Building Tracemonkey

I tried to build Tracemonkey today. But the instructions given in John Resig's post about TM didn't work for me.

Instead, after I'd cloned the repository and attempted to build:

hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/tracemonkey/
cd tracemonkey/js/src
make -f Makefile.ref BUILD_OPT=1

I got some errors, starting with the cryptic:

jsinttypes.h:113:2: error: #error "couldn't find exact-width integer types"

So, I tried the following instead:

autoconf2.13
./configure
make
shell/js

Which gave me a running Tracemonkey shell.

The Future of Mobile Social Networking

My position paper, co-authored with Franklin Reynolds is now available on the workshop site. If you're a W3C member, you can take a look...

Holding back the waves?

Roy has spoken. Paul, Dave and others have attempted to interpret. Unfortunately, there are many who don't have time to listen, are not interested in listening, or do not possess the necessary understanding.

For those people:

• REST is not SOAP
• REST means GET and POST, maybe HEAD, but likely not PUT or DELETE.
  
• REST means using URIs to identify some, but not all things
• RESTful API authentication involves OAuth or something similar - what, after all, is the other "officially" RESTful way of doing API authentication?
• REST usually means putting "custom HTTP header" information in GET query parameters or the POST body, to avoid defining... custom HTTP headers. Which method is best? The answer varies, depending on your situation.
  
• REST means returning a custom XML format, but I might be able to (ab)use Atom, and JSON, because it works well with Javascript.
• What is HATEOAS again?
• REST is most usefully practiced on rest-discuss
  

Roy owned the meaning of REST when he coined the term. But is it not simply holding back the waves of democracy in attempting to wrest the meaning back from all those who now claim to be RESTful?

But maybe the real problem is that no significant application design problem can be solved simply by "using REST". The answer involves actually understanding your design constraints, and meeting real requirements with real solutions.

Lectio reductio

if (sum( self_interests( I )) > sum( everything_else ) )

  if ( yearly_income( family( I )) >= 250000 )

    vote( mc_cain ) ;

  else

    vote( obama ) ;

Would it look better in a functional language?

Why there is (or might be) a Web OS

I hate to say that Tim Bray is wrong about the Cloud OS. I agree that, in general, memes with catchy titles are often meaningless when you try to explore the details. That being said, I think there are some reasonable parallels between that operating system concept (as represented by, say, Microsoft Windows, Apple's OS X and various Linux flavours) and some things available today on the Web:

• There is now an understanding that I can write software applications that will run on someone else's physical machines - whether it's via the Google/OpenSocial or Facebook way of thinking ("gadgets" portable between application "containers") or applications running on top of Web-based APIs to virtual machines like Google AppEngine or Amazon EC2. Isn't that really quite similar to the idea of writing an application to run on Windows, OS X and so on?

• It is increasingly the case that one can control these applications via relatively standardized interfaces (HTTP/XMPP/XML) Similar to the relatively standardized interfaces for writing applications in a "traditional" OS - kernel device drivers, client APIs for window manager notifications. We seem to be rapidly converging on a single UI manager - the browser.

• Specific applications may be provided by more than one vendor, and I may use various different vendors' applications integrated via "mashups". I have Google contacts, Yahoo calendar and Twitter for micro-blogging - I can use their APIs to combine their applications into a new application.

But Tim says:

The OS is the software that sits between you and the hardware. In practice, it offers a set of brutally stupid and complex services for managing storage and networking and the lowest level of user interaction. It’s difficult and unpleasant to use.

As defined by Windows et al, that might be true. But isn't it possible to improve on that concept by providing services at a higher level (my location service, my contacts service, my "lifestream" service)? Wouldn't it be nice it we could use those services from more than one vendor? Don't we need a bit more standardization than AtomPub? What if there already were a standard?

Note that I do NOT think that there is a Web OS - I think we should avoid calling "it" that, anyway.

But what if if we could define and make a "Cloud OS" that is related to the traditional kind (roughly as noted above) but demonstrably better than any machine-based one - would the meme be more useful then, Tim?

How to write a virus for the "Web OS"

The BBC has an article today showing how they managed to commit "identity theft" by writing a Facebook application that retrieved personal information from Facebook users. Facebook applications seem a lot like computer viruses anyway. So is this the first (destructive) virus for the Web OS?

Data Sharing: What is the problem and where are we?

This morning (USA/PT) I spoke along with some luminaries about the state of "data sharing".

I started by paraphrasing an article from today's New York Times, about how blogging has become so mainstream that people are using blogs to talk about their marriages, divorces and other personal (and often controversial) topics.

So where we are is that people are now using the Internet to, well, just be people. They don't care so much any more about technology, and they are not alpha geeks.

No longer are we dealing only with technology silos, but with real issues for (non-technical) society to deal with.

But data portability as a specific part of that can't try to address all the issues of society.

Then there are all the technologies. SAML, OpenID, Information Cards, OpenSocial, Social Graph API, ATOM, XFN, FOAF to name just a few.

And data portability as a specific user of these technologies can't try to convince anyone that any one technology can deal with the whole issue of data portability.

So, what is the problem that we can solve in data portability?

My opinion is that we should address specific, and likely quite small, things - help establish interoperability between the various technologies and vendors. Think about the big issues, but make small, specific solutions that enable society as a whole to solve those issues without making ourselves crazy.

Just my opinion though.