Archive for the ‘companies’ Category

VMs on M1

Monday, December 27th, 2021

I have upgraded my laptop. It’s been a while (Mid 2014) and I felt like the new MacBook Pro is finally a computer I can use a while. It’s got an SD card slot, an HDMI port, MagSafe and enough USB ports (even though they are all USB-C). What I’m missing is an easy way to connect my old displayport screen, but I’ll fix that by upgrading that as well (it’s ~10 years old).

The machine is great – the screen, the silence even when under load, the fingerprint reader, I love it all. I have not had any issues with the apps due to it being Apple Silicon. What I have noticed is that some smaller utility apps I used have disappeared since I last did a fresh install – developers moved on, decided to not support the new platform or the new APIs. I have mostly1 found replacements, even if some are paid apps.

Reasoning

On my previous laptop I had all development stuff running directly on the Mac. This was a problem every time I upgraded the OS as random things would die and fixing them took a lot of time. So this time around I want to pack all my development stuff inside a linux VM that would then hold either code directly or docker containers.

My initial idea was to set up an x86_64 virtual machine, so that I could have an environment as close to what I normally use in production, but installing it in UTM took forever, so I abandoned that idea for now.

Software

Step one was setting up some virtual machines to test how that would work.

I have previously used VirtualBox, but they have not yet decided to support the M1, so what I found and tested was:

  1. UTM,
  2. Parallels Desktop for M1 and
  3. VMWare Fusion for Apple Silicon.

So I went about installing Ubuntu in all three environments. My source image was Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, the machines set up as arm with 8GB of RAM and 4 cores. In the case of UTM, the system is set to QEMU 5.0 ARM VM (virt-5.0)2 with CPU set to cortex-a72 and Force Multicore checked.

Shared directory

After installing I looked at how I can share a directory from the host inside the VM:

  1. UTM

    I haven’t figured it out yet as it wanted me to install something on my Mac, so I gave up (for now).

  2. Parallels Desktop

    Default instructions are to reboot and then mount a CD from which you install the relevant tools. This went well and the directories were shared under /media/psf.

  3. VMWare Fusion

    VMWare requires you to install vmware tools on linux and you should get the mount automatically, but I didn’t, so I hade to add the line to /etc/fstab manually. Going with fstab is nice, as you can mount the share anywhere you like.

Performance

With that solved, I did a quick test of speed inside the VMs. Nothing comprehensive, just a quick feeler to see what kind of performance I can expect. To do that I ran the following python code, output mimicking that of the ping command:

import statistics
import timeit

l = []
for i in range(10):
	l.append(timeit.timeit("hashlib.pbkdf2_hmac('sha256', b'password', b'salt', 100000)", "import hashlib", number=100) / 100 * 1000)

print("min/avg/max/stddev = {:.3f}/{:.3f}/{:.3f}/{:.3f} us".format(
	min(l),
	statistics.mean(l),
	max(l),
	statistics.pstdev(l)
))

Times:

  1. UTM

    min/avg/max/stddev = 15.442/15.479/15.510/0.018 us (python 3.8.10)

  2. Parallels Desktop

    min/avg/max/stddev = 14.582/14.659/14.809/0.077 us (python 3.8.10)

  3. VMWare Fusion3

    min/avg/max/stddev = 14.596/14.632/14.713/0.031 us (python 3.8.10)

  4. Host

    min/avg/max/stddev = 23.598/24.297/25.038/0.553 us (python 3.8.9)

  5. MacBook Pro (Mid 2014)

    min/avg/max/stddev = 308.944/316.638/326.198/4.993 us (python 3.5.2)

    min/avg/max/stddev = 64.027/64.870/66.026/0.658 us (python 3.8.8)

I have no idea why the VMs are faster than the host – my guess is the VMs are running on performance cores, so python also gets a performance core, while python on the host runs on the efficiency core. Haven’t yet figured out how to confirm this though.

Update: I added times from my old laptop. Oddly python 3.5 was way slower, while there is no difference in times between 3.5 and 3.8 on arm (tested on Parallels).

