Arpit led another session about how and when to use Flash in an Ajax world. One of the attendees was a Microsoft Silverlight manager and was a solid hour of dispelling myths about RIA in general. There is still a large population that thinks Flash/Silverlight are bad for SEO and not enough people know of Adobe’s recent collaborations with Google and Microsoft, including project Ichabod that makes Flash more indexable than Ajax (some details here: http://www....
The BarCamp happened yesterday and Philly’s brightest and most enthusiastic ‘interative media’ professionals came out in force. Barcamp is a type of grass roots conference setup by the people bottom up rather then by a company top down. I talked a lot, learned a lot, drank a lot and made some friends in the process. Each session exceeded my expectations in different ways. My talk on the how we build and operate http://www....
The other night we had a security issue that came up at 3am. Our combined response toolkit included DNS changes, akamai CDN configuration, adserver updates, javascript, HTML, and lots of good old fashioned interpersonal communication and persuasion. In these days where I’m working with dedicated ‘Javascript’ engineers that don’t read Java and operations people focused on CDN configurations that don’t know the application innards the concept of specialization is a concern....
Recently at work people are discussing the merits of different cache servers. That brought back memories of my days as the R&D Product lead for a line of cache systems. The high point was participating in the two week “Cache Bake Off” hosted by NLANR (the team broke off and formed The Measurement Factory. This was great fun where engineering teams from major companies got together to have thier systems pounded in a no holds barred performance test....
The joys of home ownership pressing demands at work have stifled my personal innovation time. Sometime in the last millennium I used be enjoy writing exploratory projects and releasing libraries that others may find useful. Over the last few months I’ve been looking for inspiration for a project that would help me explore some ‘search’ related ideas that have been bouncing in my head. I came across a project idea that represents the perfect personal trifecta!...