Richard K Miller

I use both the Safari and Firefox browsers every day. Safari is fast and approaches perfection in following human interface guidelines. Firefox has extensions.

Here are the Firefox extensions that have me hooked:

• Web Developer — lets you edit CSS, resize windows to match different screen sizes, outline any element, validate your code, look at form variables, and much more. This is a must-have for any web developer/programmer.
• ColorZilla — find out the color code for any color on the web page using this eye dropper. A must have for any web designer.
• FireBug — comprehensive error reporting and DOM controls for JavaScript. A must-have for JavaScript programmers.
• LiveHTTPHeaders — captures HTTP traffic, including SSL traffic. A must-have for screen scrapers.
• Google Toolbar for Firefox — shows Google Pagerank. A must-have for Internet marketers.
• Forecastfox — displays the weather in the status bar. A must have for motorcycle and scooter riders.

A couple of weeks ago I learned about a new technology (actually a new name for an old technology) called Comet. But I didn’t catch the parallel to Ajax — they’re both names for household cleaners (duh) — until I was talking with Phil yesterday.

The heart of AJAX is the XMLHTTPRequest object that sits in a user’s browser. This object can make its own connections to web servers, allowing content to be downloaded and refreshed on the screen based on an event in the browser. For example, if you zoom or pan a Google Map, the XMLHTTPRequest object downloads a new set of images for the map, without reloading the page.

Comet is similar, allowing content to be refreshed without reloading the page. But Comet doesn’t require an event to occur on the user’s end. Gmail’s embeddded chat is an application of Comet. The server can push content (in this case, new chat conversations) to the client at will.

The secret behind Comet is an embedded iframe through which a connection to the server remains continously open. This takes some extra tweaking of the server, but Comet connections don’t have the overhead of an Ajax model which must poll the server at some interval.

Ajax and Comet are similar but not fully interchangeable; I can see uses for each.

Read more about Comet. Also read about Comet from Phil Windley.

Insightful quote by Mark Cuban, advocating intellectual self-sufficiency:

“In the past, you had to memorize knowledge because there was a cost to finding it. Now, what can’t you find in 30 seconds or less? We live an open-book-test life that requires a completely different skill set.”

Source: ZDNet.com

Last summer Jon Udell of Infoworld had dinner with local techie Phil Windley. Phil explained that when he helps his wife with computer questions, it looks like he knows all the answers. He actually doesn’t; he just knows how to find the answers. “What I’m actually doing is figuring things out on the fly.” (The Tacit Dimension of Tech Support)

This is a principle that Brian and I have discussed and call “intellectual self-sufficiency.” It’s a matter of being able to search out answers to your questions by yourself. It’s an important part of independent thought and truth seeking.

If you’re hiring, how did the candidates for your job learn what they know? Can they teach themselves more?

I don’t believe good grades in school are half as important as knowing how to find more information, how to teach yourself something, and how to discern between sources. For some people, school gives them a fish (a piece of paper that gets them their first job) while for others it teaches them how to fish. And some people learn to fish with no formal schooling at all.

Today I sat thinking about the differences between a public bathroom in the U.S. and in Brazil. U.S. bathrooms usually have good, quality soap and often electric faucets. Brazilian bathrooms usually have cheap, watered-down soap, and often a bathroom attendant that stays inside the bathroom to make sure the faucets aren’t left on and that the bathroom is clean. How can they afford to pay an attendant but still have cheap soap?

This economics question is answered by the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem:

A capital-abundant country will specialize in capital-intensive goods, while the labor-abundant country will specialize in labor-intensive goods.