Result

I think UTM could be great especially with its low price (free online, 9.99€ on the App Store), but everything is a bit finicky. If you can use one of the images provided and you don’t need to set up directory sharing, it’s surely a good option.

I don’t yet have a preference between Parallels and Fusion – Fusion has better folder sharing approach but kidnaps the cursor, which is quite annoying. At the moment Fusion is free (full price for Fusion 12 Player is 135.53€ while Pro is 180.98€ in the Europe store at the moment), while Parallels is already a paid product (99.99€ one time or 79.99€ per year, 99.99€ per year for Pro). As far as I have read, VMWare does not intend to support anything that is not Arm, while Parallels already has that support, which might make me go that way.

Next up

Next things I want to figure out:

  • does running an x86_64 VM makes any sense?
  • is it possible to mount a VM HDD without running the VM?
  • set up PyCharm to work with this setup

If you’re interested in anything else, let me know.

  1. Anybody know of a replacement for PresenterMate? ^
  2. For some reason I could not make the install work on a higher version (5.1, 6.x) ^
  3. I initially thought Fusion was much slower, but I likely screwed something up when measuring ^

An Event Apart Seattle review – day 1

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010
An Event Apart Seattle
Image by Heather L via Flickr

“This is your pilot speaking. We’ve been notified that the passenger bridge has a flat tire.” were the first few words after landing in Chicago, the third airport of the day. I left Ljubljana at 7:15 CEST towards Amsterdam, switched planes and continued towards Chicago. Fortunately the issue with the gates was small enough not to endanger my connection for the last leg – to Seattle, where I landed around 16:15 PST (around 18 hours after taking off from Ljubljana).

I came to Seattle to attend An Event Apart, a conference I wanted to attend since it was first announced. Meeting people like Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer and learning from them is just amazing. But first I needed to get to the hotel in downtown Seattle and get some sleep.

After a really long day the light rail ride from the Sea-Tac airport to downtown Seattle was really amazing. Going through the suburbs, enjoying the displays of American culture – the highways, the trucks, the architecture, the people. There were only a few of us on the train at the first stop, but at the next stop loads of people got on wearing bright green shirts, scarfs and even a few kids with their faces painted green/blue – fans of Seattle Sounders FC. I thought to myself – nah, it can’t be soccer.

As I arrived a day early I had a day to spare to see the city. I woke up late and then visited The Space Needle – amazing views even in cloudy weather. I didn’t take the old-school monorail built for the world fair in 1962 thinking I’ll do that some other day. After registering at the wonderful Bell Conference Center (thanks to Marci for resolving the issues and sorry I woke you up Gašper) I walked through town to the Pike Place Market and to the high street stores – and wandered into a huge Anime convention (Sakura-Con) and a bunch of kids (not even teenagers?) wearing totally inappropriate clothes.

The day ended with a karaoke meet-up set up by Jeff Croft. I met Mike Davidson of the Newsvine fame (thanks for the beer!) and I heard Andy Clarke and Jeremy Keith sing Ace of Spades together.

The conference started on Monday with breakfast – a really good one. And then two days of talks and an additional day of workshops. I’ll review them in different depth.

Jeffrey Zeldman – Put Your Worst Foot Forward

I wanted to see Jeffrey talk for some time now. I also got to meet him just before the conference started which made me want to see this even more as he’s a really friendly guy with years of experience to share. And the talk proved to be all that and more. Explaining his mistakes from the past and the ways he is solving them – teaching what to do with anti-patterns (to quote Jeremy Keith) was really effective and I think we were all nodding as it seems we all do the same mistakes.

The checklist

  1. Know before you go.
  2. Keep expectations on track and in sync.
  3. Constantly course-correct.
  4. Tell the TRUTH.
  5. Phrase it from the client’s/boss’s point of view.
  6. Report bad news before the client/boss notices it.
  7. Have a recovery plan.
  8. Apologize-but never denigrate yourself or your team.
  9. Have an exit strategy.
  10. Know when to quit.

