Clicking fool no more 

Isn't it funny how something you were once perfectly willing to put up with now seems impossibly tedious? Check out this discussion thread at RootsWeb. It's about a topic I'm really really interested in -- a pilgrimage around the tricentennial of the Palatine migration. Can I bear to click on a separate link for each message? Nope. Used to do it on an old Matt's wwwboard and later Webbbs all the time, hundreds of times a day, and thought nothing of it.

I still prefer threaded message boards, mind you, that's a matter of religion for some folks, but the thread has to be all expanded or ajaxified or something, I don't wait for a page to load for each message. Is that what AJAX has done for us? If so, that's OK with me.

Gorbama 

Somebody mentioned on Hardball tonight that Gore and Obama should team up as running mates early and doubleteam Hilary. Sounds like a good ticket to me. Bet they could win the general, barring extraordinary world events in the next 17 months, me genoito.

More on offline joy 

There's a little commentary out there grumbling "What's the big deal about offline content? You're not on a plane that often." But aren't the Google Gears and other on/offline efforts about a lot more than the feed reading equivilent of reading mail offline? It feels like a pretty important shift to me. Couple thoughts: 1) A local web server, a browser and a database when paired with Javascript or another webby language is the 21st century runtime engine. 2) Bitty web servers can even run on mobile devices -- it can get expensive to be always online on the run. 3) Using the OPML Editor has made me appreciate the safety of having your stuff on your local machine, it just feels better to have it right here by me.

Checking out the Google Gears tutorial 

Go offline

Trying to see where the files go. Ah. Database files are here. Wonder what the server looks like. Pretty amazing what you can do with Javascript.

Datatypes supported by SQLite 3.

Looks like the local server is sort of managed by an SQLite database. I installed the DOS analyzer (after a fleeting and thwarted thought that Google Base might know how to look at the file -- nope). Here's what's in localserver.db.

Yeah. Not that I'm any kind of authority, but I think Dave's Frontier way of handling online/offline -- online/desktop hybrid, indoor/outdoor carpeting, whatever you want to call it -- seems more elegant. Maybe because I'm such a lightweight I like the idea that I can pretty much see what's going on, all in one place. I feel like I could learn to make something using UserTalk even though I'm not really a programmer, in the way I can cobble things together using bits of off-the-shelf LAMP stuff, and Perl/CGI before that. Sort of like Lady Catherine in Pride and Prejudice, feeling very sure that if she had ever learned to play the piano she should be a true proficient!

But, maybe there's a way Frontier could work with Gears. Looks like the open source kernel developers worked out a way to let Fronteir talk to the SQLite database engine last fall. Hmm!

Facebook movie 

Student-made satire: refusal to join, intervention, guide to poking. Funny, nicely done.