Archive for August, 2006

How often do you get a real and important opportunity to stand up for what you believe in? If your answer is “not often enough”, then join me at the “Free Josh Wolf” party tonight at House of Shields in downtown San Francisco. (Event and location details on upcoming.org)

Jackson West summarizes it well:

Josh Wolf is a Bay Area journalist who was imprisoned for refusing to cooperate with the federal grand jury and turn over video footage that wouldn’t have even necessarily been relevant to their case.

Why does this matter to you? Because it means even journalist and citizen could potentially be legally compelled to aid in surveillance of political activity. Because journalists, artists and bloggers have the right to take private notes and recordings in order to cover events and craft stories. And because an attack on Josh is an attack on freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.

Josh needs help with his legal bills and rent. Booze and music will be on hand, you just need to show up and support Josh. It’s the patriotic thing to do.

And eddie has the whole back story.

Here are links (from eddie’s coverage) that you might visit:

• Legal Defense Fund
• Chronology of events leading up to Josh’s incarceration
• Video of Josh speaking about his case outside the courthouse
• Heated discussion on Scobleizer on the merits of this
• Josh’s own blog is being updated by his mom and has the latest news on his situation
• Free Josh Wolf blog has been setup
• Former NY Time’s reporter Judith Miller tried to visit Josh, but was denied (video)

See you tonight!

I’m getting pretty close to buying the Cingular 8125 cell phone, and, in the process, switching from Sprint to Cingular. Advice or input?

The whole world of “Mobile” is about to get much much more exciting in the US in the next 18 months, and I’d like to be with a carrier and on a device that lets me experiement with as much of it as possible. Is this the carries, the device?

I’m moving from an old Treo (the 600), so it’s also a switch from Palm OS to Windows. Any words of advice in that regard?

Tim O’Reilly wrote this[1] last week that Open Source Licenses are Obsolete. He points out that the excitement (or at least the newness) today is largely about web services. (Note the term “services”, not “software”.)

To these “services”, a license that deals almost exclusively with installed software doesn’t mean much. The software distributed under these various open-source licenses isn’t obsolete (in fact, I work on some fulltime), but rather these installation-based licenses aren’t sufficient or appropriate when “software as services” are concerned.

Granting somebody the rights to modify the source code behind the Yahoo! Term Extractor web service doesn’t make any sense. Instead, we need a way to license the service: How much capacity is provided? How much uptime is granted? What types of uses are legit? Etc.

This question that he’s raising makes good sense to me. I’ve got friends at agencies and startups that I encourage to use our extensive web service offerings. They want to (and do), but they have legitimate and real questions that a discussion like the one Tim’s provoking could begin to answer.

[1] I gotta get better about not losing things in the draft folder.

(Note: The information I’m reprinting here was originally sent to the ydn-javascript mailing list, which is the primary support forum for the YUI Library.)

The 0.11 release last month brought with it the Logger Control and a host of other improvements to the library, including dramatically improved performance in the Drag and Drop Utility, file upload in Connection Manager, and color animations in the Animation Utility.

Beyond 0.11, the roadmap continues to hold to the course we’ve published in earlier updates. The best of our current thinking with respect to the next two release windows is digested below. The pipeline continues to include the Tab Control, the History Utility, and the Button control, all scheduled for the 0.12 release. For releases beyond 0.12, we have some early explorations underway; of these, the project we’re committed to getting on the roadmap is a table control, something we regard as crucial to any complete library and something we’re excited to add to YUI.

Next two release windows for YUI Library Beta:

1. August 21 (v. 0.11.3) — this will be a bug-fix update, addressing 0.11-release bugs in a variety of components.
2. Early October (v. 0.12)

Projects in Developmen

1. Tab Control

   The Tab Control will provide support for a variety of tabbed-module implementations.

   Projected Release: 0.12

   Confidence: High

2. Button Control

   The Button Control will enable the deployment buttons with (1) diverse visual treatments (e.g., with or without images); (2) configurable actions (clicking can be tied to form submission or other custom functions); (3) integrated menus and submenus.

   Projected Release: 0.12

   Confidence: Medium

3. History Utility

   Managing the browser’s history stack is critical to the creation of applications that are intuitive, usable, and sharable. Currently, management of the History stack in applications based on YUI requires you to roll your own solution. The History Utility will help facilitate this process by providing a simple interface for adding application states to the History stack during asynchronous interaction flows

   Projected Release: After 0.12

   Confidence: We continue to investigate actively the best approach to this problem across the A-Grade. We are pushing this back beyond 0.12 at this point based on what we’ve learned so far.

4. Table Control

   Dynamic tabular data controls are a common interactive treatment for data-intensive interfaces, going beyond simple table functionality to add features like dynamic sorting, editing-in-place, resizable columns, and more

   Projected Release: After 0.12

   Confidence: Medium

Note: This roadmap projects our plans over the next quarter or so; in so doing, it makes assumptions about conditions that are naturally dynamic. Some of the projects detailed here may be delivered earlier or later than we are currently expecting; some may not be delivered at all. Other projects not listed here may be escalated during this period. Use this document only as a rough guide; never rely on unreleased code listed here for any crucial needs.

Regards,
Eric

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Eric Miraglia
Yahoo! Presentation Platform Engineering