Takeaways

Working with clients is a long distance relationship – away from sight, away from heart. You need to put more energy into syncing and you need to make sure you see things with their eyes. And as in any relationship – you need to know when to leave.

Nicole Sullivan – Object Oriented CSS

Nicole used to work for Yahoo! and recently helped Facebook optimize their stylesheets, so you might say she has some experience in building and maintaining CSS systems. But unfortunately it also means that a lot of us cannot relate to some stuff she is saying. One of the first thoughts I had was that she might be a good person to write the “CSS – The Good Parts” – she even quoted Douglas Crockford in her presentation.

Controversial

There were a few points that I couldn’t agree with when she said them and decided that I will think about them later. I’m not saying they’re bad practice, I just don’t think they’re good advice for most of us.

  1. Don’t use specificity was one of the things that seem like throwing away a really powerful tool because some people can’t handle the power. I could probably agree with this in big systems, but it sounds like one of the reasons to adopt Java – it’s easy for beginners to start doing productive stuff and hard for them to screw things up.
  2. Don’t use .class1.class2 as that causes all sorts of cross-browser issues. I would classify this as good stuff but it seems only IE6 is affected. So I couldn’t care less…
  3. Hacks shouldn’t change specificity as you’re not using specificity at all. That means that Modernizr and all other tools that add a class to the HTML/body elements are out of the question. The solution – using _property:value; – was something I don’t feel good about – using such invalid hacks just seems wrong.
  4. To define headers use h1, .h1 {} and in HTML use <h2 class=”h1″>…</h2> if necessary. That just seems wrong even though I agree that reusing styles is important.
  5. Avoid specifying location when targeting elements. When you do that moving an element into a different context loses the styles.

Good stuff

This list is what I think can mostly be used today for most of the people writing CSS. It is not a set of rules to abide in every case, but it should be your main modus operandi.

  1. Reuse code as much as possible. If you’re copy pasting, you’re doing it wrong. One of the ways to do this is by following the second rule.
  2. Don’t use ids, inline styles and !important to write easily applicable code. You should not write location specific code. Don’t use .sidebar ul, but rather add a class (eg. sidenav) to that ul and use .sidenav for the rule. Smaller CSS yes, but it will also get you bigger HTML (and classitis?).
  3. Think in modules and provide styles that are easily reusable by just using a class name in HTML. Only elements that are strictly bound to modules should have location specific selectors (but with .class, not #id).
  4. Put defaults into .class and use elm.class to apply specifics. Many elements can have .error – and all errors should have a similar look, whether they’re divs, lists or paragraphs.

Wish-list

  1. Variables are something a lot of people want. What I want is for them to be simple enough that people can’t abuse them to make CSS a programming language. The proposed syntax:
    • To set the variable: @variables hex {myblue:#006;}
    • To access the variable a {color:hex.myblue;}
  2. Prototypes are a really good way of providing defaults to a lot of elements at once and gets rid of rules that have many comma-delimited selectors. The proposed syntax:
    • Set a prototype with allowed child nodes: @prototype .box {margin:10px;children:b,.inner;}
    • Add styles to child nodes: .box .inner {position:relative;}
    • Use a prototype: .weatherBox {extends:.box;}
    • Under the hood this translates to: @prototype .box, .weatherBox {…} .box .inner, .weatherBox .inner {…} .weatherBox {…}
    • Also allows checking code: .leftCol .inner {color:red;} is invalid as .inner is part of .box prototype and .leftCol does not extend it
  3. Mix-ins were skipped in the presentation as she was running out of time. You can think of them as small pieces of repeatable code that is only set in one place and used in others. Syntax:
    • Set a mixin: @mixin .clearfix {zoom:1}
    • Any selector that matches the mixin selector modifies it: .clearfix:after {content:”.”;display:block;height:0;clear:both;visibility:hidden;}
    • Include a mixin: .line {include:.clearfix;}
  4. Prototype sub-nodes were also skipped. They seem to allow calculations based on values defined in different sub-nodes of prototypes – they’re not meant to access computed style:
    • Use calculations: .box .bottom {height:5px;} .box .bl {height:10px;margin-top:.bl.height-.bottom.height;}

Some of these changes will require us to write code for new and old browsers independently or to write a “compiler” that will compile code for older browsers. Is there one already written?

