easy for someone to just sit down and use a broad based search engine. But the issue isn't Google. The issue is that users aren't thinking critically about the information they're finding.
So, what about the solution offered by the person in Will's story?
"I think it's better for everyone if we just give them a list of sites they can use when they do their papers," the principal said, "and tell them they have to have a certain number of those resources in the final product."
I think this sort of integration into the curriculum is a decent idea. It is a start, at least. But students really do need to learn how to evaluate materials, and how to tell which sources are best for specific needs. We've found that the schools that are able to make good use of our library resources are the ones that have active, passionate librarians who can help educate others on information literacy.
Here's a lovely post from Tim Bray on the value of librarians, even with all of the electronic search power around us today.
It dawned on me that now I work for a big company, and big companies have libraries, and sure enough, we do. It has a nice site on the Intranet where you can submit research requests, and so I did. Within a couple of hours, this intelligent librarian called me and wanted some more details on the numbers I was looking for.
The concept of creating "less software" is much on my mind lately. I mentioned this briefly in a post a few weeks ago, but the concept was really hammered home during the Building of Basecamp workshop. (I'm going to write up a longer response to that workshop at some point, I hope.) The concept popped back onto my radar screen this morning with Brad Appleton's post about the notion that there There is No CODE that is more flexible than NO Code!. (This is just a slightly more verbose way of the 37Signals' mantra.) Appleton elaborates in an email:
And the biggest thing I learned from that was the importance of what I imagine Christopher Alexander calls "negative space", only for software architecture. I glibly summarized it as: "there is no _code_ that is more flexible than _no_ code". The "secret" to good software design wasnt knowing what to put in; it was in knowing what to leave OUT. It was in recognizing where the hard-spots and soft-spots were, and knowing where to leave space/room rather than trying to cram in more design.
I just made the decision to toss out some features in a little side project I'm working on. Feels good.
Wink looks to be an interesting free product to create screen capture movies. There are a few commercial products out there that do this, so it is nice to see a free alternative. (Well, less nice if you're the maker of one of the commercial products.)
ESPN.com has a great interview with Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink. Well worth a read, if you're either a sports fan or a Gladwell fan. Here's Gladwell's advice to the Eagles for the upcoming Super Bowl:
That's why I've always been so surprised that more NFL teams don't use the no-huddle. It's not just that it forces your opponent to keep a specific defense on the field. It's that it shifts the game cognitively: it forces coaches and defensive captains to think and react entirely in the instinctive "blink" mode -- and when teams aren't prepared for that kind of fast-paced thinking crazy things happen, like Iraq beating the U.S. Andy Reid has to know that Belichick has an edge when he can calmly and deliberately plot his next move. But does he still have an advantage when he and his players have to make decisions on the spur of the moment? I'd tell Andy Reid to go no-huddle at random, unpredictable points during the game -- to throw Belichick out of his comfort zone.
We'll see if they follow his advice...
(via my cousin David)
Just yesterday, I read this interesting article about a link spammer (via mezzoblue). In short these folks spam comments and trackbacks of weblogs in the hopes of pumping up the search engine rankings of porn, drug, and casino sites.
Then, this morning I woke up to hundreds of trackback spams on my site. I'll need to clean 'em out tonight, but it sure is annoying. And it looks like I'm not the only one. Grr.