Tech

AJAX is cool. I'm not entirely sold on the fact that it's absolutely necessary, but it definitely is neat.

So what on this blue globe is AJAX do you ask? Well, first of all, it's not just a household detergent. Its an acronym that stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. What it does is give you the ability to communicate with a webserver from a webpage without resending the page request or submitting a form.

For those who aren't web programmers (basically anyone who reads this blog), the web is what is called stateless. All that means is that when you open up a page in a web browser, a request is sent to the server at the other end, and the server sends the page you are looking for back to your browser for display. Once that transaction is complete, all bets are essentially off. Your next request will have absolutely no relation to the one before. That's why cookies were invented to hold data for use between pages. It's also why you see almost entirely static web pages: any data you need for a page needs to be loaded ahead of time before a page is rendered in a browser.

Well, some folks have found a neat way around this: AJAX. What it does is give you the ability to send requests to a webserver AFTER a page has been loaded using what is called the Javascript XMLHttpRequest object.

An example of this idea would be in something I just built for Picasso (my Intranet portal at work) -- the new corporate directory. AJAX seemed to be a good solution to this problem. I needed to show everyone in the company categorized by organization and sub-categorized by department, and this is a rather large amount of data to pull all at once and try to jam into the loading of a page. With AJAX, I was able to break up the processeing into discreet chunks:

Example: at the inital page load, the server grabs a list of all the organizations in the company and displays them. Once a user clicks on an organization, the XMLHttpRequest object opens up a request in the background for a list of all sub-departments. It waits for an XML response And builds the list of sub-departments. Seamlessly. Without rereshing the page. On the fly.

This may seem a bit esoteric, but in practical use it is very slick. I'll try to put up an exampke of it in action.

One of the many cool features of the new Coomey.net weblog system is the ability to easily create and implement *themes*. Serendipity comes with a ton of bundled themes. I've sort of settled on a theme called *MT3-Squash*. I dig it. However, I'd love for everyone to get a chance to check out the different themes and vote for their favorite!

So... in the right hand column you should see a list of themes that you can try. Give them a try and then below that, vote for your fave. After a week or two, I'll take a look at the most popular and make that the default theme, at least until I create one of my own.

\m/

So this is the new Coomey.net. Hope you like it. I decided a while back that I would completely overhaul the codebase for the blog engine I wrote for the original Coomey.net. I wanted more blog-worthy features implemented (trackback, better media library, threaded comments, easier editing tools, etc...)

I started to rewrite the damned thing, and then realized that I really didn't need to reinvent the wheel, as much as my ego wanted me to. So instead, I started looking for good blog software. Thanks to a suggestion from my pal and fellow PHP cowboy Jeff Loiselle, I've found one. It's called Serendipity... and it rules.

While I was at it, I completely ripped out my home-brewed photo album and moved it to the excellent Gallery 2 photo management system. It rocks! Commenting, ordering photos, you name it! You'll notice too the neat little random photo that shows up on the right hand column: a cool little integration of Serendipity and Gallery. By the way... I've posted all the pics from our recent trip to Orlando. Cool stuff.

A few things remain: Re-establishing the random taglines that existed in the old coomey.net and finding a way to incorporate polls. Any ideas?

EDIT: I figured out the polls! They're built in! w00t! First poll is up on the right hand side.

This morning, Scaled Composites' privately funded and built spacecraft SpaceShipOne has successfully launched into LEO (Low Earth Orbit). with another launched scheduled soon, this will mean that Burt Ratan and his crew will be winning the Ansari X Prize of $10 million.

Looks like semi-affordable outer space vacations are really coming in this decade under the banner of Virgin Galactic. Doesn't bode well for Mission:Space at Disney.

I don't know how I missed this last April 22, but 2003 is the ten-year anniversary of the release of NCSA Mosaic, the first practical, graphical World Wide Web browser. All browsers since, including Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc. tip their hats to Mosaic. It ushered in a literal revolution in how people lived and worked with computers.

I still have a copy of Mosaic for Macintosh from about 1994 on a floppy disk at my parents' house. Hell, I even remember the first website I ever visited: it was some ska music web page. I with hanging around my old roommate Layla Sullivan. We were blown away at the potential even back then.

Mosaic was the browser I used when attempted my first clumsy stabs at creating my first web page. "Shawn's Hockey Homepage" it was called, and basically consisted of a bunch of pictures of Ed Belfour centered on the page. That's it.

Ah, geek memories.

OK. Take a quick look to your right, under Current Visitors. More than like likely, you will see anywhere between three and ten "Anonymous" visitors. For about the past week, I have been inundated with these visitors. Now I know this is a snicker popular site, but there is just no way that these visitors are just regular old web surfers coming to take a peek at the life and times of the Coomey family. I have no idea what is going on. Could it be spammers or ha><0rz looking to 0wnz0r my bawx? Could be, but why so suddenly and from so many distinct IP addresses? I am stumped. Here's what I know so far:

• 88.76% of hits are single requests to the main page of the site.
• All of the requests are NOT to coomey.net, but directly to the site IP address, i.e. "http://66.189.35.193/index.php"
• 89.15% are using Windows 98 with Internet Explorer 5.5
• These "visitors" visit once and then don't come back.
• The requests are coming from all over the world.

Any ideas about what is going on here?