Takeaways

Building a CSS system means thinking about the selectors (and not the properties) and Nicole probably knows more than anyone else on that subject (to make you feel more comfortable, Jeremy Keith of Clearleft said they arrived to the same conclusion independently). Another, probably even more important takeaway is that you should think about flexible modules – sometimes stuff is more similar that it might seem at first. If you write CSS for a module that supports variations you’ll write less code that will apply faster and your visitors will be happy. If you want to look into an Object oriented CSS framework – check Nicole’s project OOCSS project at GitHub.

Dan Cederholm – The CSS3 Experience

Dan told us that we can and should use CSS3 now in non-critical areas such as experience, visual rewards, feedback and movement for users with the latest & greatest browsers. Not so much progressive enhancement as progressive enrichment.

Some ideas for use of CSS3:

  • Hover on items with RGBa background, a text-shadow and a border-radius with a transition (Sam Brown style).
  • Hover with opacity change. Create a single image, make it transparent normally and less transparent on hover. With a transition of course.
  • Multiple backgrounds to achieve a Silverback parallax effect.
  • Enriching form elements with a background gradient and border radius.
  • Making form buttons prettier with text-shadow, border-radius, box-shadow and a background gradient. Animate the focus styles.
  • Use scale transform with box-shadow and a transition for hover on images in gallery.
  • Rotation on hover for a single degree with a transition.

Takeaways

You can use CSS3 today, but know what others are missing so they don’t miss critical visual cues. Be subtle with these things or we’ll end back at using transitions to make stuff blink.

Luke Wroblewski – Mobile First!

Web products should be designed for mobile first. (Even if no mobile version is planned.)

Mobile is a big opportunity for growth, but you need to think about different things than when you’re doing web development like:

  • Multiple screen sizes and densities
  • Performance optimization
  • Touch targets, gestures, and actions
  • Location systems
  • Device capabilities

Designing for a smaller screen size will make you focus on core actions. To do that you’ll need to know your users. You should focus on iPhone, not (only) because of its popularity but also because it sets the design expectations very high. It also doesn’t allow any hidden features that hide in menus pressed by buttons – everything needs to be on the interface. When designing you should define device groups, create a default reference design and define rules for content and design adaptation – opt for web standards and a flexible layout. Technically you need to take care that you reduce requests and file size. You should take advantage of HTML5 that allows you to cache things locally and gives you the canvas tag that might sometimes be smarter than loading images. Think outside your web box – less cross browser issues means some new tricks come into play (like data URLs).

The context of using mobile applications is different. It’s not a long time sitting in front of a computer but rather quick bursts of attention everywhere, using mostly just one hand.

Mobile is innovating fast and you should think about the new capabilities to innovate yourself. Touch interfaces mean no hovers, thinking about bigger touch targets and a bunch of gestures that differ from platform to platform. Location information (from GPS, WiFi, cell towers or IP) is almost ubiquitous and can be used for positioning and filtering, but you should not forget other innovations that are less obvious like orientation information, audio & video input and output, compass, push notifications, Bluetooth connections, proximity sensors, ambient light detectors,…

Takeaways

You need to think about mobile because it’s an opportunity for growth, the constraints will give you the focus you need to make a great product and the capabilities will drive innovation in your product. But don’t forget that the design considerations are different.

Aarron Walter – Learning To Love Humans—Emotional Interface Design

There’s a lot of talk about usability of web pages, but is this enough? Usable is just edible. Would you say you go to the restaurant because their food is edible? We have a few options on how to trigger an emotional response to our designs – one of them is giving our sites personality. It’s a platform for emotional response as we like to empathize and personality invites empathy.

