Frost and Nixon

Frost and Nixon is a intense movie depicting the David Frost interview with Richard Nixon about Watergate. I have anticipated the movie for a while and finally had the chance to see it, it turned out to be better than I originally thought.

I wasn’t born in that period of time, but the history fascinates me. I also watched bits and pieces of the real interview on youtube, and I have to say there are some over-dramatization but overall it was both entertaining and though-provoking. I like how Ron Howard handled this movie, he has a talent of making a drama movie with a lot of intensity. Overall it’s a very good movie, I recommend everyone to see it.

Things to learn

The school officially ends next week, but in the filed of web development there is always something to learn. There are a lot of new technologies emerging everyday. Even so, I think I have only scratched the surface for what I can create in the future. This is also a critical time because focusing on a particular software is important. There are a lot of areas to explore, especially the mobile devices are having a large install base, and it’s going to provide more opportunity to expand my target market.

Adobe Flex

Adobe Flex is a tool for web developers to make Rich Internet Applications with intuitive interface that bridge the gap between programmers and designers. Flex is free for anyone who wants to start experimenting with building rich media web content. Currently AJAX is the more common method for building RIA, especially with Google’s support, AJAX is very popular.

The good thing about theses tools is that they are open source. There are a real sizable coumminty behind development of Flex and Flash. Flex is still at its early stage but the potential for creating amazing applications on the web is limitliess.

Onlive

Onlive service was announced this week during the Game Developer’s Conference. This is a online service that provides video game content to be streamed off the Internet. This eliminates the need to constantly upgrade your hardware to meet the latest hardware requirements. The idea is only possible during recent times because the technology advances like Cloud Computing.

There is also an debate on how practical that this service will be. There are concerns about the bandwidth and the latency on how things will run. Some doubt that Onlive will be able to meet the demand of the overwhelming users when a popular game is launched. The service certainly faces a lot of challenges that the network structure right now will not suffice. The Onlive service is only the beginning for running things from the Cloud.

Cloud Computing

The term Cloud Computing has been a hot topic amongst the web community. It is a new way of how computing is going to change in the next decade. Cloud Computing can be a hard concept to understand, and depending on who you ask, there are different answers. What Cloud really is, it’s just large datacenters, computers stacked on top of each other to do a particular computing task. The big draw with Cloud Computing is the ability to scale, due to the ability to divide the computing power and locate that powet freely.

The power to scale means websites that are seasonal in traffic, will be benifited the most. Software as a service (SaaS) is also a big part of the Cloud. Sevices like slaesforce and zoho are offering software application with a suscription fee, where before the money spent on these kind of services are expensive.

Cloud Computing is a concept that’s been existing for decades, but finally it’s realized today.

Open Source

Open Source is the big movement on how people distribute and use software. As a web developer, I’m benefited by open source everyday. The tools we use to make web pages, the content management system and the server language are all open source.

The good thing about open source is not only it’s free, but there is a group of passionate people who are contributing to make the software and the tools better. There is always a community behind any open source tools.

I think in the future more and more software will take the open source approach. The proprietary software maintained by private corporations is  going away.  Companies like Microsoft will find it challenging to adapt to the open source movement.

Japan: A Story of Love and Hate

A documetry about a 56 year old Japanese man’s struggle to live under poverty.  Naoki is working part time for an insurance company in Japan,. For part time in Japan, it means 7 hours a day with a wage about 5 dollars an hour. Working  full time is not much of an upgrade either, the pressure to meet sales expectations has bogged down many to seek mental help. It is rare for Japanese to open up to foreigners and discuss their problems, but Naoki’s willingness to share his situation, as he said to Sean McAllister, the filmmaker, that McAllister has broken the shadow he was hiding behind.

Back to the basic

I came across a blog post on BLDGBLOG about architectures of the near future. The discussion centered around English fiction writer J.G.Ballard. I’m not familiar with Ballard’s work, the only contact I have with his work is I watched half of Empire of the Sun. Ballard’s view of dystopia future conjured up images of post apocalyptic future. Ballard has a bone to pick with technology, or the over reliant we have for it.

The lesson I got from that post is that the when we keep pursuing graphics, the more we lost the purpose of content. The parallels I draw with what I do, web design, is that the  more advanced the graphics got, the more interfered it was to the content. Are the graphics supposed to echance the content, or should the graphics be part of the content. Will we be returning to the very old days of HTML with just plain text and bare graphics.

Clawless Cat

I got this quote from the blog of a well respected game journalist.

“Guitar heroism is sort of like seeing a clawless cat pretend to scratch a post.”

So, is Guitar Heros pretentious?

The whole notion that Guitar Hero is like many mindless things that we consume in life, and the game is just a dumbed-down version of the real guitar except there is no creativity involved, has generated some discussions in the gaming community.

I get the whole Guitar Hero phenomena, people want to be like rock stars, and they can have a good time doing it through the game; I also understand the “painting by the numbers” comparison to the game.

Autonomous

Word of the day.

Renzo Pianto said if you want to be a good architect, you have to be autonomous.

You got to have the right amount of curiosity, and the right amount of skills, so when people say something is impossible, you would have the confidence to say it’s possible.

Autonomous is appealing because I think being a strong is crtical in making decisions, in my case it’ll be creative decisions.