Disqus - Latest Comments for brent ashley

Re: Entrepreneurship, Sharing and DemoCamp

brent ashley — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 03:29:23 -0000

If movement builds towards a split between the two flavours, I would suggest VentureCamp would be a good name to differentiate the business part from the technical. The DemoCamp name still conjures up tech demos to me.

I think that the two themes pull in different directions to some extent so each might gain better momentum on their own without that potential friction. People who wish to present to both groups can focus on each aspect separately and get more focused feedback.

Re: You say you want a revolution

brent ashley — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 17:33:26 -0000

Fantastic news, David. I think that TorCamp's example will help to springboard Toronto (and MaRS) as a premier tech and entrepreneur conference destination, which will in turn attract more of the grassroots to TorCamp. Great momentum for everyone involved.

Re: The Sun never sets

brent ashley — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 06:09:58 -0000

Practically infinite scalability on demand could be in your future & see what Jonathan Boutelle has to say about Amazon's new
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. The comments add additional insight too.

I've been using multiple virtual machines and round-robin DNS for some time now and for the right apps it works a treat.

Re: The Sun never sets

brent ashley — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 06:15:43 -0000

oops – my more relevant point is that with such virtual servers you generally have control and access to their console or config settings from afar even if you’ve gone and bogosified the network interface.

Re: An Open Apology

brent ashley — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 14:41:44 -0000

I remember the slide during the conceptshare demo.

It was a perfume model on her back with her bare cleavage featured prominently at the top left of the picture. The context was that there was an image of a bottle of product overlaid on the bottom left of the picture and the shared whiteboard participants were ostensibly discussing placement and size of the bottle.

I remember hearing some tittering when the picture came up and the presenter started talking about the product 'not being big enough'. I recall thinking the reaction it was a little premature of any punchline and a bit facile but didn't specifically hear any discernable comments.

Then the presenter annotated the picture by adding a note that said something along the lines of 'let's make this bigger here' and attached the note via an elastic pointer widget to the bottle, but either inadvertently or for effect hovered the connecting dot over the breasts for a time before settling on the bottle. Whimsy of sorts ensued, and that's probably when inappropriate adjuncts were made to the already suggestive situation. I know I felt that the hovering had been somewhat provocative of audience response. Though I didn't hear them, I do not doubt the remarks were inappropriate and offensive.

I hope the context helps those who wish to form an opinion.

Re: Find my purpose…

brent ashley — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 13:59:07 -0000

I think Dave's hinting he wants one of these for Christmas!

<a href="http://www.cafepress.com/flickwear.18191882

" target="_blank"><a href="http://www.cafepress.com/flickwear.18191882

" target="_blank">http://www.cafepress.com/flickwear.18191882

Re: Demo of Firefly (Scripting News)

brent ashley — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:24:43 -0000

It's not that nobody did it, it's that nobody noticed. That has been the way with lots of things - the whole Ajax epiphany came at least 5 years after the techniques were in wide use, for instance.

Take Q42's Quek in this case: http://www.quek.nl/q/index.jsp?url=http://www.q...

I first noticed it in 2001. http://www.ashleyit.com/blogs/brentashley/2001/...

Re: Could Vista fail? (Scripting News)

brent ashley — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 12:31:29 -0000

Hi Dave!

I think you should load up eeeXubuntu on your eee instead of windows. It is a Linux distribution specifically bundled with all the eeePC drivers. You can even install it onto a 4G SDHC card and still boot into Windows from the SSD when you want to.

I have used it with great success as a media machine. The Amarok music player even recognizes when an iPod is plugged in and connects to it smoothly.

It won't be long before you don't care to boot up on the Win partition any more.

Re: Yahoo! This peanut butter is del.icio.us

brent ashley — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 21:15:58 -0000

I know that from a business and acquisitions perspective, Yahoo has seemed stagnant for a while, however from my perspective in the web development geek sphere, Yahoo has been doing a stellar job snarfing up a preponderance of the top talent in the DHTML/Javascript/RichUI (or if you prefer "Ajax") field. Douglas Crockford, Bill Scott, and Simon Willison are but three of the top guys they have on staff - one could easily list a score of others (Eric Costello form the Flickr team comes immediately to mind). They have also contributed some really good development tools for the betterment of the rich UI world with their YUI library and Design Patterns library.