People will forgive shortcomings, follow your lead and sing your praises if you reward them with positive emotion.

You can use treats to give users something more. Let users discover new things. It’s the little positive surprises that make us happy.

Takeaways

Usability is not enough, we need to think about designing pleasurable experiences. We need to create an emotional response from our users and make them want to come back.

Jared Spool – Anatomy of a Design Decision

How do we make design decisions and what kind of designs exist? There are a few decision styles:

  1. Unintentional design – when users will put up with whatever we give them and we don’t care about support costs and frustration (think airlines & hotels).
  2. Self design – works great when users are like us and we are our own users (think 37signals).
  3. Genius design – when we have domain knowledge that informs our decisions and we’re solving same design problems repeatedly.
  4. Activity focused design – when we can identify users and record their activities to go beyond our previous experiences.
  5. Experience focused design – when we want to improve our users’ complete experiences, in between specific activities.

There are ways of moving up the chain:

  • “Eat your own dog food” to get from unintentional to self design.
  • Do usability testing to get from self design to genius design.
  • Field studies get you from genius design to activity focused design.
  • Personas & patterns help you get to experience focused design.

There are two fundamentally opposite ways we can make decisions:

  1. Rule-based decisions are based on design books, brand identities and other rules. They don’t allow exceptions and ignore the knowledge of the person deciding.
  2. Informed decisions are based on design patterns and put the person deciding behind the wheel. They are good for handling exceptions.

With this in mind we can look into what is needed to do one or the other:

  1. Dogma
  2. Methodologies
  3. Process
  4. Techniques
  5. Tricks

The first two are typical for rule-based decision making as they rely on a set of rules and don’t require a lot of knowledge from the person deciding. Techniques and tricks on the other hand come with experience and a lot of domain knowledge.

Takeaways

You need to know which decision style you’re using and encourage informed decisions, avoiding rule-based decision making. Techniques and tricks are more effective than methodologies and dogma even though/because they’re harder to come by.

Pete LePage – Help Us Kill IE6

A sponsored talk that didn’t really turn out as bad as some I’ve seen at other conferences (eg. FOWD). Pete presented the history and some IE9 features. He also suggested that we let IE6 users know that they might want to upgrade their browser as Facebook does.

MediaTemple Party

The party was nice – being fashionably late meant that it wasn’t too crowded and that most of the snacks had already gone. I had a brief chat about designing Drupal 7 with Mark Boulton, met Aarron Walter and Petra Gregorová formerly from Slovakia and a police man from Denmark that does web development in spare time. And I grabbed a (mt) beer and a coaster as a souvenir.

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Hiring developers: King of the Hill effect

Friday, August 14th, 2009

You might have noticed that we’re hiring at Zemanta. As we’re a start-up we’re looking for experienced developers that can get to work right away. The environment of browsers and as if that’s not enough blogging platforms and rich-text editors is very challenging so the bar is set quite high. As we were talking about hiring a new person we tried to write a job description and application invitation that would set the bar high and also test some things we wanted to know before conducting the interviews. It seems we might have went a bit too far as we only got a few applications.

You always expect some people to send you a job application request that will not conform to what you’re requesting and that’s ok – you can easily ignore these applications. You will also always get some people who don’t fit the requirements by a mile but are trying to get “on the shortlist” for possible openings in the future – that’s ok too. And you’ll also get a lot of people that will value their own knowledge far more that they should – these are the ones I wanna talk about here.

You’ve probably met a bunch of “airheads”, “egomaniacs” or whatever you call the people that are full of themselves and describe their knowledge as expert but turn silent when you pop a simple advance question. I call them “king of the hill” types.

Assessing your own knowledge is hard

It’s in our nature to compare. My “house” is bigger than your “house” is part of our minds, even more so in Slovenia, a small market where basically everybody knows everybody. So it’s only natural that we assess our knowledge based on comparison. There’s an obvious problem with that – I will have no idea who you’re comparing yourself with and therefore your score will make no sense to me. In that sense it’s similar to confidence levels in search.

