The Demented Ravings of Frank W. Zammetti

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 18, 2010 “Recently, I completed judging duties for Packt Publishing’s 2010 Open Source awards in the JavaScript libraries category.  The competitors where jQuery, Dojo, ExtJS, Rafael and MooTools, all very good libraries.  The winner was jQuery, based on a couple of judges’ opinions and the opinions of the voting public.  Congratulations to… Continue Reading jQuery wins the 2010 Open Source JavaScript Libraries Award

ORIGINALLY POSTED SEPTEMBER 9, 2010 There was an interesting forum post in the private webOS dev forums that I saw today talking about the Google Map app and how lousy it was (paraphrasing a bit- LOL).  One of the biggest concerns, which I absolutely share, was around startup time.  We were all wondering why it… Continue Reading Efficient remote code loading in webOS applications

ORIGINALL POSTED SEPTEMBER 6, 2010 For anyone that follows me on Twitter or elsewhere you almost certainly know that I’m a huge fan of the progressive rock band Shadow Gallery (www.shadowgallery.com).  I have been for… jeez, about 15 years now, give or take!  I discovered them right around the time I got engaged to my… Continue Reading History was made tonight: Shadow Gallery- LIVE AT LAST!

ORIGINALLY POSTED AUGUST 10, 2010 Twitter is stupid.  It’s a waste of time.  It’s people self-aggrandizing and trying to make themselves feel better about their pathetic lives.  It’s idiots telling you every little last bit of minutia about their day, as if anyone cares about their boyfriend problems or how lousy their boss is or… Continue Reading Twitter: it’s really not (all) just mental diarrhea!

ORIGINALLY POSTED MARCH 3, 2010 Well, it’s just about 2 am here and I just got back from a business trip a few hours ago… I SHOULD be going to sleep, but instead I’m doin’ the ole’ blog thing! On the flight back I saw the news that Apple has opened litigation against HTC claiming… Continue Reading What the Apple v. HTC suit is REALLY all about

ORIGINALLY POSTED FEBRUARY 13, 2010 I was reading a post over at The Register today talking about Opera Mini on the iPhone.  One of the talkbacks made a comparison between Apple’s App Store and a real store. They said (essentially) that if you own a brick-and-mortar store you can choose to sell any merchandise you… Continue Reading When comparisons go wrong

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED DECEMBER 31, 2009 So, a bit over a month ago I got a brand new Palm Pre, and I’ve been playing with it ever since (in fact, it’s for a project I’m knee-deep in, it’s not just a toy, I actually needed it!).  This phone has been out for something like three months… Continue Reading Is the Palm Pre all it’s cracked up to be?

ORIGINALLY POSTED JULY 26, 2009   A question that gets raised a fair bit in my line of work is that of animations in UIs.  Nowadays, most UIs have some sort of animation going on in them: windows expanding and contracting, menus fading in and out, comboboxes that slide open, that sort of thing.  As… Continue Reading Animation in user interfaces: not just for coolness anymore!

ORIGINALLY POSTED JULY 19, 2009 You know, programmers love to build layers, especially us (primarily) Java guys. For some reason, a language named after a caffeine-heavy beverage brings out the need to abstract away everything from everything else, to extend this and that, to build parts on top of parts on top of yet other… Continue Reading Software Engineering == Marriage … sort of

ORIGINALLY POSTED JUNE 17, 2009 Recently I had a discussion with some online colleagues about JSON-P web services.  There was a post on Ajaxian about how Microsoft Bing wraps their JSON-P results in a try..catch block.  I thought this was a neat little addition to JSON-P, which I’ve felt for a long time is an… Continue Reading Making JSON-P web API calls more robust