More often than not, politics can be annoying… So, a bunch of people finished a big meeting in Bali about climate change and how to deal with it. How did they do?
“This is a real breakthrough, a real opportunity for the international community to successfully fight climate change,” said Indonesian Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar, who served as conference president, at the conclusion of the talks.
Gee, that sounds swell. I have a feeling that Witoelar was prepared to say that even if a big turd had dropped from the sky and landed just outside of the conference hall. The way this breakthrough was achieved was:
The EU and US agreed to drop binding targets; then the EU and China agreed to soften language on commitments from developing countries.
Err, so they reached a deal without binding targets and with soft language about commitments. What kind of deal is that? Certainly not a breakthrough. The real statement to go with a meeting like this is:
“We have effectively managed to hold off any real decision making for two more years.”
Politics
bali, climate change, environment
Interesting announcement from Google: Official Google Blog: Encouraging people to contribute knowledge
Google announces a tool (Knol) that’s not yet open to the public but appears to be taking on Wikipedia. The premise is different, but I think the goal is similar. They want encyclopedia like articles that are written by people in the community who know stuff about a topic. However, Google’s take appears to be to have articles that are authored by single people that will stake their own personal reputations on the articles. Though Wikipedia articles have a history, they don’t have a by-line. Knol articles do.
The likely scenario here is not that Knol will overtake Wikipedia, of course. The reality is that we’ll just have both. Seriously, Wikipedia has a ton of articles (more than 1 million in English, if I remember correctly). I don’t think that Knol, as described, will compete in sheer breadth. But, it is possible that the quality of articles that get prominent placement may be high. We’ll see when they release it.
Random
google, knol, wikipedia
Intriguingly, Ajaxian seems to have the news first: Ajaxian » DWR joins the Dojo Foundation - Joe Walker joins SitePen. I haven’t used Java in 3 years, so I haven’t had a chance to use DWR, but it looks like a nicely designed API for doing Ajax and Comet in Java apps. Having Joe Walker join up at SitePen is great news indeed, and DWR is quite an addition to the Dojo Foundation.
Update: Ahh, that’s more like it. The word is officially out: the SitePen press release, the SitePen blog (which has considerably more w00ts than the press release) and Joe Walker himself announcing it.
Java
dojo, dwr, joe walker, sitepen
I’ve just received notice that my proposed talk for PyCon 2008 has been accepted!
People who were at my PyCon 2006 “Effective Ajax with TurboGears” talk might remember that I talked about sprinkling Ajax throughout a webapp as appropriate. A lot has changed in the nearly two years since. We can now move a lot more presentation logic to the browser, and the server side becomes much more of a web services layer.
I’m going to focus on what the server side looks like (this is PyCon, after all!), using Dojo to easily implement the client side. I’m also going to talk about how you can integrate Comet (where the server sends messages back to the client) into a TurboGears 2 app.
The ideas will work in any web framework, and the code samples will also work with very little change in Pylons.
I’m looking forward to this talk, and I hope to see you there! (And don’t forget to say ‘hi’ if you’re at CodeMash next month!)
Update: Wow! Check out the PyCon 2008 list of talks. This will be my third PyCon, and I must say that that is the most impressive list of talks of the three.
Python, TurboGears
codemash, conferences, pycon
There’s now a multi-author Scala Blog that provides info about this very cool language. It sounds like there is a draft of a Scala book about ready, and the lift web framework hits 0.3. Scala and lift are tools to watch, because there is a lot of interesting background going into them. Anyone who has been eyeing Erlang’s concurrency features should check out Scala, because it gives you the same concurrency features but on top of the JVM with access to Java libraries when you need them.
Software Development