You might think setting a comparison chart would make the scores better, but it really doesn’t. If you tell a developer that he should assess his knowledge of a language based on a scale where 1 is “can read it” and 10 is “i invented it” you’ll get a lot of 8s. Which would mean they’re basically the best developer for that language in the country. When you do, you can easily think that the guy saying it is a moron and discard him as a viable candidate. And you’d be wrong doing that, at least sometimes.

Are you King of the Hill?

When people overestimate their knowledge it’s because of two basic reasons:

  1. They are genuine asswipes that think they know more than the guy that invented the language, but know showing they’re an egomaniac on the interview is not smart. So they’ll lower the score to an 8 to make you feel good. These guys are usually easy to recognize as they’ll be defensive and dismiss any questions they don’t know with something like “that sucks”, “i never need that”, …
  2. They really have no idea what else is out there. I was sure that in the age of internet such people don’t exist anymore, but even in computer related industries you can easily find people that got stuck in a particular part of the web of amateur forums and people of the previous variety. This means they do actually know everything, but don’t realize that everything is a lot bigger than they know.

But this is only a part of the story.

Who to hire then?

I’ve drawn a simple graph to help explain this:

Don\'t hire the King of the HillDon’t hire the King of the Hill!

The beginners

As you start learning about something you’ll know that you know next to nothing. You’ll also see a lot you can learn and might even see where you want to get – as near to the “i inveted it” as possible. At that time your think you know less than you really do – these are the people you should hire only if you are willing to wait until they learn more and if you believe they can. As you learn and overcome the problems you thought were the “the big problems” you’ll go over the equilibrium and become a smart-ass.

The kings

This is where it gets interesting. Some people like to be king of the hill so they will ignore everything beyond that point. They will also make sure that people lower on the actual knowledge axis will not see over that point. They’ll have all sorts of reasons why everything beyond this point is crap. These are the people that make the most damage to development communities, as they’re usually the vocal ones. You should not hire them.

The enlightened

But as I said before they might really just have no idea what’s beyond that point. That’s easily solvable even during the interview – you can show them some code, throw around some ideas and arguments on why that’s good and some people will say “Wow, I didn’t even know all that is possible!” (yep, I actually got a response like that). You should hire this people immediately – seriously, don’t let them leave the interview without signing a contract. Tell them they’re the last interview before the decision and that you decided already and don’t need to wait. And because they’re now sure they know less than they really do, you’ll be able to get great value for money.

You must however be really careful with developers in this stage. They will climb the curve fast and soon they’ll start whining about lack of challenging work. They’ll also start to want more money. They might even want to say they want to be a team leader. When they do, they’re really just saying they want more money. Don’t confuse expert developer knowledge for managerial skills!

The experts

The best you can do at this stage is making them architect or senior developer. And with that done you need to start sending them to topnotch conferences and encourage them to write papers trying to get a gig at one of them. They’ll meet with the inventors, see that they’re actually normal people with a unique set of knowledge that is much wider than they expected. The new “lack of focus” will keep them busy and inspire them. They might become a better developer or stay at the same level, but they’ll be happy. They’ll be the kid with a new toy. With the ability to find a new toy when this one gets boring. That’s what supporting extracurricular activities and flexibility is good for.

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Know a JavaScript developer?

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

If you haven’t heard yet, we’re looking for a JavaScript developer at Zemanta. I think the ad says it all.

Are you the frontend developer we are looking for?

Zemanta is developing a platform for contextually enhancing content and your job would be to help us develop tools that make this easy and fun for writers and readers alike.

If you have an exceptional understanding of Javascript and the internals of browsers, thrive on challenges and love learning new skills, then we would love to talk to you. Knowing Python and Django framework is a plus, but not a prerequisite.

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

(Winston Churchill on life at a startup)

Well, not quite. Working in a startup means working in an ever-changing environment. We expect you to be flexible, do what needs to be done when needed, but offer flexibility in return. We care about good work and meeting deadlines. We don’t care where or when you do it, as long as you keep true to mutual agreements which include occasional meetings and we promise not to overburden you with work. A self-reliant member of a team is how you see yourself.

