15 September 2009
We used to call that a dirt road
Via RISKS Digest: complaining of poor bandwidth through Telekom (South Afica's leading ISP), an information technology company strapped a data card to the leg of a carrier pigeon, sent it flying 80 kilometers, and exceeded internet throughput by a factor of 50.
27 August 2009
Eval of jQuery data grid plugins
[Adapted from a wiki entry I made for my current project:]
Starting from a brief review article, I looked at five tools:
Flexigrid and jTPS have very little documentation and have not been updated for nearly a year, and so I did not try to get these tools working. I downloaded jqGrid, Ingrid, and FireScope Grid and assembled test harnesses for all three.
Of these three, all use Ajax to populate the grid. All of them accomplish sorting by an Ajax call back to the server, passing a parm to specify the sort column and direction. So we would accomplish sorting of dates (or any other data types with unusual sort requirements) with server-side logic.
All three tools provide paging navigators, but all require some paging logic to be performed on the server. I didn't fully eval this area, because I used a static file of data to populate the grid.
Ingrid and FireScope Grid only support HTML data. jqGrid, according to its wiki entry, provides these options for its datatype parameter:
I tested the tool with XML, but JSON support would appear to be consistent with other technologies we're using on the project.
jqGrid is not bug-free: in particular, I'm seeing a one-off issue with specifying the number of rows to display, and there are some formatting weirdnesses with the navigation bar. But it is the only tool of the five with a wiki for documentation (albeit the wiki's spelling and grammar are a little wonky), and it is the most fully-featured tool. Indeed, the download page offers a choice of optional components to download.
I will proceed with building out a prototype of the new search results page with jqGrid.
Starting from a brief review article, I looked at five tools:
- jqGrid 3.5 (released 1 August 2009)
- Ingrid 0.9.3 (27 June 2009)
- FireScope Grid 0.1.5 (29 June 2009)
- Flexigrid 1.0b3 (14 July 2008)
- jTPS 0.4 (10 September 2008) (Google Code home)
Flexigrid and jTPS have very little documentation and have not been updated for nearly a year, and so I did not try to get these tools working. I downloaded jqGrid, Ingrid, and FireScope Grid and assembled test harnesses for all three.
Of these three, all use Ajax to populate the grid. All of them accomplish sorting by an Ajax call back to the server, passing a parm to specify the sort column and direction. So we would accomplish sorting of dates (or any other data types with unusual sort requirements) with server-side logic.
All three tools provide paging navigators, but all require some paging logic to be performed on the server. I didn't fully eval this area, because I used a static file of data to populate the grid.
Ingrid and FireScope Grid only support HTML data. jqGrid, according to its wiki entry, provides these options for its datatype parameter:
- xml
- json
- local or clientSide
- xmlstring
- jsonstring
- script
- function (…)
I tested the tool with XML, but JSON support would appear to be consistent with other technologies we're using on the project.
jqGrid is not bug-free: in particular, I'm seeing a one-off issue with specifying the number of rows to display, and there are some formatting weirdnesses with the navigation bar. But it is the only tool of the five with a wiki for documentation (albeit the wiki's spelling and grammar are a little wonky), and it is the most fully-featured tool. Indeed, the download page offers a choice of optional components to download.
I will proceed with building out a prototype of the new search results page with jqGrid.
26 August 2009
From Babbage to EDVAC
A tidy history of early mechanical, analog, and electronic computing, fully referenced, by B. Jack Copeland for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy—with a fairly clear explanation of how mercury delay line memories worked.
12 August 2009
Old friends and new
Via ReadWriteWeb: a recap by Mick MacComascaigh, Toby Bell, and Mark R. Gilbert for Gartner of the current players in the web content management (WCM) marketplace. A few of the companies I remember from the turn of the decade are still around (like Open Text), but there are many new names, too.
28 July 2009
Launched
36 hours, more or less, after the launch of the new npr.org, and we're all feeling pretty chuffed. The coverage in the New York Times and elsewhere didn't hurt.
From Andy's pics of the late-morning launch meeting (we had to take over the Music end of the floor to fit in everybody—that's my elbow in front of the window, far right), to roving Callie's skewed-angle portraits, to the steady stream of tweets, our launch activity was meticulously documented. I think Daniel and crew were particularly bold to live blog the proceedings, when you consider that the process took more than twice as long as we planned. There are lots of tweets like:
I remain astonished at how smoothly this boat got into the water, with a minimum of schedule slippages, sharp words (and some of those from me), late nights. Beyond this, standards of excellence have been maintained. And the emphasis on transparency is something I've never seen before, with my background in proprietary software products and financial applications.
The back-end application still shows its age in places, but to its credit, the project planners made this an opportunity to give it a feature boost while also building the public-facing site.
It really has been a great project. What's the opposite of a perfect storm?
From Andy's pics of the late-morning launch meeting (we had to take over the Music end of the floor to fit in everybody—that's my elbow in front of the window, far right), to roving Callie's skewed-angle portraits, to the steady stream of tweets, our launch activity was meticulously documented. I think Daniel and crew were particularly bold to live blog the proceedings, when you consider that the process took more than twice as long as we planned. There are lots of tweets like:
- We are moving a lot of data in our migration scripts. Taking longer than expected in the live env. @daniel_jacobson Sunday, July 26 13:44:58
- Final stages of migration before the QA starts. Taking longer than expected... @daniel_jacobson Sunday, July 26 14:13:51
I remain astonished at how smoothly this boat got into the water, with a minimum of schedule slippages, sharp words (and some of those from me), late nights. Beyond this, standards of excellence have been maintained. And the emphasis on transparency is something I've never seen before, with my background in proprietary software products and financial applications.
The back-end application still shows its age in places, but to its credit, the project planners made this an opportunity to give it a feature boost while also building the public-facing site.
It really has been a great project. What's the opposite of a perfect storm?
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