Ray Cromwell › Comments

I fail to understand how anyone digitizing French works *undermines* French culture. If anything it seems like the opposite to me. I for one would love to have access to such works through Google or any other digital service -- it's a pain in the ass to find them in the US, and you end up ordering them from Europe and having them shipped to the US. - Joel Webber

Yes, it's all very puzzling. Apparently this is from people who've never tried to find reading material when they're out of the country? btw, how is Google Books on French stuff? - j1m

" the French Ministry of Culture wrote that the plan did not conform either to “intellectual property law or to competition law and constitutes a threat to cultural diversity.” -- Umm, what? How is digitization a threat to cultural diversity? if anything, giving anyone in the world instant access to cultural works at their fingertips *preserves* culture vs locking it up in some hidden archives or museum basement - Ray Cromwell

Awesome. - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

Yay, +1 for Scala - Ray Cromwell

Thanks Google! It's beautiful example for realtime web application. - Hasan Ozgan

Truly awesome, the first, real, web-based IDE. This raises the stakes on what can be considered a cloud IDE. - Ray Cromwell

My son bought a $5 game from the Android Market last night, because Google doesn't expire credentials, unlike the iPhone which requires you to login after a small period of time. - Ray Cromwell

I can't let my son play with my iPhone any more. He starts emailing people long random strings and rearranging my icons. Knows enough to be dangerous now. Nothing cuter than a toddler who can flick and pinch zoom though. - Matt Mastracci

It's a testament to the iPhone design. My son is a master at the iPhone UI, but confused by Android's context menu ("How do I start the Game?" New Game hidden under context menu), and rthe fact that the 'home button' doesn't take you to the app menu, so it takes 2 clicks. - Ray Cromwell

Yes and no. Clearly WebSocket provides a clean, efficient implementation of all these things we've been hacking around. On the other hand, we won't be able to throw away the hacks until WebSocket is widely supported. Which will be a while. - Joel Webber

Its still a shame there is no provision for binary/blob data, this makes implementing stuff like video/audio streaming problematic. - Ray Cromwell

There are serious performance and battery life issues that inhibit this at the moment. - Ray Cromwell

More than that I bet. Google's common stock valuation back then was something like $5/share as I recall, meaning that $30 million would be closer to $3 billion today! - Paul Buchheit

Crazy thing is, from what I hear Abrams owned like 80% of Friendster at this point, so he would easily be worth $200-400 million right now if this had one through - Elad from email

I think Digg similarly turned down good offers and/or waited till a shark jump. Twitter could be in a similar boat if it waits too long to monetize or sell. I think when people start whispering in your ear "don't sell, you can grow to a $10 billion valuation", it actually might be a signal it's time to sell. :) - Ray Cromwell

IMHO, a sign that Guice works, easy to use, is mature. Keep in mind, there's a JSR effort to standardize DI - Ray Cromwell

Beautiful!! - Rachel Lea Fox

Awesome - Frederick Bvalani

webkit, another example where failing to license as GPL destroyed free software. - Andrew Euell

Freedom isn't free... yeah, freedom costs a buck-oh-five... - Joel Webber

It actually works. 160x120@20fps looks great. Looks like there could be a memory leak, though. - Nick Lothian

I don't care about IE, so that sounds useful.. - Nick Lothian

While this is not too bad when all you have to deal with is a 7-9% sales tax, it's annoying in the case of airline tickets, where "taxes and fees" may be up to 50% of the overall price. - Tudor Bosman

Mark: I can see your point, although I don't empathize with it :) Maybe it's because I lived outside of the US until 1997, and the system I describe is in use throughout Europe; it was baffling to me to not know exactly how much I have to pay until the register. Two prices on the tag would, I think, satisfy most folks: if you're tax-exempt, you pay the first one, and the second one (including tax) is in a bigger font, simply because that's what most consumers will pay. - Tudor Bosman