My take is that they are investing some good effort in talent and assets in preparation for whatever Web 2.0 turns out to actually be.

Re: Yahoo! This peanut butter is del.icio.us

brent ashley — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 00:32:22 -0000

I suppose the most strategically talent-filled stables won't make a difference if you aren't in the right races, which has to happen at the tactical level.

Let's hope the changes that follow from the "peanut butter memo" make selective use of the talent and assets they've gathered rather than simply imposing symmetrical cuts across the board, laying waste to some good foundations for growth.

Re: Want a Joost invite? Post a comment

brent ashley — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 21:59:22 -0000

Hey you kids, get me an invitation from that Jello tree!

Re: Safari: Didn’t get it at first, but now I do

brent ashley — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 08:37:40 -0000

I can't figure out why they made it so mac-like that it doesn't even give you sizing handles on the edges but forces you to resize only with the bottom right corner.

At least I can tab to checkboxes and buttons with Win Safari, unlike on the mac (in both safari and FF, seems to be a mac thing). Everywhere but the mac, logins are username [tab] password [tab] rememberme [space-to-check] [tab] submit [space-to-press]. On the mac I have to leave the keyboard and navigate the mouse to the checkbox and button.

Re: Meebo: Chat rooms are so 1998

brent ashley — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 12:06:15 -0000

You're right - it's never been that hard, and it's practically trivial these days with advanced Ajax toolkits.

I first built it as a proof of concept with less than 100 lines of code on client and server and then expanded it into a free service that's been running virtually unchanged since 2002 - Tim Aiello continues to host it at http://www.blogchat.com. While there are a few long-time users, most people try it out and tire of it after a few days.

There are companies who have extended the idea to provide live product support, and I've used that on vendor sites a few times to good effect. I have never seen the concept gain any real traction outside of that realm, however.

Providing an embedded chat room for blogs, while a neat gimmick, has no supportable business model that I've been able to discover. It might provide minimal incremental value to a hosted blogging service, but nobody's going to pay for it when there are so many free and simple alternatives whose features are "good enough" (such as a shoutbox, one of many examples).

Re: Comments in MT4

brent ashley — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 01:06:10 -0000

I would recommend spending any energy you might otherwise spend fixing this in place towards moving your blog from MT to WordPress. I did a couple of years ago and it has been smooth sailing ever since. The SpamKarma2 plugin is a huge help.

Re: Comments in MT4

brent ashley — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 01:09:00 -0000

I'm hearin' ya.

FWIW, I went from Radio to MT too (to be exact, Radio-controlled Manilasites to MT, back in 2002) and at the time I had to write my own export/import scripts - a real bear. My move from MT to WordPress in 2005 was a whole different kettle-o-fish, since there was a built-in MT converter thingmy. The hardest part (which means the part I had to RTFM for, and even then it was a cut-paste job) was setting up the Apache-rewrite rules so people coming to the old MT urls would be brought directly to the new WordPress location for the same post. Whole shebang took me about an hour, then I took another couple of hours over the next week to mod my theme.

Re: John McCain Wants to Be My Friend!

brent ashley — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 11:54:30 -0000

By virtue of being on your connections list, I got a Linked-In notice saying that you were now connected to John McCain. I wondered how that came about - thanks for the scoop.

Re: A Retweeter in Perl

brent ashley — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:51:09 -0000

I'm glad to see you used Perl for a modern social app utility.

Perl still gets the job done as the crow flies.

Re: HP has major ethical problem, day 4

brent ashley — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 20:41:44 -0000

I think anyone who tries to feed us the bullshit that the fraud of impersonation can be reframed as some lesser transgression called "pretexting" perhaps deserves to be sent to Guantanamo and subjected to "waterboarding" and other such fun-sounding and equally accurately named diversions.