Dylan Schiemann

While this is crazy:

… this makes it bearable:

I recently picked up Ron Paul’s “The Revolution: A Manifesto”. I’ve made my way through the first two chapters which do a great job of simply explaining the problems with our government. A few of the highlights include, for example, the 1996 election won by the Republican party:

The Contract with America was typical of what I have just described: no fundamental questions are evan raised, and even supposedly radical and revolutionary measure turn out to be modest and safe. In fact, the Brookings Institution in effect said that is this is what conservatives consider revolutionary, then they have basically conceded defeat.

Basically the Republican party campaigned on a platform of change, and then changed nothing. That sounds a lot like the 2006 Democratic campaign actually…

Needless to say, I am also unimpressed by the liberal Left. Although they posture as critical thinkers, their confidence in government is inexcusably naive, based as it is on civics-textbook platitudes that bear absolutely no resemblance to reality.

I have long been bothered by the assumption that it is the government’s responsibility to fix every thing that is wrong with the world, from healthcare to foreign aid. Frankly, I don’t trust the government’s ability to spend my hard earned money better than I spend it, nor do I agree with giving the government the authority to look out for the best interests of “society”.

Watching candidates “debate” this past election season was beyond painful, because the debate was pointless at best:

No wonder frustrated Americans have begun referring to our two parties as Republicats. And no wonder the news networks would rather focus on $400 haircuts than matters of substance. There are no maters of substance.

To sum things up, I leave you with thoughts on what government’s role should be:

When we agree not to treat each other merely as means to our own selfish ends, but to respect one another as individuals with rights and goals of our own, cooperation and goodwill suddenly become possible for the first time. My message is one of freedom and individual rights. I believe individuals have a right to life and liberty and that physical aggression should only be used defensively. We shoudl respect each other as rational beings by trying to achieve our goals through reason and persuasion rather than threats and coercion. That, and not a desire for “economic efficiency”, is the primary moral reason for opposing government intrusions into our lives: government is force, not reason.”

I highly recommend picking up a copy of The Revolution as this book does an amazing job of simply focusing on the issues that matter and cutting through the common rhetoric and political platitudes we normally read and watch.

One of the cool perks of my role on Aptana’s Advisory Board is that I get to learn about some of the great things they are working on. Today, Aptana has announced Aptana Cloud, including coverage by eWeek, the missing piece in their strategy of making web apps really easy to deploy. While the name implies that this is a lot like Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services, or Google’s App Engine, and in some ways it is, it’s nice in that it makes it really, really easy to use Aptana Studio + Jaxer + your JavaScript toolkit of choice (Dojo, jQuery, Prototype, MooTools, etc.) + your server-side toolkit of choice, and get a web app deployed pretty easily at a reasonable cost. People might also do this to get their latest Facebook or OpenSocial app idea out the door. Regardless, these solutions make the start-up cost of server operations negligible compared with just a couple of years ago.

At SitePen, we’ve just added two new resources:

• Dojo QuickStart Guide
• DWR QuickStart Guide

These guides were developed by the SitePen support team.

A lot has changed for the better since my post four years ago on preventing the death of SVG.

Today, we have excellent SVG (and canvas) implementations in Safari, Firefox, and Opera. dojox.gfx provides a simple JavaScript API based on SVG nomenclature for abstracting away inconsistencies between implementations, and also allow VML and Silverlight support for IE browsers.

Lately, Apple has been taking an interesting approach of leveraging key SVG stylistics features and exposing them through CSS: CSS gradients, CSS transforms, and CSS animations. What’s really interesting is that some of the best features of SVG are making their way into HTML+CSS.

I’m starting to wonder if the future of SVG for the most common 80% is just HTML, CSS, a few new shape and path elements, and some additions to the HTML coordinate system.

Dojo 1.1 is now available.

More information is available in the Dojo 1.1 release notes, or on the SitePen Dojo 1.1 announcement.

Be sure to check out the new Dojo API Viewer, and the growing collection of Dojo demos, tutorials, and articles.

Update: The Beauty of Dojo 1.1 by James Burke, and Dojo 1.1 released announcement by Peter Higgins.

I love redundant typos in news headlines: “Inventor of McDonald’s Egg McMuffin inventor has died (at CNNMoney.com)”

Over the years of working with the Dojo Toolkit at SitePen, we have avoided offering a formal support service because we did not want to compete with our efforts in supporting the community. Recently, we started to realize that there are simply cases where an open and free community cannot always fill the need of support:

• someone who needs in-depth assistance
• a company that needs support for their proprietary application that extends Dojo
• someone who needs the guarantee of a timely solution
• a company that wants to be able to call someone when something goes wrong
• advice above and beyond the normal call of asking someone how to make things work

When Joe Walker joined SitePen in November, the plan was to eventually offer Dojo Toolkit, DWR, and Cometd support. Eventually is here now, as we are pleased to announce SitePen Support for these technologies as well as others that build on top of the great open source projects to which we contribute.

Our support offering goes beyond the typical expectations and gives you access to key people involved with building great open source software. Depending on the support package selected features include:

• Ask the Experts: This service allows you to ask questions when you don’t know the best way to approach a problem, can’t find information, or are having trouble formulating a description of the issue you need to solve under the confidentiality of an NDA.
• Solve the Problem: When you find an issue with Dojo, DWR, or Cometd, we’re here to solve the problem for your development team and provide you with emergency bug fixes so you can be on your way. We also commit these patches back to the relevant open source project as appropriate.
• Fix My Code: examining and fixing your application’s source code, server configuration, etc.
• Key Insights: Open source projects contain a lot of news and information. On a regular basis we will provide you the key insights and details that might otherwise get lost in the noise of busy and active open source communities.
• Talk with the Experts: Conference call with the SitePen expert of your choice to ask any questions, gain insight about the direction of a project, or talk to us about any other topic related to delivering amazing web applications.

Finally, we believe that offering great support will allow us to invest more time and effort into making these great open source projects even better, through the form of more bug fixes, features, and increased documentation and contributions to the project forums and mailing lists.

For more information, visit SitePen Support

I couldn’t resist wearing my Dojo shirt while doing the Trail 2 hike through the Cinque Terre in October:

Matthew Russell’s Dojo Book is the first book on the market exclusively about Dojo. It should be out in a few months.