Jamie Thingelstad

I will soon be departing on a Canadian Fishing Adventure. T-minus nine days before I head out with my father-in-law and all my brother-in-laws to Canada for a week of fishing giant fish. Really giant fish. Fish that, if you are not careful, can severely injure you. I’m not an expert fisherman. I’m not even a basic fisherman. I haven’t fished for a decade, and this trip will double the amount of time I’ve fished in probably my entire life. This fills me with some trepidation.

However, I’m also really excited. This isn’t the type of trip I would typically go on so it’s fun to try something completely outside of your typical zone. Plus, fishing is loaded with gear and I’m a gear addict so that is fun. We’ll be departing for our trip and heading into the great unknown with a sun that never sets and more water than land, GPS in hand of course.

We’ll be eating a lot of fish. I’m going to pack some extra stuff just in case. I’ve ordered some wacky natural bars to take along called Figamajigs. They are supposedly pretty good, and should be a nice break if desired.

We are going to be totally off the grid. Forget the Internet. Forget phone lines. Forget cellular. There is a little bit of power via a solar panel and a generator that can be started from time to time. Digital cameras and such can be charged, but that’s about it. This will be the longest that I’ll have gone offline for quiet some time. The urge to pick up a satellite phone is strong, but the price point is enough to push that urge aside. Plus I’d probably be stoned if I showed up with some crazy phone.

I’ve got a little bit of additional gear to get or arrive via UPS. We are limited to 80 pounds of gear and I’m probably going to be right up against that with fishing stuff, photography stuff and clothes. I’m going to journal while I’m there and post when I return. I’m looking forward to the northern waters, really huge fish, time with the guys and giant fish stories to lie about when I return.

JavaScript is a really powerful development environment. Really.

Many developers don’t agree with that statement. I think there are a couple of reasons for that. First, the word “script” appears in the name of the language and developers are often pejorative of anything with the script word in it. The logic goes something like scripting may be fine for hacking out little things, but cannot be used to build real applications.

I think the other black eye for JavaScript was that the first uses of the language were purely trivial. Remember the first time you had snowflakes falling on a web page? Or how about going beyond blinking text to text just jumping all over the place. True, the first implementations using the language were primitive.

There are other issues that you could highlight. There are no threads. It’s not compiled. Namespace is very loose. But this all misses the point that some of the most sophisticated and sexiest web applications out there are largely built in JavaScript. I personally spend a lot of time everyday now in JavaScript applications thanks to Google. Developers need to focus more on this language as a serious development environment, and the tools for it need to catch up. Venkman is nice for debugging, but more is needed. Further tools like Google Gears will extend JavaScript even further including off-line.

The May 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine featured a cover article called Create Advanced Web Applications With Object-Oriented Techniques (whew, mouthful) that touched on building JavaScript in a more sophisticated way. It’s a good read, and will start your thinking down the path of using JavaScript for more than snowflakes falling off your mouse pointer.

Congrats to my sister Alona for passing her social work exam!

I just spent a little while getting caught up on a variety of sites with Google Reader. Reader is my RSS tool of choice. This isn’t all that special, except that I did it while sitting on an airplane.

Last night Google released the first “developer release” (alpha?) of Google Gears, and along with it Google Reader got a revision to allow you to go offline using Gears. The experience was pretty amazing. Reader works just as you would expect it to. You launch your web browser, go to the Reader URL and instead of the expected error since your not online, you actually get the site but in offline mode.

This is a first release for Reader using the offline capability so it’s a little overly modal (either offline or not) and some features are frustratingly unavailable, particularly marking all items read. To my surprise sharing items is available.

Google Gears, the technology that makes this all possible, provides a nice suite of features to make this all work. I’m assuming that the Googleplex is hard at work on making an offline version of GMail, it’s the most obvious next candidate. I did a little poking around the developer documentation for Gears and I was really excited to see that all the hooks are there for ‘sometimes offline’ applications. With a little bit of ingenuity we should see web applications that seamlessly go online and offline as needed. I’d love to see this in a number of tools – all the 37 Signals applications, Wordpress, Google Calendar.

I think this is a big moment. The Internet is nearly pervasive, but there are times when it may be unavailable. The biggest net benefit of technology like Gears may be in making applications much more resilient to transient network failures – in addition to the offline experience.

It will be worthwhile to keep a close eye on this space.

Update

I used this on the flight back with a lot more unread items and it again worked great. Going offline took more time since there was more data. The lack of a mark all as read feature in offline Reader is a real pain though.

Update 2

I tried getting this going in Firefox on Vista and the installer fails. The Mac OS X Firefox install is a breeze and is just a browser plugin. The Windows install is a separate installer. YMMV.

Used the BlackBerry 8800 + GPS + Google Local to get coffee in completely random locale. Now watching myself walk on the map on the BlackBerry. Geek++

Car service is a fully decked black suburban! I feel like I’m in the secret service. Where is POTUS?

iTunes 7.2 just showed up in Soaftware Update with DRM-free downloads. Guessing I know what Jobs said at AllThingsD.

Dissapointed that it seems very hard, to impossible, to get a plug-in converted Toyota Prius.

A friend of mine forwarded this screen capture from a friend of his who grabbed this great Twitter moment. It seems my robot and Steven Wright (also on Twitter) are on similar wavelengths.