Schools you might have attended are none of our concern. We care only about how good of a developer and person you are. We expect you to send us examples of your work or explain persuasively why we should hire you. Zemanta is an international company, so your application, as much of our communication, will have to be in English.

Please send your application saved as an HTML or TXT document to [email protected].

Closing date for applications: 31.7.2009

In a time when practically all pages include some sort of JavaScript I am surprised that we don’t have more JavaScript developers popping up – this now surely is a full time job even in Slovenia. So you are one challenge yourself and send your job application and if you know one, send him our way…

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Developing for Opera

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

I’ve recently put a lot of time into Zemanta stuff working in Opera. There are a few things I’ve noticed that really bother me as a developer when developing for Opera.

OperaImage via Wikipedia
  1. The easiest way to be sure you’re getting a non cached file is to actually have it open in a tab and reload that tab. Emptying the cache does not seems to work as I’ve found out while caught in an alert loop.[1]

  2. I found the “don’t run scripts on this page anymore” checkbox in the alert box fascinating, but less so after I clicked it and couldn’t find a way to turn scripts back on for that specific page. Fortunately restarting the browser did the job.

  3. We load a loader.js that in turn loads other Javascript and CSS files. Unfortunately it seems I have to manually load these files in tabs in order to get them to work – even though I can see them in Dragonfly when I click them they seem to be blank. When I reload, the content appears. After that they work as expected. But even then I don’t see them loaded in the Network tab of Dragonfly.

  4. Can’t get the CSS loaded from a script to work. I don’t have any ideas, they just don’t work. I don’t see them in Dragonfly network tab (but I don’t see Javascript files either and they work).

  5. When using Dragonfly I cannot get out of the inspect DOm mode so I can’t use the site to do something while watching what is happening in the DOM – what you must do is switch to a different tab, do your stuff and then switch back.

  6. When you look at errors on a WordPress page Opera spits out loads of “-… is an unknown property” – thanks very much but properties that start with a – are supposed to be unknown to most of the browsers as they are vendor specific. This means that finding the error you’re looking for is much more difficult than it should be.

What I really hate the most when working with Opera is the lack of information about what is going on. They’ve added some really nice features in the recent releases but it is still quite far away from being a browser that people develop for. In this way it is sort of similar to IE but IE is a must and Opera isn’t…

If any of these are my mistakes I’d be glad if someone set me straight and taught me to use Opera as a developer. I bet others would too.

  1. When you have a loop that alerts something and you keep getting the alert – the only way of getting out is removing the alert from code, emptying cache and trying to hit reload between alerts. In Opera this does not seem to work as the only way to get the new file is to reload the file and you can’t do that between alerts. back
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Speaking about the web of data

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

Today at 19:00 CET I’ll be speaking at a local web meet-up about the web of data. There’ll be a live feed of the talk available and since I’ll be speaking in English you can tune it. This is a quick translation of the abstract posted on Slovenian sites:

Numerous services are emerging on the web that provide data in a computer friendly form through APIs, microformats, feeds,… Even your blog is actually a database as it syndicates its content via feeds and new posts trigger a ping you can subscribe to.

This fact opens new ways of collaboration – so called mash-ups, but this isn’t really a new concept. What’s new about it is the fact that we don’t use this word anymore as all the new services are some sort of a mash-up leveraging existing services. But accessing data is not the only way to leveraging these services – it’s becoming increasingly easy to create an application that lives in other applications without their approval through browser extensions and bookmarklets.

Marko Mrdjenovič from Zemanta will talk about what you can do to make your site more mash-up friendly and why that’s becoming increasingly important. As a developer I’ll also present what options you have and give a few tips on what to do and what to avoid when developing these kind of apps.

If you have any questions during the talk use twitter to tell me and I’ll try to answer them. Or put them in the comments.

Update: The video is now online. It’s in English so go watch it and tell me what you think.

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