"The point of GWT is most emphatically *not* to allow bad Java programmers to build web apps. IMHO, good programmers should be able to pick up just about any language as needs demand. Java is a simple, pragmatic choice -- it's one of the only widely-known, statically-typed, more or less open languages that has good tools available. As I mentioned earlier, a dynamically-typed language makes a large class of optimizations (and especially dead-code removal, which matters a *lot* on the web) provably impossible. > If you were going to write a javascript "compiler", it would probably make a lot more sense to do javascript -> javascript. You can use the Closure compiler for this purpose. But one could argue that it's not truly a javascript->javascript compiler at all. Rather, it compiles a syntax-compatible statically-typed superset of javascript into standard javascript. Most of its more interesting optimizations cannot be applied to untyped js." - Joel Webber

What's funny is that polarities have been reversed. It used to be the case that people thought 'scripting' was for newbie/unsophisticated programmers, because type systems are more complex to understand and require a longer edit/run/debug cycle, whereas scripting allows a more playful 'hack on this until it works' bottom-up style. Now chest-thumping alpha-JS programmers are asserting the Java coders are the newbie know nothings, and that the real smart people are using JS. Interesting how the wheel turns. - Ray Cromwell

I think anyone trying to make a business out of URL shortening in the long term is in the wrong business. It's a commodity that only exists because of a) silly legacy SMS-length-limits on sites like Twitter that also can't deal with rich-text metadata and b) the fact that many sites don't offer short URLs for their content. They have distorting effects on the web's link-graph, and... more... - Ray Cromwell

"66% more people than normal chose the stairs over the escalator. Fun can obviously change behavior for the better." - Tom Stocky

This is awesome, but my afterthought is that the first time is fun, but everyday, it would no longer be novel, and people would go back to the escalator. If you tried to make every set of stairs fun, you'd get a sort of 'fun fatigue' effect as well. It works well in small doses, but there's an even cheaper and easier way to fix it if you really want to: remove the esclator, use elevators for disabled. :) - Ray Cromwell

What percentage of your house is taken up by kids toys? :) - Ray Cromwell

Not only is your house space low, you have to post each friendfeed comment in triplicate to have room for the kiddos. I rather like having the couch be the workspace except that it's impossible to get into a ergonomic typing position. - James R

Awesome idea, since propulsion without reaction mass has been the holy grail of science fiction, but this paper only seems to suggest that rotation is possible, and there's a well known way of doing that already: spin a wheel. Being able to generate any linear deltaV, however microscopic an amount, would be a revolution. It would be an ion-drive, but without the ions. All you'd need to... more... - Ray Cromwell

HTML is just a serialization of a tree, I don't see how you can ship parse trees over the wire to avoid parsing, since such trees a) must be text because WebSockets only allows text and b) even if binary could be shipped, you still can't just mmap() it. At best, you could use some more efficient serialization of tagsoup after parsing, but I don't think pulling that over a WebSocket via JS, and turning it back into a DOM is going to be a win - Ray Cromwell

Joel, absolutely. It is very interesting to see what people think of as "Ajax" :) (I know this is a backend Erlang creator..... but....) - Dion Almaer

http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotb... - Ray Cromwell

"This is a straw-man proposal to add first-class functions, function types, and lambda expressions (informally, “closures”) to Java." - Matt Mastracci from Bookmarklet

I'd love to use a language with traits combined with duck-typing. If you implement methods A and B, you can be cast to something that gives you C, D and E with default implementations (or override them as needed). - Matt Mastracci

I prefer Gnome Chomsky: http://www.popbitch.com/home... - Gabe

They are really a rudderless constituency the conventional G.O.P. leaders are not claiming the populist uprising either. Richard Viguerie makes a similar argument and takes the Republican establishment to task today on American Thinker. http://www.americanthinker.com/2009... - Eric Logan

