Alex Hopmann’s Blog

One of the features I’ve been messing with for a few weeks now is support for the Microsoft introduced Live Clipboard. Live Clipboard
brings copy and paste to the web, enabling you to copy and paste inside and between applications that support it. I’ve been messing
with this for awhile but I’ll admit that being quoted
mentioning it in an article in Wired Magazine was extra motivation to actually
get it online today.

To the best of my knowledge, CalendarData.com is the first production site to support Live Clipboard. Doing some searches I haven’t
found any other sites implementing it other than Ray Ozzie’s example pages. I noticed a grip over on mini observing that little progress has
been made since it was introduced back in April. This kind of whining is percisely why traditionally companies like
Microsoft hold these things back until they are all ready to go. The thought process goes “until our entire product line is ready to support
this and we have 100 developers lined up with us with press releases, let’s keep it under our hats”. That approach IS appropriate for
some things, but I’m a big fan of “get it out in the community and see where it goes from there” instead.

Today’s implementation is just a start- I’ve got lots of ideas about how to extend this further including adding some new clipboard
widgets to collect clippings, and some new formats to represent RSS feeds, calendars, and links to other objects (for example a link to a photo).
Another big issue we need to tackle is some UI evolution- to be honest, the little clipping icons scattered all over the page look somewhat
cluttered once you have a user interface with multiple elements. It might make sense to hide them somewhat until you move the mouse over their
associated object, etc.

Another observation from implementing this stuff- coding and debugging JavaScript in web pages pretty much sucks. Its much easier in Firefox
than IE since the Firefox JavaScript console, DOM Inspector and Web Developer toolbar are a great help. I assume there are similar things for IE
but I’m not aware of them, so shoot me an email if you have suggestions. Still, as I’m starting to use some JavaScript libraries for Live Clipboard
and the Prototype AJAX library, I often find myself chasing small syntax errors for unnaturally long time-spans.

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I mostly try to avoid addressing political issues here and usually find conspiracy theories
uninteresting outside of episodes of 24.
However this article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Rolling Stone
raises some important questions on what happened during the 2004 election. The biggest scandal here is
how little attention any of the incidents outlined in this article have gotten from the media so far.
Given the direction that the media has taken lately Im curious how much this will be picked up by the
key news outlets- The NY Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, etc. Furthermore as far as I can tell,
its two years later, another set of elections are coming up and so far nothing at all has changed to
prevent any of this stuff from happening again..

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The stuff that I’ve been working on at Judy’s Book is finally live in production and open to the public. Go check out
Judy’s Book Deals and the Judy’s Book Dealbar.

Judy’s Book Deals responds to one of the key things that have been missing from Judy’s Book so far. Judy’s book so far is a great
place to share tips about a great place to eat or service professionals, but many people have been asking for a place to share the
latest great deals. There are several other existing deal sites but usually they are just steering you towards whatever will make
the site owner the most money, not necessarily the best deal. With our site we take the approach that the community of users rank which
deals are actually best for you.

The dealbar is the thing I’ve been working on myself most recently and it is a bit more experimental. As you surf around the Internet,
it knows about the best deals as ranked on the Judy’s Book Deals site and will let you know about deals relevant to the site you are currently on.
The cool thing is you might be on some site about to buy something and it can let you know about a special configuration that has a better discount
or a coupon code. I know there have been several times I’ve gone to buy something and had to cross-check several web-sites to make sure
I’m getting the best price available. Of course this relies on great deals existing on the main site…

In any case its been a fun and interesting experience working on this new direction for the past few months. Its pretty clear
that its all going to need some tweaking as we go along so we still have our work cut out for us.

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Two big thumbs up to the Washington State Department of Transportation for
providing free
wi-fi at highway rest stops. Driving back from Canada today I’ll admit that I didn’t use the service, but
it makes tons of sense.

I bet the truckers (or for that matter anyone who works on the road) really love it. Plus anything to help encourage people to take a break on long trips is
probably a great thing. I almost needed this on my way to Canada. I needed to send a file to some
people I was working with and I’d forgotten the cable I need to use my phone as an Internet connection for
my laptop. I managed to use blue-tooth to send the file to the phone and email it from there, but that
was pretty complicated to pull off, so its nice to know that I have other options now.

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When I got my airplane I went shopping for a folding bike that could easily fit in the airplane
for trips. I did not have a normal bike at the time and I was hoping I could get
something that was the best of both worlds- a real mountain bike that could fold in half, easily
fit in the car’s trunk or an airplane and then go up a real trail. The Dahon Zero-G seemed to
fit the bill so I got one. I’ve had it now for a year and a half but today is the first time I
took it out for anything beyond the roads and paved paths of Seattle.

I should be clear that when it comes to real mountain biking I’m a big wimp. I enjoy the easy
trails but I’m not so excited about feeling like I’m sliding down something out of control or near
a precipice. Today we were up at Whistler and they have an inexpensive rate for the bunny hill. I
took the bike up for a few runs and overall I can say it did a great job on those runs. One thing
I did learn is that its really important to tighten everything before doing real off-road riding.
On my last run a bolt fell out of my rear brake and it failed which was a bit exciting to put it mildly.

Overall it’s a pretty great bike and it wasn’t its fault that I didn’t check the screws in the
brakes. Probably not good enough for the super-hard-core-black-run type person, but good enough for
a wimp like me who enjoys a nice run on the mountain.

The visit to Whistler put me in the mood to post a calendar of Whistler / Blackcomb events for
the coming year.

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