Frodo takes on chapter 3

Chapter 3 of the 28 chapters movie project has been asigned to Frodo Zumbrunn and is due May 15th .

I'm looking forward to it - and my expectations are BIG! Mainly because he's my nephew ;-) and her son , but also because Dent-de-Lion du Midi is his dad.

No Rough Cut :-(

David Flanagan informs us that the new edition, the 5th one, of Javascript: The Definitive Guide is complete and will be published on August 1st.

I was really looking forward for O'Reilly to put this new edition through a Rough Cuts phase. Oh well...

Interesting new bits are a chapter on embedding JavaScript in Java 6 programs and SVG client-side graphics scripting ...and the mandatory additions of Ajax and DOM scripting. Apparently Javascript still has classes, even-though it doesn't (unless that refers to JS2.0) - I wonder what David's decision was regarding the wording in that area .

Welcome to Helma!

Slight face-lifting with navigation and style improvements for the Helma welcome application . That's the welcome you'll get after installing Helma on your local system. If you would rather not go through the trouble of checking out the current version from CVS , you can grab the last packages I've built - and discover what you can do with Javascript on the server-side!

40th Montreux Jazz Festival

Lots of goodies in this year's program of the Montreux Jazz Festival . Massive Attack, Al Jarreau, Tracy Chapman, Sting, and not one but three evenings of Santana. To bad Tracy Chapman is in the Miles Davis Hall - would have been great in the more intimate atmosphere of the Casino.

trackAllComments

The following is just a quick draft updating the instructions for embedding coComment into your blogs. With this new approach, you will be able to track *all* the comments posted, not just the ones by fellow coComment users.

This first section you can skip, if coComment already extracts the correct information automatically. You only need it if the automatic extraction on your blog does not work or does not work reliably. This step is already documented in more detail at http://cocomment.com/integrate

<script type="text/javascript">

    var blogTool              = "MyBlogManufacturer";

    var blogURL               = "http://www.domain.com/~myblog";

    var blogTitle             = "My Blog";

    var postURL               = "http://www.domain.com/~myblog/?p=42″;

    var postTitle             = "This is Roger’s \"great\" post";

    var commentTextFieldName  = "messageTextArea";

    var commentButtonName     = "SubmitButton";

    var commentAuthorLoggedIn = true;

    var commentAuthor         = "Douglas Adams";

    var commentFormName       = "commentForm";

  </script>

In the following second section you'll see the two additional attributes that you will need to include in the script tag if you want to track all comments:

<script id="cocomment-fetchlet"

    trackAllComments="true"

    src="http://www.cocomment.com/js/enabler.js">

  </script>

Note that in this example I linked to the new enabler.js file instead of the cocomment.js file. Pointing directly to the cocomment.js file should work as well, but I hope loading the enabler.js file first will provide a performance benefit. Hearing from you about your experiences with this will be highly appreciated. This stuff is experimental and I'm note sure how it will behave in the real world :-)

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