Seems like Chomsky's living in the past tho, there's very few factories to take over. They're in China now. Now it would be "take over retail distribution!" (e.g. Wal-mart) but that's being eroded by e-commerce as well and it's also not a solution to driving up real wages either. Most people are employed by small business now, so traditional unionized socialist organizing isn't very... more... - Ray Cromwell

Are WebSockets compatible with HTTP proxies, or is it implemented on top of raw TCP? If doesn't work with existing proxies, it seems unlikely to take off. - Paul Buchheit

From http://tools.ietf.org/html... NOTE: Implementations that do not expose explicit UI for selecting a proxy for Web Socket connections separate from other proxies are encouraged to use a SOCKS proxy for Web Socket connections, if available, or failing that, to prefer the proxy configured for HTTPS connections over the proxy configured for HTTP... more... - Peyman

Ick, nambu iPhone client doesn't insert spaces sometimes when it wraps it appears - Ray Cromwell from Nambu

However, there is talk of having a <video> viewfinder, which would allow JS processing at least. - Nick Lothian

I wonder what drives people to put bumper stickers at all. :) - Ray Cromwell

@Dewitt, Awesome, even better than the Darwin-fish! - Ray Cromwell

Looks like it's got most of the Chrome API mapped, plus generators for manifests, and linkers to produce the CRX. SpeedTracer's starting point appears to it BackgroundPage. Yummy. - Ray Cromwell

So very, very cool. I think I might port our stuff over to it and get rid of the manually-coded background pages. - Matt Mastracci

Or "hell". - DeWitt Clinton

Peng-Toh: even that is debatable. - Tudor Bosman

public native void hmm() /*-{ this.facepalm(); }-*/; - Matt Mastracci

Or one I heard one time "why is Google pushing applets/java in the browser again?" - Ray Cromwell

I heard "Kelly Norton sure looks sexy in hockey jerseys." But I corrected him, so it's all cool now. : ) - DeWitt Clinton

"I think people are voting you down because of this statement: "It's no wonder that Google has been working diligently to replace GWT with Closure in Wave." Which is untrue and I think people are responding to that. For instance, I will downvote it for that reason alone. You bring up a good point though. Some of the empty functions you see play a part in type identity. In fact, using constructors for runtime type identification is pretty common. So, while it looks strange that there are a lot of similar functions, some of these have to remain. Other functions could be eliminated and will. There is already talk about doing merging of functions with identical bodies. But really the only reason you are noticing this is because of the work to sort the GWT output in a way that it compresses much better. Identical function bodies happen in pretty much every library. You just don't notice them because they look like: function setController(c) { this.controller = c; c.init(); } function..." - Kelly Norton

I responded.Too often, people jump to conclusions based on anecdotal sampling or knowledge. There's also comments about how libraries like YUI, or Dojo, or Qooxdoo which can asynchronously load pre-split modules or concatenate them together at build time is "Code Splitting". That's right, it 'use' statement in perl or import statement in python, or require statement in your favorite JS module loader means the same thing as GWT's runAsync. - Ray Cromwell

I actually have very high hopes for solutions like Salmon (http://www.salmon-protocol.org/) to bring us back to the best of both worlds. Rich, detailed posts with topical comments on the original site, intermixed seamlessly with the discussions taking place on aggregators like FriendFeed and Facebook. It's possible -- we just need a little bit of tech to make it happen. - DeWitt Clinton

Salmon will be a very valuable solution. By allowing people to add comments in the environment they feel most comfortable with (and propagating them) I think the depth of conversation can/will increase. - Chris Myles

Great time at the Campfire One tonight, watching Bruce and Kelly and Andrew launch GWT 2.0 and Speed Tracer. Ran into plenty of old friends (Bret, Dion, Ray, Iein, Niall) and nice to finally meet Matt Mastracci. Congrats on the launch, guys! - DeWitt Clinton

Fred Sauer was wearing the HTML 5 baseball jersey. Apparently they were mysteriously handed out right before and taken back just as quickly. - Matt Mastracci