Rails' greatest contribution

[...] "This is Rails' greatest contribution , the one that will last longest, because eventually Rails itself will be usurped and something else will come along to pick at its sun-bleached carcass. But the ecosystem it will have left behind will be healthier because of its contributions."

Consensus vs Direct Democracy

Regarding technocracy, ...when you delegate decision making to a group of people that are willing to spend time to involve themselves in "the system", there is always a big risk that it's breeding technocracy.

Richard writes, "In places like Cuba, and Porto Allegra, where participatory opportunities exist, people generally do tend to participate."

Even if it were true that in these places "people generally participate", you can never achieve a system in which "everybody" participates. By definition, the people that *do* participate are "the new elite", since they are the ones making the decisions.

Because of this, I still see harmonization "only" as a - very important - administrative process, that does not take the responsibility for the final decision making away from the individual. In addition to a harmonization process which develops a suggested consensus, we need a direct democratic control system that can veto the suggested consensus if need be.

A candidate for CSCSJS or a Mocha Fetchlet

Michi pinged to check tag the net out once more, which I did. Clearly a candidate for wrapping in a mocha fetchlet (you'll read me write that more often in the foreseeable future):

<script src="/tagthenet" 

     id="tagthenet-fetchlet"

     text="foo foo bar" 

     response="mochaBus.suggestedTags" />

Welcome to CSCSJS - client-server-client-server-javascript. More's to follow.

:-)

A (Re)-Introduction to JavaScript

"Why a re-introduction? Because JavaScript has a reasonable claim to being the world's most misunderstood programming language. While often derided as a toy, beneath its deceptive simplicity lie some powerful language features. The last year has seen the launch of a number of high profile JavaScript applications, showing that deeper knowledge of this technology is an important skill for any web developer."

Simon Willison's notes , leading to these slides .

coComment Roundup

Google search results for "cocomment":

• after 4 days, from virtually zero to 200'000 
  
• after a week there are now about 400'000 search results

9.2.2006, 11:23

Track your comments

Track your comments throughout the blogosphere and keep the conversations flowing... coComment is out of the bag.

Sketching image queries and reinventing email

A first sneak peek at the things we can expect from System One in 2006: Retrievr lets you find flickr images by drawing rough sketches of them.

" This article is not intended as a proposal for a replacement for email. [...] Nevertheless, in understanding how the move to REST improves email, you will hopefully come to see how moving your own web services to it would improve them ."

In other news... 

Subversion hits 1.3.0 and brings us path-based authorization for svnserve.

In case you've been looking for it: Venkman for Firefox 1.5

And one more puzzle piece for building Mocha heaven: Banteng - leveraging GCJ and Rhino to build cross-platform native applications in Javascript.

3.1.2006, 9:23

>>> ECMAScript - The Switzerland of development environments