History meme

Indirectly tagged by Arve Bersvendsen's entry.

wollstonecraft:~ shawn$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
85 screen
52 ssh
50 ls
44 vi
39 cd
36 svn
25 ping
20 telnet
16 cp
14 mv

I guess I reattach my screen session a lot. The telnet calls probably stem from checking the server once I got it up and running again, since the router had some issues letting everyone through for a while.

Part 2 of the Advanced Ajax review went up!

In the midst of things, the second half of the review from Agile Ajax went up! It seems that despite the rather heavy use of PHP for the server-side example code, Brian (apparently more into ASP, JSP, and Ruby) still liked it, which makes me very happy.

Back in February, I reviewed the first half of Shawn M. Lauriat's "Advanced Ajax: Architecture and Best Practices" (Prentice Hall, 2008, 360p). The first four chapters of Lauriat's book, which focused almost exclusively on client-side technologies, impressed me considerably. But it's taken me several weeks to get through the remainder of the book, and there's one reason why: PHP.

The server-side portion of "Advanced Ajax" uses PHP code to illustrate its many and varied lessons about Ajax architecture. It's not that I have anything against the popular web-development framework and scripting language. It's just that, after spending my career in the ASP Classic and JSP trenches and slowly ramping up on Rails in the last year, I'm not the ideal target audience for these code samples. Adding "PHP" to the title of the book might have limited its potential audience, but it also would have been more accurate.

That said, there's a lot of value here for adherents of any server-side framework. Lauriat discusses each topic from a general perspective before diving into the code. The technical approach to a given problem would obviously differ by framework, but the high-level approach wouldn't. If you don't mind skimming past the content that doesn't apply to you, Lauriat's advice about developing stable, scalable, accessible and secure Ajax applications transcends framework allegiance.

Read the rest of the review.

Sidenote: On the Ajaxian post for the review (part 2), Joeri left a comment that really hit on what I tried for in writing the book, almost quoting what I told Prentice Hall when describing the type book I intended to write:

I’ve read this since the last review.
It does a pretty good job documenting the best practices when building ajax apps. This is a book to read when you want to move beyond knowing the basics of javascript and xmlhttp to building a real web app using ajax methods.

Thank you, Joeri! I feel glad knowing that people out there have read the book and gotten out of it something resembling what I had hoped they would.

No place like 67.102.65.250

I haven't posted in a while, partly to figure out the details of, and then execute a move from Austin, TX to Oakland, CA. It made for a hell of a trip, but a successful one nonetheless. I still have my job with IBM, now working remotely and officially from my home office. From my desk chair, I can see the loading docks of the bay in the distance, and have already timed the trip from my favorite peanut sauce source to the house at a mere 15 minutes (with light traffic)!

The site(s) and email(s) went down during the move partly because of DNS issues that resulted in utter failure to move to the temporary hosting service, and partly because so much came up that needed handling in the last couple of weeks that I just had too many higher priority things to do. Speaking of which...back to unpacking!